The Wars of Religion: thirty-six years that marked the stones

A French Reformation

Before it was a war, it was a reading. In 1521 the Bishop of Meaux, Guillaume Briçonnet, called Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples and a few clerics to his side, among them Guillaume Farel, to reform his diocese through Scripture: this was the Circle of Meaux, where in 1523 Lefèvre produced the New Testament in French. The Sorbonne grew uneasy; by 1525 the bishop had retracted and the group dispersed. The town kept the seed: in September 1546 a community of some four hundred believers was discovered there, meeting in the house of a wool carder, Étienne Mangin; at the beginning of October — on the 7th or the 8th, according to the sources — fourteen of them were burnt in the place du Marché, in front of his house. Meanwhile, on the night of 17 to 18 October 1534, posters against the Mass had been put up in Paris, Orléans, Tours and, according to tradition, even on the door of the king's bedchamber at Amboise: the Affair of the Placards. Francis I then let the pyres burn. A young humanist from Picardy left the kingdom: John Calvin published the Institution de la religion chrétienne (Institutes of the Christian Religion) in Basel in 1536, translated it into French in 1541 and settled in Geneva, from where pastors and books would set out. In May 1559, in Paris, a first clandestine national synod gave the Reformed Churches a confession of faith and a discipline. They were soon called Huguenots, a word whose origin remains disputed: around 1560, perhaps two million subjects out of eighteen, a good share of them nobles, craftsmen and merchants in the towns, strong south of the Loire.