Gallican Liberties and the Politics of Later Sixteenth-Century France

Abstract

What lay behind the anxiety of so many Frenchmen of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to defend the ‘liberties of the Gallican church’? In a stimulating essay published in 1971, Professor W. J. Bouwsma argued that Gallican ideas transcended any purely national setting, and that they should be studied (to borrow Febvre's distinction) from the standpoint of religious rather than of ecclesiastical history. Beyond the narrowly institutional concerns of traditional French approaches to the subject, Professor Bouwsma glimpsed among the upholders of Gallican liberties a certain cast of mind: a disposition towards religious renewal, an acceptance of the diversity of local church arrangements, and a corresponding distaste for the dogmatic certainties and standardizing ambitions of Tridentine Catholicism. So Professor Bouwsma argued.