King Henri IV of France was born to a Protestant family but converted to Catholicism in order to win the support of his subjects. He published the famous Edict of Nantes on his visit to Brittany in 1598, which briefly established France as the most progressive and tolerant state in Europe.
The Reformation was one of the decisive chapters of European history, allowing the continent to evolve from a feudal society into an industrial power that imposed itself upon the rest of the world. In spite of its significance, however, little effort is made by modern historians to give people an overall perspective of what took place, and schools still tend to teach the subject from a purely national perspective: people in the UK, for example, often have the impression that the Reformation was principally about Henry VIII and his six wives, and Queen Elizabeth and the Spanish Armada.
If people have heard anything about the Reformation in France, it tends to be that France was intolerant towards reform, and that as a result France remained locked in a feudal, backward-looking society dominated by the Catholic church, whilst Protestant countries such as Britain, Germany and the Netherlands moved forward and increased in wealth and power. This has been used to explain why France has always remained slightly apart from the rest of the industrialised world and never managed to challenge the UK or the United States for pre-eminence.
For a while, however, France was at the forefront of reform, and under King Henri IV, France and Brittany were united in a brief period of progress and prosperity.
France, Brittany and the Reformation
Across most of Europe, the Reformation was driven by an intense dissatisfaction with the Church, which was widely viewed as being irredeemably corrupt. In Brittany itself, however, people had relatively few complaints about the local Church, which, on the contrary, was seen as an institution that helped to protect the Breton way of life.
Although fully integrated into the Catholic Church, the Church in Brittany had its own independent culture and traditions. Very few people in Brittany had much interest in the ideas of people such as Luther and Calvin: they simply did not seem relevant to Breton life.
In Europe as a whole, criticism of the Church was particularly strong in Universities – where academics were starting to say that the Church’s doctrines were based upon superstition rather than logic – and amongst some powerful families who disagreed with the Church on grounds of politics. There was a long history of powerful French kings setting themselves up in opposition to the authority of the Pope, and in the early days of the Reformation many people in the French court embraced the ideas of the Reformation with enthusiasm. During the 1530s it was even fashionable in society circles to be identified as a reformist or Protestant, and it appears that everyone in the French court subscribed to reformist ideas to a greater or lesser extent. This explains why, in the years to come, the French king was viewed with such suspicion by his subjects – particularly in Brittany, where the traditional religion was held to be sacrosanct.
Once it became clear that the ideas of people such as Martin Luther and Jean Calvin, were not going to lead to a reformation of the Church as a whole, but to a schism, most of the French establishment reaffirmed its allegiance to the Catholic church. Some people, however, had gone so far down the road of Protestantism that they were unable to accept an unreformed Catholic church. Many of the principal landowners of Brittany were in this category, and this served to create an insurmountable divide between the ordinary people of Brittany, and the people who were meant to be representing their interests to the French government.
During the 1550s, 60s, 70s and 80s, France suffered a series of civil wars, motivated by religious discord and a struggle for power between the Catholic and Protestant nobility. As is always the case with religious disputes, each side was able to demonise its opponents by playing upon the superstitious fears of ordinary people: Catholics were led to believe that they might become corrupted, and doomed to hell, if they even so much as listened to a Protestant preacher, whilst Protestants convinced themselves that the Catholic Church was a degenerate institution that had lost touch with true Christianity: each side felt justified in committing atrocities against their former friends and neighbours, and positions became more intransigent, and feelings more bitter, as time progressed. The Catholic party was more numerous and gained the majority of the military victories, but successive kings made concessions to the Protestants even after they had been defeated, probably not out of a spirit of generosity, but rather in an attempt to moderate the power of the Catholic church and thereby to maintain their own grip on government. These concessions were not understood by ordinary people and they served to make the royal family increasingly unpopular.
The Duc de Mercour was governor of Brittany throughout the Wars of Religion. He led Brittany into rebellion against the King and appears to have fervently believed in the Catholic cause. After his surrender to Henri IV he volunteered to lead the European forces against the Muslim army threatening Austria and Hungary, and he there gained a reputation for courage and valour.
In order to protect the interests of the established church, powerful Catholics banded together to form a semi-secret League, the initial intention of which was to ensure that the King made no futher concessions to the Protestants. This Catholic League was headed by the De Guise family who for a while effectively ruled the country. This was intolerable to the King, Henry III, and he had both the Duc de Guise and his brother, Cardinal de Guise, brutally murdered.
Unfortunately for Brittany, the governor of Brittany at that time was the Duc de Mercour, cousin to the murdered brothers and a staunch, though previously undeclared, member of the Catholic League.
A year later, in 1589, Henry III was himself assassinated, by a Catholic monk. Under well-established French laws of inheritance, in which the female line of the royal family was barred from the succession, the next in line to the throne was Henri de Navarre (Henri IV). Henri was from a Protestant family, and had fought with the Protestant troops during the civil wars. His accession to the throne was therefore unthinkable to most of the population of France, and certainly not to the Duc de Mercour who went into open rebellion against the new king.
Wars of the League
During the early years of the Reformation, Bretons had displayed their customary tolerance, and whilst the rest of France was engulfed by civil war, Brittany remained in a state of peace. Even when outrages were committed – such as when the castle at Concarneau was seized by a group of zealous Protestant noblemen – there were no serious reprisals. Most towns accommodated one or two Protestants without any problems – often the apothecary, notary or someone who had attended university, and people appeared to pay little attention to the fact that some of the leading aristocrats of the region had changed their religion.
All this changed with the murder of the De Guise brothers: for the first time people in Brittany seriously began to believe that their way of life might be threatened by the new Protestant religion, and the governor, the Duc de Mercour, received strong popular support for his rebellion against the authority of the King. He seized control of the city of Nantes, and then marched to Rennes in an attempt to secure the centre of Breton government to his cause.
Driven by wild fears of a Protestant take over, the population of Rennes rose in rebellion and threw up barricades in the streets; the Duc of Mercour was welcomed into the town and, believing it to be now firmly attached to the League, he departed with his troops to besiege Vitré, which was the only significant Protestant town in the whole of Brittany, and which represented the only route through which French troops would be able to enter the province.
Shortly after Mercour left the city, however, passions cooled, and the Breton parliament, which was based in Rennes, came to the conclusion that it was against the interest of Brittany to ally itself to the League. Instead, members opted for the more subtle strategy of remaining loyal to the King of France, provided that he maintained his allegiance to the Catholic faith. The parliamentarians managed to carry this policy to the rest of the population of Rennes and the Duc de Mercour was never again able to enter the city. Even when Henri III was assassinated and Henri de Navarre, a Protestant, became King of France, the Breton parliament kept faith with their policy and pledged loyalty to the new king, on the condition that he converted to the Catholic faith.
Few people in Brittany appreciated the wisdom of this course of action and almost the whole of the rest of the province, except Vitré and Brest, sided with the rebellion led by the Duc de Mercour. Vitré resisted Mercour’s siege, but was isolated in the midst of a hostile countryside – at one point local people banded together to fight against royalist forces who were trying to relieve the town; and Brest remained loyal to the King simply because it was an important naval base, staffed by picked officers who had little or no connection with Brittany itself.
Morlaix, Quimper, Vannes and Dinan, and almost every other major town, came out firmly on the side of the League; St. Malo established itself as a semi-independent city-state; and virtually the whole of the rural population supported the Duc to a greater or lesser extent.
Brittany and Independence
The level of support for the Catholic League in Brittany has surprised many historians especially in view of the fact that the province was untouched by the Wars of Religion that had raged over the rest of France during the previous decades, and because the Church in Brittany was clearly not under any threat; Protestantism was almost unknown, especially in the countryside, and this is where the League was able to gather some of its strongest support.
The factor that made the war so devastating for Brittany was the way in which the cause of the League became mixed up with the idea of Breton independence.
When the war of the League broke out, only fifty years had passed since the official union between France and Brittany. This was after almost a thousand years of Breton independence and, in the popular imagination, the incorporation of Brittany into a state stretching from Flanders to the Pyrenees was an aberration from the normal state of affairs. The religious discord and warfare sweeping across France was widely expected to lead to the collapse of the French state, and, for many Bretons, it must have appeared to offer the perfect opportunity for Brittany to reassert its independence.
Perhaps, if different personalities had been involved, these hopes may have been fulfilled: when war broke out upon the death of Henri III, Henri IV was forced to retreat to his stronghold in the South, and few people gave him much chance of ever being able to establish himself as the undisputed ruler of the whole country. In the event however, he proved to be a person of extraordinary ability and statesmanship; not only was he a brilliant general and inspired leader, but he also displayed levels of tolerance and forgiveness that were unheard of at the time, and which succeeded in winning even some of his most resolute opponents over to his cause.
The Duc de Mercour, the governor of Brittany, on the other hand, developed (perhaps unfairly) a reputation for double-dealing and vacillation. It was widely believed that he wished to establish himself at the head of an independent Brittany, but he never openly declared this to be his intention, perhaps because he did not wish to harm the progress of the Catholic League in the rest of France.
Early on in the rebellion he sought help from King Philip II of Spain, who was the pre-eminent Catholic monarch in Europe, but over the course of time, this proved to be an ill-advised move which caused more problems than it solved: for several years, the main object of Spanish foreign policy had been to gain control of France. Philip’s first wife had been sister to the King of France, and if succession through the female line had been allowed, their daughter, Isabella, would have had a better claim to the French crown than did Henri IV. Irrespective of the question of the French succession, Isabella, as a direct descendent of Anne of Brittany, had an undeniable claim to the Duchy of Brittany – and even if Philip could not gain control of France, it was clearly in his interests to establish his daughter as Duchess of Brittany.
In the 1500s, Brittany was a prize of inestimable value to the Spanish King: it would have provided the perfect base from which to re-open hostilities against Queen Elizabeth of England, and it would have made communications with the Spanish possessions in the Netherlands infinitely easier. Philip readily agreed to provide funds to support the League in Brittany and sent 5000 of his best troops to support the rebellion. In exchange, he wanted the Duc de Mercour to support the claim of his daughter to the Duchy of Brittany, which is something that the Duc could not do, possibly because of his personal ambition, but also because he knew that such a move would have lost his rebellion popular support – Bretons wanted independence, not to be absorbed into the Spanish empire.
Maximilien de Béthune, duc de Sully, was Henri IV’s most trusted and able minister. He was a Protestant by birth but worked successfully with both Protestants and Catholics, even helping to arrange Henri’ s marriage to Marie de Medici. His fiscal reforms saved France millions of livres per year and he introduced measures to improve roads and bridges, reduce the number of castles, protect forests and encourage agriculture.
Because of these political manoeuvrings the Duc of Mercour and his Spanish allies seldom acted in concert with each other, and although their combined forces were far superior to the forces loyal to the King, they were never able to gain control over the whole of Brittany.
Henry IV
While Brittany was descending into a state of near anarchy, Henri IV was gradually imposing his authority upon the rest of France. He gained several significant military victories against the Catholic League and won over people that were opposed to him, through a policy of clemency and generosity. He succeeded in encircling Paris and effectively blockaded the city, which was under the control of a committee who were resolutely opposed to recognising him as king.
Henri sensed that the population was growing tired of war, and that if he converted to the Catholic faith, he might be able to win Paris without a fight. This is indeed what he did, and on 25th July 1593 was admitted to the Catholic faith. Despite protestations by leaders of the League that this was simply a ruse to win power, the news was greeted with joy by ordinary people across the country and for most of France this marked the end of the civil war.
Henri still found himself at war, however, against Spain in both the North and the South of the country – and, in Brittany, the Duc of Mercour showed no interest in coming to an accommodation. Many people pressed the Duc to abandon his rebellion, and to join other leaders of the League in submitting to Henri, but for whatever reason, perhaps because of promises made to Philip of Spain, the Duc refused to come to terms and the war continued in Brittany for a further three years.
Henry gained a famous victory at Amiens against superior Spanish forces and in 1598 Philip himself died. A peace treaty was signed between France and Spain and at last Mercour was obliged to sue for peace.
Henri came to Brittany himself to ensure that the final remnants of armed resistance to his rule came to an end. He entered Nantes, the capital of the League, and from there published the famous ‘Edict of Nantes’, which guaranteed basic rights to Protestants, and made France the first country in Europe to incorporate a measure of religious tolerance into its laws.
Article Written by Gareth Lewis for the Central Brittany Journal January 2008
