The Rise and Fall of Renaissance France

The Pre-Reformation

At the Estates-General of 1484, Jean de Rely, who spoke for the Parisian clergy, painted a grim picture of the contemporary French church. ‘Everyone knows’, he declared, ‘that among the monks of Cîteaux, St Benedict and St Augustine, as among the rest, there is no longer any rule, devotion or religious discipline.’ Among the secular clergy, he went on, pastoral duties were generally neglected. The clergy ought to be setting an example to the laity, yet the roles were now reversed.

The disorderly state of the Gallican church was exemplified in Paris, where the chapter of Notre-Dame claimed exemption from all episcopal jurisdiction. When Tristan de Salazar, metropolitan archbishop of Sens, tried to assert his authority, he was violently attacked by the canons. As he left the cathedral on 2 February 1492, after celebrating mass in the king’s presence, two canons seized the processional cross. In the ensuing scuffle the cross was damaged, the archbishop butted in the stomach and his mitre torn to shreds. The incident prompted a lawsuit in the parlement which lasted thirteen years. In 1504 the archbishop’s right to officiate at Notre-Dame was recognized and the canons were ordered to restore the damaged cross.

The authority of the bishop of Paris, though less feeble than that of his metropolitan, was none the less weak. His jurisdiction was undermined by appeals to Rome or to the parlement and by the judicial activities of the cathedral chapter. His right to nominate to benefices in and around Paris was strictly limited. The chapter and most religious houses were exempt from his jurisdiction. In 1492 the canons refused to accept the king’s nominee, Jean de Rely, as bishop. They elected Gérard Gobaille, who was himself challenged by Jean Simon. As the two rivals fought over the episcopal revenues, their quarrel came before the parlement. When Gobaille died in September 1494 the pope, acting at the king’s request, confirmed Simon as bishop, but the chapter set about electing a new bishop. Only Simon’s willingness to stand as candidate averted a major confrontation between the crown and the chapter. Even after he had won, however, some canons refused to obey him.

There was also much disorder among the parish clergy of the diocese. Within Paris itself priests seemed more interested in their revenues than in the discharge of their spiritual duties. These they habitually unloaded on vicars whose disorderly conduct was a matter of continual concern to the bishop’s official. Rural parishes were even worse off. Their incumbents tended to reside in the capital, leaving indigent clergy to perform their duties. As yet there were no seminaries for the training of rural clergy. They picked up the rudiments of Christian dogma haphazardly while retaining the manners and tastes of their social background. The upper clergy despised them for their ignorance and uncouth ways.

Deficient as it was, the secular clergy was far superior to the regular one. Yet Paris and its suburbs had some of the wealthiest abbeys in the kingdom. During the Hundred Years War suburban monasteries and the rural estates of the great Parisian abbeys had been ravaged by passing armies. Though some had managed to repair their losses, many monasteries and convents in the countryside around Paris were ruinous and poverty-stricken. Even in Paris, except among the Cordeliers and Jacobins, the number of regular clergy had declined, and the monastic rule was no longer being generally observed. At Saint-Martin des Champs, a reform commission in 1501 noted that life in common had vanished: the monks owned property without regard for their rule. The same was true of Benedictine houses. There was disorder too among the Cordeliers and in 1502 the Jacobins claimed the right to seek refreshment outside the cloister. A similar state of affairs existed among the Carmelites and the Augustinians. Everywhere monks deserted the dormitory and refectory: each had his own room where he entertained friends. Apostolic poverty and the common ownership of goods were memories; everyone had his own purse. Monks roamed the streets mingling with boatmen and jugglers.

How far could the French crown be relied upon to assume responsibility for church reform in the absence of a serious papal initiative? King Charles VIII, unlike his father, was interested in reform. He sponsored the Synod of Sens (July – August 1485), which produced a comprehensive programme of reform covering worship, monastic discipline, fiscal abuses and disorder among the secular clergy, but a renewal of political troubles in France between 1485 and 1491 prevented that programme from being implemented. In November 1493 a reform commission met at Tours. It proposed a number of sensible practical remedies for the church’s ailments. Avoiding doctrine or worship, it concentrated on clerical discipline and the results were not insignificant. The French government sent the proposals to the pope with a demand that he should back the reform movement. In July 1494, Alexander VI empowered three abbots to visit and reform the Benedictine houses in France. Charles VIII’s interest in church reform could not be sustained once he had decided to invade Italy, yet the impetus he had provided was not lost: in many parts of France reformist activity continued till the end of the reign. Although no concerted action was taken by heads of the Gallican church, a number of bishops did reform their dioceses. At Langres, Chartres, Nantes and Troyes, they called synods and drew up or renewed episcopal statutes.

One of the loudest voices for reform in late fifteenth-century Paris was that of Olivier Maillard, a Franciscan friar, whose brutal frankness in the pulpit earned him enormous popularity. He poured scorn on unworthy priests and bewailed the decline of the church. Other champions of reform were Jean Raulin, principal of the collège de Navarre, Jean Quentin, penitentiary of Notre-Dame, and Jean Standonck. All three had come under the influence of Francis of Paola, an Italian hermit who had been invited to France in 1482 by Louis XI. He had founded in Italy a new order of friars, called Minims, who, in addition to the normal vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, promised to observe a perpetual Lent. In 1491, Charles VIII built a monastery for Francis at Montils-lès-Tours and another at Amboise. In the same year two Minims were allowed to set up a house in Paris. Francis was canonized in 1519, only twelve years after his death.

While preachers in Paris demanded reform, a slow movement of renewal was taking place in provincial monasteries. At Cluny in 1481, the abbot Jacques d’Amboise, brother of the cardinal, continued reforms that had been undertaken some twenty years earlier by his predecessor, Jean de Bourbon. Cluny’s example was followed by the nuns of Fontevrault where a reform programme initiated in 1458 by the abbess, Mary of Brittany, was continued by her successors and extended to other houses in 1475. In 1483, Charles VIII gave the convent of the Filles-Dieu in Paris to the abbess Anne d’Orléans, the sister of duke Louis. Benedictine reform also reached Marmoutier, near Tours, and Chezal-Benoist in Berry. Among the Cistercians a revival was also under way: in 1487, Innocent VIII commissioned Jean de Cirey, abbot of Cîteaux, to reform the order. He reorganized studies at the Cistercian college in Paris in August 1493, and laid down new rules for all the order’s houses at a general chapter in February 1494.

Reform among the mendicant orders was weaker. The Franciscans were bitterly divided between the Observants and Conventuals and the ferocity with which they fought each other in the courts seriously damaged their moral authority. Among the Dominicans reform was imported from the Low Countries. The Dutch Dominicans attached less importance to theological speculation than to mystical contemplation. In this respect they differed from the Jacobins, who adhered to the scholastic tradition. The missionary activities of the Dutch Dominicans tended to be excessively militant and consequently encountered stiff opposition.

In 1496, Standonck visited the canons regular of Windesheim, who practised the ideals of the Brethren of the Common Life. Following his visit, six brothers from Windesheim led by Jean Mombaer went to Château-Landon. They encountered resistance but, with the support of powerful patrons, they gained the upper hand, Mombaer becoming prior. In March 1497, Jean Simon, bishop of Paris, looked to Windesheim as he tried to reform the abbey of Saint-Victor. Writing to the general chapter of his order, Mombaer underlined the importance of the task in hand: ‘It is not simply a matter of reforming a once famous abbey,’ he said, ‘but eventually the entire Gallican church.’ In October, Windesheim sent seven brothers to Saint-Victor and two others visited the Augustinian house at Livry. Their rule gradually penetrated the French kingdom, although they suffered some serious setbacks under Louis XII: at Saint-Victor they made themselves so unpopular by their tactlessness that they had to leave.

Louis XII appreciated the urgent need to reform the French church. To bring this about he relied on Cardinal Georges d’Amboise, who, as papal legate, was empowered to visit religious houses, to depose and replace delinquent heads and to impose discipline on the monks. Although the reform programme of November 1493 had envisaged a reform of the whole Gallican church, Amboise concentrated his efforts on the regular clergy. With the help of energetic men like Maillard, reform of religious houses in Paris was carried out promptly, often in the face of stiff resistance. This was particularly strong among the Jacobins and Cordeliers. Sometimes the legate had to impose order by armed force. As for the nunneries, where reform had marked time in the face of countless difficulties, they too were visited, reformed and repaired. The famous abbey of Fontevrault received special attention. Under Amboise, communal life was restored, visitors sent out to daughter houses and reformed nuns introduced where necessary. New rules recently adopted at Fontevrault were extended to daughter houses between 1502 and 1507. Among other important abbeys reformed at this time were Chelles, Montmartre and Roye. In 1506 it was the turn of the great abbey of Poissy. Finally, the legate fought against the isolation of monasteries. They were grouped together and placed under the control of large and wholesome ones. In 1508, for example, the Jacobins of Paris, Rouen, Blois, Compiègne and Argenton were linked to the Dutch congregation.

Thus much was done to improve conditions in the Gallican church under Charles VIII and Louis XII. Although both kings backed reform, the initiative was mainly taken by individual churchmen, including some prelates. Georges d’Amboise, in his dual capacity of royal minister and papal legate, was a powerful force. In a large number of monasteries discipline was restored. Yet the results, as many contemporaries complained, did not go far enough. Only the surface wounds of the church had been bandaged; the real sickness within the body remained to be cured. The main cause of trouble was the government of the church itself. Although the Renaissance popes paid lip-service to the cause of church reform, they were generally far more interested in advancing their family or princely interests. The Fifth Lateran Council, which Julius II had called, was too unrepresentative of the church as a whole to be an effective vehicle of reform. It produced only half-measures aimed at reducing, not extirpating, abuses. Once the council had been dissolved, its decisions were quickly forgotten.

Reform in France was strongly resisted and frequently overturned. Monks and nuns took refuge in endless lawsuits, piling appeal upon appeal, in defence of their exemptions. In many places they rose against the reformers, driving them out by force. At every turn, episcopal agents were obstructed, threatened or subjected to physical abuse. Among the mendicants a positive state of war existed between the Conventuals and the Observants – they fought each other in the courts, with their fists or by means of censures and pamphlets. In 1506, Julius II tried to reconcile the two branches of the Franciscan order. No sooner had this been accomplished than the effort had to begin afresh. In 1511 the convent of Saint-Pierre in Lyon was reformed by the grand prior of Cluny; two years later, royal officials noted that the abbess and the nuns had destroyed the walls, scrapped the new rules and sued the archbishop and his officials. Only by deporting the nuns could order be restored. At Saint-Sansom in Orléans, in 1514, the monks refused to live in common. Only after five years of quarrels, lawsuits and revolts was reform imposed by royal decree in January 1519. Almost everywhere reform had to fight every inch of the way. Even where it struck root, it often needed to be replanted.

In the past the church had put its own house in order. Now the reformers were frequently obliged to seek the assistance of the secular authorities. Municipal bodies were sometimes asked to help, but they seldom wanted to be drawn into a situation likely to trigger off public disturbances. They were particularly cautious regarding the mendicants, who, even in their unreformed state, had much popular support. Nor could the parlements be depended upon to assist reform. They were traditionally suspicious of any interference by Rome, as they showed by challenging the powers of legates. They also denied bishops freedom of action. In 1486 the avocat du roi Le Maistre denied that bishops could exercise any jurisdiction over exempt churches. The parlement claimed the right to judge all suits involving privileged monasteries. In 1483 it demanded the reinstatement of the Conventual friars who had been expelled from Tours by Maillard and the Observants. In 1501 it received an appeal from the monks of Saint-Victor against the bishop of Paris who was trying to reform them. All too often, reform of the French church degenerated into a kind of police operation. By placing too much reliance on force and not enough on conversion, it created a large body of discontent among regular clergy who were forced to accept a life-style with which they had grown unfamiliar or be thrown out of their monasteries and convents.

By 1515, therefore, much still remained to be done. The constitutional argument between conciliarism and papalism was unresolved. The Pragmatic Sanction, though still in force, was often disregarded by the king. Disputes over appointments to benefices were still coming before the parlement with undue frequency. Abuses among the clergy were still rife, offering much scope to popular satirists like Pierre Gringore. His Folles Entreprises (1505) and Abus du monde (1509) attacked the debauchery and avarice of the secular clergy, the ambition of prelates and the corruption of monks. He even accused reformers of hypocrisy. As for the theologians, they remained divided into two broad camps: the schoolmen and the humanists. While the former dispensed the dry subtleties of Scotus and Ockham, the latter tried to build a new faith on a basis of sound scriptural studies. At the same time a wave of mysticism, reaching back to Thomas à Kempis, Cusa, Lull and beyond, caused many Christians to turn away from the formal observances of the church in favour of private prayer and ecstasy. It was this partially reformed, often rebellious and ideologically divided Gallican church which was soon to be faced by the Protestant challenge.