The Reformed terreur panique of 1562: debating miracles and memory in seventeenth-century Le Mans

Abstract

Abstract In Le Mans in July 1562, the Protestant troops who had been occupying the town left abruptly, and the Catholic population soon developed the tradition that the Huguenots’ panic was due to a miracle performed by the town’s patron saint, St. Scholastique. In 1667, Claude Blondeau, a Catholic lawyer, disputed this local memory of the First War of Religion and ignited a published dispute over the nature of historical evidence and the status of Church tradition. Blondeau by no means supported the Reformed takeover of his city, but he also intensely criticized the Catholic retributory violence that followed. The argument over the miracle of St. Scholastique demonstrates that disagreements concerning the memory and meaning of the Wars of Religion endured in French towns into Louis XIV’s reign and had implications for religious toleration and political order at a time when the stipulations of the Edict of Nantes were subject to erosion.