Conseil à la France Désolée

Sébastian Castellion (1515–63), or Chateillon, Professor of Greek at the University of Basel, was best known, prior to the twentieth century, for his scholarly manuals: The Dialogi Sacri (1543/45) and his Bible en français (1555). Subsequently, due to his unflinching confrontation with Calvin and Calvinist orthodoxy after the execution of Michael Servetus in 1553, Castellion has emerged as a central figure in the bid for religious toleration. His De Haereticis, an sint persequendi (1554) is a key text in this debate and his manuscript De arti dubitandi (written in 1563) an important contribution to French scepticism. However, the survival of Castellion’s texts has historically often been more a matter of luck than planning: his Contra libellum Calvini, for example, would only be published after his death, when it was re-purposed by the Dutch Remonstrants (1612). The manuscript of Castellion’s response to Calvin’s successor Théodore de Bèze’s attack on his work, the De haereticis a civili magistratu non puniendis (1554–5), was only discovered by Bruno Becker in 1938.

The troubled publishing history of Castellion’s texts, and questions of authorship which frequently linger over his editions, perhaps explains the relative absence of anglophone literature on this fine thinker, with the exception of Hans Guggisburg’s translated study, newly available online. An edited edition of the Conseil à la France Désolée (1562), replacing Valkhoff’s 1967 Droz edition, is a thoroughly welcome contribution to the wider field, and evident growing interest in Castellion. The Conseil is a compact treatise of ninety-six pages, 8°, first published anonymously in response to the outbreak of the religious war in France and the infamous Vassy massacre. Few copies survived the Genevan censors, who ordered it destroyed. It is rather fitting, therefore, that the Conseil has been revived and republished by a Genevan press. It is also an appropriate—if unconscious—tribute to the often multi-authored translations and editions of Castellion’s work over the centuries, that this portable little text was produced through the efforts of no fewer than five editors.

Anglophone students encountering Castellion for the first time will still doubtless turn to Valkhoff’s English text (1975/available online 2016), and others to the Paris Conseil available in Gallica, which forms the basis of the text of the new Droz edition. However, the editors’ introduction to the latter, at almost twice the length of the actual treatise, makes it well worth the reasonable price. It provides a helpful analysis of the wider advice literature as well as usefully contextualizing Castellion’s contribution to French debates on religious toleration, particularly vis-à-vis the position of Michel de l’Hospital and Étienne Pasquier. The footnotes to the text likewise offer a learned guide for readers unfamiliar with the Castellion’s mental world and frame of reference, though perhaps could be more robust in the areas of medieval, scholastic theology and humanist rhetoric.