As there were princes of the blood among them, and even crowned heads, resistance to the authority of the day was not felt to be seditious.
But they were associated with vast political interests, and with men less eager about points of doctrine than about affairs of state, who brought them into action against the government. As a religious body, guided by the counsels of Calvin, they should have professed passive obedience. By image-breaking, assaults on processions, and general violence, they made the part of tolerant Catholics difficult to play. They thought it a life and death struggle, persuaded that the Catholics were irreconcilable, and impossible fellow-subjects and neighbours. They did not profess the liberal principle, and never repudiated the maxim of their chief at Geneva regarding the repression of other sects. There never was any prospect that the Reformation would prevail but at first, in the tide of early expansion, this was not quite evident, and they dreamt, not of liberty only, but of predominance.
No province ever became Protestant, and hardly any town. Then they spread to Normandy, and in the west, and as time went by it became difficult to say which part of the country or which class of the population was most deeply influenced by their doctrine. They were strongest in Dauphiny, which was near Geneva, and at Lyons, which was a centre of trade. They had two translations of the Bible, and a celebrated book of hymns and they now began to combine and organise. The Protestants at that time were estimated by Calvin at about 300,000, and in certain districts they were increasing rapidly. He made an attempt to introduce the Inquisition, but was killed in a tourney before he had achieved his purpose. King Henry II., who had been educated in Spain, where he was detained as a hostage, was resolutely intolerant, and when the general peace was concluded he turned his thoughts to the state of religion. For these reasons the Calvinistic doctrines obtained a far more favourable hearing, and it is in that shape only that the Reformation struck root in France. Calvinism possessed the important faculty of self-government, whilst Lutheranism required to be sustained by the civil power. After his death, the first man among the reformers was a Frenchman, and the system as he recast it was more congenial.
Luther, in his life and thought, presented so many characteristics of the exclusively German type as to repel the French, who, during many years of that generation, were at war with Germany. is supposed to have been eighty-five or a little more. The number of victims in the last years of Francis I. In that shape, as Lutheranism, they never became an important force in the country, though there was a time of comparative toleration, followed, after 1535, by the severities which at that time became usual in Europe. There the struggle was obstinate and sanguinary, and lasted more than thirty years, ending, towards the close of the century, with the triumph of the Crown over the nation, and the State over the Church.Īlthough the French had had at least one reformer before the Reformation, and were prepared by the Gallican system for much divergence from prevailing forms of medieval Catholicism, they received the new ideas as an importation from Germany. When the religious frontiers were fixed in the rest of Europe, in France, the most important state of all, they were still unsettled.