The Church in the Republic: Gallicanism and Political Ideology in Renaissance France

Abstract

By examining in detail the transformation of Gallicanism in sixteenth-century France, Jotham Parsons has performed an important service for all historians of the Ancien Regime. He shows how medieval Gallicanism, which was largely predicated upon fiscal independence and which reached its high point with the council of Pisa in 1510, was profoundly changed by the rise of humanist learning and by the conflicting responses of Catholics to the Protestant Reformation. During the Wars of Religion a generation of Gallican jurists developed an ideological complex whose intellectual foundations derived from the new discipline of history. They began to develop the concept of Gallican liberties as a fundamental law in response on the one hand to Protestant schism and on the other hand to the claims of reinvigorated ultramontanism. Traditional scepticism of ecclesiastical jurisdiction among lay jurists was joined by newer currents of thought. Principally, the dominant role ascribed to custom as the basis of social order permitted jurists to develop ‘an ideology allowing them to claim prescriptive authority in maintaining the stability of the state, based on their special relationship to the past and its fundamental legal structure’. History, law and counsel were the intellectual tools at their disposal, the proper exercise of which required disinterestedness—objectivity, justice, devotion to the public good. The ways in which the gens du roi in particular had an exalted sense of themselves as tribunes dedicated to the upholding of justice and the defence of ancient liberties is a familiar story, but Parsons shows how the development of a coherent ideology was consequent upon the crisis of erudite Catholic royalism in the 1580s. The manifesto of this group was Antoine de Loisel's De la puissance Royalle et Sacerdotale, a refutation of the call of the 1579 Assembly of the Clergy for introduction of the Tridentine canons, a reduction of royal influence over the collation of benefices, the redistribution of church income, and a strengthening of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. From this date, publications on Gallican liberties became a distinct genre, and the collapse of the Henrician regime in 1589 necessitated that what had been until then an episodic, reactionary and indefinable political force coalesce into a party. By the turn of the century the institutional structure of erudite Gallicanism in the Parlements had been firmly established and the armature of publication, collection, scholarship and rhetoric that incarnated Gallican ideology thrived in the contentious political and legal arena. Thereafter Gallicanism as a political ideology spread beyond its intellectual milieu as it was taken up by anyone wishing to challenge either the pretensions of individual clergy or the jurisdictional competence of the Church. The rise of Gallicanism also forced the strongly Tridentine French church to develop its own political doctrine, one that transcended custom and history through its foundation on revealed truth, and which countered the Gallican magistrates claim to offer more disinterested council than the First Estate. In the long run, it was the timeless ideals of the clergy that appealed more to the monarchy and by the middle of the reign of Louis XIII the role of Gallicanism as an ideology of opposition, patrolling the limits of absolute monarchy, was already established. Given the immense importance of Gallicanism into the eighteenth century, this study will command a wide readership among those interested in the religious and intellectual history of the Ancien Regime, especially since it complements Alain Tallon's recent important, though more essayistic, treatment of the subject. That said, it is not an easy read and Parsons' undoubted powers of erudition are sometimes compromised by his prolixity. Tighter editorial control would also have reduced the number of errors, some of which, such as the substitution of the first for the third estate on page 259, will leave students baffled. Likewise, though the meaning of the noun ‘republic’, in the sense of commonwealth, is uncontroversial, the word ‘republican’, adjective or noun, is anachronistic and, at the very least, likely to leave all but the most advanced students perplexed. For those who persevere, however, this book will be an important addition to their understanding of the role played by ideas, learning and erudition in shaping Ancien Regime political culture.