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Tag Archives: Henri IV of France

La Henriade

10 Thursday Sep 2020

Posted by michelinewalker in Acadia, Age of Enlightenment, France, French Literature

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Acadie, Charlesbourg-Royal, Henri IV of France, Huguenots, Jacques Cartier, La Henriade, Pierre Dugua Sieur de Mons, Port-Royal, Quebec City, Voltaire


Voltaire (portrait by Nicolas de Largillière, c. 1724)

The ostensible subject [of La Henriade] is the siege of Paris in 1589 by Henry III in concert with Henry of Navarre, soon to be Henry IV, but its themes are the twin evils of religious fanaticism and civil discord.

La Henriade, wiki2.org

I think the above captures the spirit of Voltaire’s La Henriade. But it also describes Voltaire who spent a lifetime combating fanaticism, injustice and superstitions. Our subject is New France in its earliest days. We wish to know what happened during the half century separating Cartier’s attempt to found a settlement and Dugua de Mons’ similar endeavour. This period has not been chronicled, but Huguenots had been involved in the fur trade. Our King is no longer François Ier, but Henri IV.

The contents of this post may seem repetitive, but they sum up Cartier’s era and Henri IV’s brief reign. More importantly, although New France has Huguenot roots, I am portraying a good king who was attempting to put away a divided Kingdom. He was assassinated in 1610.

Jacques Cartier

  • François Ier
  • Henri IV

Many Huguenots (French Protestants) or former Huguenots, were the founders of what became Canada. Dugua de Mons converted to Catholicism in 1593, at approximately the same time Henri IV became a Catholic. As King of Navarre, he had been a Huguenot.

Charlesbourg-Royal

Nothing suggests that Jacques Cartier was a Huguenot, but he settled Charlesbourg-Royal in 1541, a settlement that ended in 1543. François Ier (Francis Ist), had commissioned Pierre de La Rocque, sieur de Roberval, known as Roberval, a nobleman, to build the first French settlement in North America, but Roberval did not set sail until 1542. Although sources differ, Charlesbourg-Royal was settled, almost undoubtedly, by Jacques Cartier, rather than Roberval.

Jacques Cartier left France in 1541, a year before Roberval sailed for the New World. Jacques Cartier met Roberval, near Newfoundland, but refused to turn around to assist Roberval, as the King had requested. Jacques Cartier was not a nobleman, but he is the explorer who discovered Canada and named it Canada, after Kanata, its Amerindian name.

Francis 1st, King of France, did not ask Jacques Cartier to build a settlement. As we know, the person he commissioned was Pierre de La Rocque, sieur de Roberval, a nobleman. This may have been an affront to Jacques Cartier who had discovered “Canada.” Jacques Cartier lost 35 men during the first winter he spent at Charlesbourg-Royal, pictured above. By 1543, the settlement was abandoned. Then came a seemingly inactive period spanning nearly a half-century, but was it?

Henri IV

The settlements that survive are Dugua de Mons’ Port-Royal and Quebec City. As a noted, Champlain founded Quebec City, as Dugua’s employee. In fact, he and Mathieu da Costa were Dugua’s employees. So, Mathieu da Costa, the first Black in Canada, may have co-founded Quebec City, as an employee of Dugua de Mons. Mathieu de Coste is also Canada’s first linguist and he died in the settlement he co-founded. He was a free Black.

Had he not been a fur-trader, it is very unlikely that Pierre de Chauvin de Tonnetuit could have built a trading-post. The Huguenots had been fleeing the Wars of Religion. Henri IV reigned from 1589 to 14 May 1610, when he was assassinated, and events do not suggest that during his reign Henri IV encouraged the growth of Protestantism. As we know, he signed the Édit de Nantes promoting religions toleration.

at the end of the Wars of Religion, [Henri IV] abjured Protestantism and converted to Roman Catholicism (1593) in order to win Paris and reunify France. With the aid of such ministers as the Duc de Sully, he brought new prosperity to France.

Britannica
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Henry-IV-king-of-France

When Henri IV died he had yet to finish unifying France and, given Richelieu’s concept of absolutism, Huguenots would have to convert. Richelieu’s notion of absolutism required that all French citizens practice the same religion. As conceived by Richelieu, absolutism consisted of one religion, one language, and one King. When the Siege of Larochelle began, so did the Anglo-French War of 1627-1629. England was defeated and the Edict of Nantes, revoked in 1685, unleashing a reign of terror a Voltaire could not accept.

Acadie had just begun, when Marc Lescarbot wrote and published his Histoire de la Nouvelle-France. He had been in Acadia for one year, 1607-1608. He also produced a play, le Théâtre de Neptune, in Port-Royal. His History of Nouvelle-France is not a bad history. On the contrary. It is a good story. But Nouvelle-France consisted of one settlement, or habitation: Port-Royal that was about to crumble to be reborn again. The picture above features Lescarbot reading his play. The artist is William Jefferys (photo-credit: wiki2.org).

Would there ever be a King of France so loved that a young Voltaire would praise him in long cantos, or “fictions” “drawn from the regions of the marvelous” (Voltaire, 1859)? There wouldn’t, except in “fictions.”

Sources and Resources


Musing on Champlain & New France (9 May 2012)
Wikipedia
The Encyclopædia Britannica
La Henriade is an Internet Archive publication
La Henriade is a Wikisource publication

Love to everyone 💕

© Micheline Walker
9 September 2020
WordPress

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Casuistry, or how to sin without sinning

16 Monday May 2016

Posted by michelinewalker in France, Molière, Music, The Church

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Aristotle, Casuistry, Escobar y Mendoza, Henri IV of France, Henry VIII of England, Huguenot, Pascal's Lettres provinciales

King Henry VIII by Hans Holbein the Younger, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

King Henry VIII, by Hans Holbein the Younger, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Casuistry

The Fragmentation of the Western Church

When Antonio Escobar y Mendoza (1589 – 4 July 1669) published his Summula casuum conscientiæ (1627), the handbook of casuistry, the Roman Church had been severely fragmented. Escobar y Mendoza and Francisco Suárez (5 January 1548 – 25 September 1617), Jesuits, were therefore addressing an alarmed and vulnerable Western Church, a Church ready to use remedies it may not have otherwise contemplated. Casuistry all but took sinfulness out of sin.  Consequently, it was attacked by Blaise Pascal, in his Lettres provinciales (1658-1659), and ridiculed by Molière (Tartuffe) and La Fontaine. But it allowed the king to sin.

Let us assess the damage

  • Henry VIII of England (28 June 1491 – 28 January 1547; king: 21 April 1509 until his death), who was not allowed to divorce, ended up making himself head of the Church of England.
  • Martin Luther (10 November 1483 – 18 February 1546), had confronted indulgence “salesman” Johann Tetzel, with his Ninety-Five Theses in 1517 and opposed other practices, had also fragmented the Roman Catholic Church.
  • John Calvin (French, Jean Calvin, born Jehan Cauvin: 10 July 1509 – 27 May 1564) and French Huguenots, Calvinist Protestants, could easily point a guilty finger not at Jesus of Nazareth, but at the Church as a human institution.  Calvin is the author of The Institutes of the Christian Religion, published in 1536.

To the above, we could add the Edict of Nantes, promulgated in 1598, by Henri IV who was both king of France and king of Navarre. The Edict of Nantes offered protection to the formerly persecuted Huguenots, which seemed the correct remedy, but Huguenots were not loyal to the Roman Church and were therefore a potential obstacle to absolutism in the eyes of cardinal-duc de Richelieu.

Richelieu may have been right when he suggested to Louis XIII that the Huguenots’ right to have “places fortes” (fortified communities), such as La Rochelle, could imperil absolutism, i.e. one king, one language, one religion. These “places fortes” could be turned into genuine fortified places. (See Siege of La Rochelle, Wikipedia.) However, did he have to let twenty-two thousand Huguenots starve to death?

Casuistry: origins

Casuistry, a recipe for ethical laissez-faire, does not find its origins in seventeenth-century Spain, or Escobar y Mendoza, Francisco Suárez and other casuists. In dates back to ancient Rome and ancient Greece.

Plato (left) and Aristotle (right), a detail of The School of Athens, a fresco by Raphael (6 or 28 March 1483 – 6 April 1520). Aristotle gestures to the earth, representing his belief in knowledge through empirical observation and experience, while holding a copy of his Nicomachean Ethics in his hand, whilst Plato gestures to the heavens, representing his belief in The Form.

For example, casuistry has roots in ancient Rome and, especially, ancient Greece, and the Renaissance had given greater access to the knowledge of ancient Rome and Greece. In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle (384 BCE – 322 BCE)[i] proposes an examination of certain actions, not all, before judgment is passed with respect to their moral acceptability.

Casuistry and Jurisprudence

I should mention that casuistry has often been defined as jurisprudence applied to morality. For instance, the Ten Commandments do not permit the killing of a human being, but during a war that restriction is lifted. It is also lifted in the case of self-defence. As well, many countries have retained what other countries look upon as profoundly unethical: the death-penalty. This would suggest that the sinfulness of an action depends to a smaller or larger extent on circumstances and location. Jurisprudence is the study of cases (casuistry).

In other words, moral relativism is not new.

—ooo—

However, with casuistry, a sin could be rendered innocent using “methods” that manipulated reality, which Blaise Pascal could not accept, nor Molière, nor La Fontaine.

Casuistry: a general definition

There were great advantages to casuistry in that allowed the “grands” among the faithful to sin without sinning, which constitutes an unacceptable form of moral relativism and, by and large, benefits only the “grands” or the rich and powerful.  Casuistry proposed “methods” that could be used to make a wrong a right. The most important of these “methods” or doctrines were:

  1. la direction d’intention, or the end [l’intention] justifies the means (Machiavellian);
  2. mental restriction (saying part of the truth out loud, but saying the rest silently, within oneself);
  3. the doctrine des équivoques: using ambiguous or equivocal terms, to transform a message;
  4. probability (one theologian who said “no” could be overruled by a theologian who said “yes” as both were theologians.

I am leaving out: easy devotion (la dévotion aisée), and dispensation from loving God (la dispense d’aimer Dieu) and there may be other “methods” or doctrines, but for a detailed account of the methods put forth by casuistry, one needs to read Escobar y Mendoza, Francisco Suárez and other proponents of casuistique, a task best performed by theologians.

Among the four “methods” or doctrines I have listed, the most disputed was the fourth: probability, which pitted one authority against another.

Henry VIII & Henri IV

The Church of England separated from the Roman Church because Henry VIII (28 June 1491 – 28 January 1547) was not allowed to divorce Catherine of Aragon and having separated from the Roman Church, Henry VIII went on to have wives decapitated.

But let us look a the life of Henri IV of France who was a good king, but a womanizer who did not honour his promise to marry Catherine Henriette de Balzac d’Entragues, should Gabrielle d’Estrées (1573 – 10 April 1599), his official mistress, pass away.  Henri IV probably expected Gabrielle d’Estrées to live a long time, but she died of eclampsia on 10 April 1599, at the age of 26. A few months later, Henri married Marie de’ Medici, not Catherine Henriette de Balzac d’Entragues, whom he had promised to marry.

Moreover, where was the Church, when Henri IV, a Protestant married Marguerite de Valois (14 May 1553 – 27 March 1615), a Catholic who did not want to marry him?Henri IV, king of Navarre, stood outside Notre-Dame de Paris while his wedding took place.

Henri IV abjured Protestantism on 25 July 1593, following the advice of his mistress, Gabrielle d’Estrées, a Catholic, but he did so unconvincingly: “Paris vaut bien une messe.” (Paris [the crown] is well worth a mass.) He converted five years after his becoming king of France. I surmise he had to convert in order to be crowned, which meant he was seeking power.

Finally, in 1599, ten years after he became king of France (1589), Henri had his marriage to Marguerite de Valois annulled on the grounds that she could not bear him children, which may not have constituted valid grounds for an annulment had Henri IV not needed heirs and had he not been a “grand.” He had also had Gabrielle d’Estrées’ marriage annulled. So what happened to Henry VIII? Why was his marriage not annulled?

Henri IV, king of France and king of Navarre, was no choir boy. He loved women. But he may well have been the best king France ever had.

Adultery

In other words, what we see here is adultery which, according to Judaism’s Ten Commandments, is a sin. Unlike Henry VIII, Henri IV did not break with the Roman Church to marry another woman. Nor did he have wives decapitated. But he had an insatiable sexual appetite which he obviously felt free to indulge perhaps given his “divine rights of kings,” a notion he and Henry VIII had probably never heard of.

Moreover, it was not uncommon for monarchs whose marriages were arranged to keep an official mistress. Henri II of France, Marguerite de Valois’ father, was married to Catherine de’ Medici, but he had a mistress, the powerful Diane de Poitiers.

Opposition to Casuistry

In his Lettres provinciales (1656-1657), Blaise Pascal[ii] (19 June 1623 – 19 August 1662), using a pseudonym, Louis de Montalte, condemned casuistry.  Molière mocked it in Tartuffe (1664, 1666, 1669) a play he often revised to please “le parti des dévots” and escape the death penalty. As well, La Fontaine, bequeathed a long list of poems where the “grands” do with impunity what is not allowed of the “petits.”

—ooo—

In other words, the rapid breakdown of the Roman Church justified robust recourses, but did it justify taking sinfulness out of sin in aristocratic rather than plebeian circles.  There can no doubt that circumstances play a role in determining whether some actions are ethically permissible. But can taking all sinfulness out of sinful actions be acceptable?

Pascal was not heard in his lifetime, but in 1679, “Pope Innocent XI publicly condemned sixty-five of the more radical propositions (stricti mentalis), taken chiefly from the writings of Escobar, Suárez (Catholic Encyclopedia) and other casuists as propositiones laxorum moralistarum and forbade anyone to teach them under penalty of excommunication.”[iii]

Ironically, if indeed casuistry was used to prevent further fragmentation of the Western Church, it was also an indictment of the Church, which can lead one to think that Pope Innocent XI perhaps saved the Western Church.
.

Love to everyone. ♥

 _________________________

[i] “Aristotle.” Wikipedia <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotle>

[ii] “Blaise Pascal.” Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2012. Web. 04 Mar. 2012.<http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/445406/Blaise-Pascal>.

[iii] “Casuistry.” Wikipedia <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casuistry>

Thomas Weelkes (baptised 25 October 1576 – 30 November 1623)

© Micheline Walker
5 March 2012
WordPress
 
Gabrielle d’Estrées
(Please click on the image to enlarge it.)
 
 

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Casuistry, or how to sin without sinning

05 Monday Mar 2012

Posted by michelinewalker in France, History, Music, The Church

≈ 39 Comments

Tags

Aristotle, Casuistry, Escobar y Mendoza, Henri IV of France, Henry VIII of England, Huguenot, Pascal's Lettres provinciales

King Henry VIII by Hans Holbein the Younger, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

King Henry VIII, by Hans Holbein the Younger, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Casuistry

The Fragmentation of the Western Church

When Antonio Escobar y Mendoza (1589 – July 4, 1669) published his Summula (1627),  the handbook of casuistry, the Roman Church had been severely fragmented.  Escobar y Mendoza and Francisco Suárez (5 January 1548 – 25 September 1617), Jesuits, were therefore addressing an alarmed and vulnerable Western Church, a Church ready to use remedies it may not have otherwise contemplated.  Casuistry all but took sinfulness out of sin.  Consequently, it was attacked by Blaise Pascal, in his Lettres provinciales  (1658-1659), and ridiculed by Molière (Tartuffe) and La Fontaine.  But it allowed the king to sin.

Let us assess the damage

  • Henry VIII of England (28 June 1491 – 28 January 1547; king: 21 April 1509 until his death), who was not allowed to divorce, ended up making himself head of the Church of England.
  • Martin Luther (10 November 1483 – 18 February 1546), had confronted indulgence “salesman” Johann Tetzel, with his Ninety-Five Theses in 1517 and opposed other practices, had also fragmented the Roman Catholic Church.
  • John Calvin (French, Jean Calvin, born Jehan Cauvin: 10 July 1509 – 27 May 1564)  and French Huguenots, Calvinist Protestants, could easily point a guilty finger not at Jesus of Nazareth, but at the Church as a human institution.  Calvin is the author of The Institutes of the Christian Religion, published  in 1536.

To the above, we could add the Edict of Nantes, promulgated in 1598, by Henri IV who was both king of France and king of Navarre.  The Edict of Nantes offered protection to the formerly persecuted Huguenots, which seemed the correct remedy, but Huguenots were not loyal to the Roman Church and were therefore a potential obstacle to absolutism in the eyes of cardinal-duc de Richelieu.

Richelieu may have been right when he suggested to Louis XIII that the Huguenots’ right to have “places fortes” (fortified communities), such as La Rochelle, could imperil absolutism, i.e. one king, one language, one religion.  These “places fortes” could be turned into genuine fortified places.  (See Siege of La Rochelle, Wikipedia.)  However, did he have to let twenty-two thousand Huguenots starve to death?

Casuistry: origins

Casuistry, a recipe for ethical laissez-faire, does not find its origins in seventeenth-century Spain, or Escobar y Mendoza, Francisco Suárez and other casuists. In dates back to ancient Rome and ancient Greece.

Plato (left) and Aristotle (right), a detail of The School of Athens, a fresco by Raphael (6 or 28 March 1483 – 6 April 1520). Aristotle gestures to the earth,representing his belief in knowledge through empirical observation and experience, while holding a copy of his Nicomachean Ethics in his hand, whilst Plato gestures to the heavens, representing his belief in The Form.

For example, casuistry has roots in ancient Rome and, especially, ancient Greece, and the Renaissance had given greater access to the knowledge of ancient Rome and Greece.  In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle (384 BCE – 322 BCE)[i] proposes an examination of certain actions, not all, before judgment is passed with respect to their moral acceptability.

Casuistry and Jurisprudence

I should mention that casuistry has often been defined as jurisprudence applied to morality.  For instance, the Ten Commandments do not permit the killing of a human being, but during a war that restriction is lifted.  It is also lifted in the case of self-defence.  As well, many countries have retained what other countries look upon as profoundly unethical: the death-penalty.  This would suggest that the sinfulness of an action depends to a smaller or larger extent on circumstances and location.  Jurisprudence is the study of cases (casuistry).

In other words, moral relativism is not new.

—ooo—

However, with casuistry, a sin could be rendered innocent using “methods” that manipulated reality, which Blaise Pascal could not accept, nor Molière, nor La Fontaine.

Casuistry: a general definition

There were great advantages to casuistry in that allowed the “grands” among the faithful to sin without sinning, which constitutes an unacceptable form of moral relativism and, by and large, benefits only the “grands” or the rich and powerful.  Casuistry proposed “methods” that could be used to make a wrong a right.  The most important of these “methods” or doctrines were:

  1. la direction d’intention, or the end [l’intention] justifies the means (Machiavellian);
  2. mental restriction (saying part of the truth out loud, but saying the rest silently, within oneself);
  3. the doctrine des équivoques: using ambiguous or equivocal terms, to transform a message;
  4. probability (one theologian who said “no” could be overruled by a theologian who said “yes” as both were theologians.

I am leaving out: easy devotion (la dévotion aisée), and dispensation from loving God (la dispense d’aimer Dieu) and there may be other “methods” or doctrines, but for a detailed account of the methods put forth by casuistry, one needs to read Escobar y Mendoza, Francisco Suárez and other proponents of casuistique, a task best performed by theologians.

Among the four “methods” or doctrines I have listed, the most disputed was the fourth: probability, which pitted one authority against another.

Henry VIII & Henri IV

The Church of England separated from the Roman Church because Henry VIII (28 June 1491 – 28 January 1547) was not allowed to divorce Catherine of Aragon and having separated from the Roman Church, Henry VIII went on to have wives decapitated.

But let us look a the life of Henri IV of France who was a good king, but a womanizer who did not honour his promise to marry Catherine Henriette de Balzac d’Entragues, should Gabrielle d’Estrées (1573 – 10 April 1599), his official mistress, pass away.  Henri IV probably expected Gabrielle d’Estrées to live a long time, but she died of eclampsia on 10 April 1599, at the age of 26.  A few months later, Henri married Marie de’ Medici, not Catherine Henriette de Balzac d’Entragues, whom he had promised to marry.

Moreover, where was the Church, when Henri IV, a Protestant married Marguerite de Valois (14 May 1553 – 27 March 1615), a Catholic who did not want to marry him?  Henri IV, king of Navarre, stood outside Notre-Dame de Paris while his wedding took place.

Henri IV abjured Protestantism on 25 July 1593, following the advice of his mistress, Gabrielle d’Estrées, a Catholic, but he did so unconvincingly: “Paris vaut bien une messe.” (Paris [the crown] is well worth a mass.)  He converted five years after his becoming king of France.  I surmise he had to convert in order to be crowned, which meant he was seeking power.

Finally, in 1599, ten years after he became king of France (1589), Henri had his marriage to Marguerite de Valois annulled on the grounds that she could not bear him children, which may not have constituted valid grounds for an annulment had Henri IV not needed heirs and had he not been a “grand.”  He had also had Gabrielle d’Estrées’ marriage annulled.  So what happened to Henry VIII?  Why was his marriage not annulled?

Henri IV, king of France and king of Navarre, was no choir boy.  He loved women.  But he may well have been the best king France ever had.

Adultery

In other words, what we see here is adultery which, according to the Ten Commandments, is a sin.  Unlike Henry VIII, Henri IV did not break with the Roman Church to marry another woman.  Nor did he have wives decapitated.  But he had an insatiable sexual appetite which he obviously felt free to indulge perhaps given his “divine rights of kings,” a notion he and Henry VIII had probably never heard of.

Moreover, it was not uncommon for monarchs whose marriages were arranged to keep an official mistress. Henri II of France, Marguerite de Valois’ father, was married to Catherine de’ Medici, but he had a mistress, the powerful Diane de Poitiers.

Opposition to Casuistry

In his Lettres provinciales (1656-1657), Blaise Pascal[ii] (19 June 1623 – 19 August 1662), using a pseudonym, Louis de Montalte, condemned casuistry.  Molière mocked it in Tartuffe (1664, 1666, 1669) a play he often revised to please “le parti des dévots” and escape the death penalty.  As well, La Fontaine, bequeathed a long list of poems where the “grands” do with impunity what is not allowed of the “petits.”

—ooo—

In other words, the rapid breakdown of the Roman Church justified robust recourses, but did it justify taking sinfulness out of sin in aristocratic rather than plebeian circles.  There can no doubt that circumstances play a role in determining whether some actions are ethically permissible.  But can taking all sinfulness out of sinful actions be acceptable?

Pascal was not heard in his lifetime, but in 1679, “Pope Innocent XI publicly condemned sixty-five of the more radical propositions (stricti mentalis), taken chiefly from the writings of Escobar, Suárez (Catholic Encyclopedia) and other casuists as propositiones laxorum moralistarum and forbade anyone to teach them under penalty of excommunication.”[iii]

Ironically, if indeed casuistry was used to prevent further fragmentation of the Western Church, it was also an indictment of the Church, which can lead one to think that Pope Innocent XI perhaps saved the Western Church.

 _________________________

[i] “Aristotle.” Wikipedia <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotle>

[ii] “Blaise Pascal.” Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2012. Web. 04 Mar. 2012.<http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/445406/Blaise-Pascal>.

[iii] “Casuistry.” Wikipedia <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casuistry>

Thomas Weelkes (baptised 25 October 1576 – 30 November 1623)

Give Ear Oh Lord

© Micheline Walker
5 March 2012
WordPress
 
Gabrielle d’Estrées
(Please click on the image to enlarge it.)
 
 
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Catherine de Médicis & the Huguenots

20 Thursday Oct 2011

Posted by michelinewalker in History

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Catherine de Médicis, Charles IX., Henri IV of France, Huguenot, John Everett Millais, Paris, St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, WordPress

Huguenot Lovers on St. Bartholomew’s Day

In my last blog, I wrote that a daughter, Caterina (13 April 1519 – 5 January 1589), was born to Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici (September 12, 1492 – May 4, 1519) and Madeleine de la Tour d’Auvergne (c. 1501 – 28 April 1519).  Both died in 1519, shortly after the birth of Caterina who married Henri II of France and became Catherine de Médicis, Queen consort of France.

As Queen consort of France, Catherine incited her son, Charles IX (27 June 1550 – 30 May 1574), to massacre Huguenots (French Calvinist Protestants). This massacre called the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre (Massacre de la Saint-Barthélemy in French) took place during the night of the 23-24 August 1572.

In my blog on Machiavelli and Reynard the Fox, I pointed to the ruthlessness of the Medici family, but left aside Caterina deʼ Mediciʼs hatred of French Protestants and her Machiavellian behaviour.  The St. Bartholomewʼs Day massacre was Catherineʼs idea, but only her son, King Charles IX, could and did order it.  When he witnessed the bloodshed, his already fragile mental health suffered such a blow that he did not recover and died two years later, in 1574.  The St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre claimed at least 5,000 lives in Paris.  But it also claimed lives outside Paris.

This is the kind of actions, though on a smaller scale, that Machiavelli was aware of, and saw, hence his praise of the zoomorphic, half human, half beast, Centaur.  The Centaurʼs beastial half could be useful to his prince as could the crafty Fox, born as Reinardus in Nivard de Gandʼs Ysengrimus a lenghty Latin beast epic (1149).

However, we will concentrate on Reynard in a future blog.  At the moment, it would suffice to focus on the Huguenots, or French Calvinist Protestants.  The French were beginning to consolidate their monarchy to make it an absolute monarchy.  Richelieu would be its main architect, but absolutism meant one king, one language, one religion, a concept embraced by Catherine de Médicis.

Henri IV, who sympathised with the Huguenots, had to convert to Catholicism to become the King of France.  He is remembered for saying that Paris (kingship) was well worth a mass:  “Paris vaut bien une messe.” Henri was an excellent king, but he was murdered in 1610, when his son, the future Louis XIII was still a child.

A few years earlier, in 1598, Henri IV had signed the Edict of Nantes, which gave the Huguenots a respite, but one that did not truly survive the assassination of Henri IV.  In theory, the Huguenots were safe and inhabited safe places, such as La Rochelle.  But we know about the Siege of La Rochelle.  It reaped the lives of approximately 24,000 Huguenots who were simply starved to death by Richelieu, a regent during the Louis XIII’s childhood but who remained a ruler during part of the reign of Louis XIII.

Mazarin, who was a ruler, also a regent, during the reign of Louis XIII, and Louis XIV were tolerant of Huguenots, but ended up revoking the Edict of Nantes, in 1685

The Révocation de l’Édit de Nantes led to an exodus.  Huguenots fled to the Low Countries, England, the future Germany and elsewhere.  However, as they fled, those who were caught were tortured in the cruellest of manners.

The Huguenots had constituted the cream of France’s middle-class, including Nouvelle-France’s middle-class.  Where Nouvelle-France is concerned, it was so weakened by the departure of the Huguenots that the Révocation may help explain the future vulnerability of the colony.

* * *

It was an important chapter in the history of my family.  However, my sister Diane, an excellent genealogist, tells me that three Bourbeaus left France, which means that Suzor-Côté’s* Bourbeau paintings depict the home and surroundings of a third Bourbeau, my maternal grandfather’s father whose ancestry Diane has sent me, but it remains unexplored, but who was a Huguenot who converted to Roman Catholicism in order to remain in Canada.

* This is a French-language Wikipedia site, surrounded by English-language sites.

* * *

Among Huguenots slaughtered on St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre was composer Claude Goudimel, an innocent man.  All were innocent persons.  Many Huguenots settled along the St. John’s River, in the United States.  I must find out a little more.

I have never understood cruelty, especially cruelty perpetrated in the name of a religion.

P.S.  Millais (Sir John Everett Millais)

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