La Sorbonne entre en guerre de religion: autorité universitaire, censure et pouvoir royal en France (v. 1551–v. 1589)

‘It is the Sorbonne on which the entire school of theology depends, where the most prominent members of the faculty are sourced, where all cases concerning matters of religion are considered, and where the head of the faculty is chosen as well as the inquisitors of the faith against the perversity of heretics.’ This is how François Belleforest in his Universal Cosmography (1575) characterized the dominance held by the College of the Sorbonne over the Faculty of Theology in the University of Paris, a dominance so clear that the college became synonymous with the faculty as a whole. One of the many contributions of Thierry Amalou’s excellent and erudite book on the Sorbonne in the religious wars is to demonstrate how it was particularly during the second half of the sixteenth century that the Sorbonne established itself in this pre-eminent position, above rival colleges in the university and the largest religious orders who supplied considerable numbers of students and faculty members. Amalou builds on James K. Farge’s considerable work concerning the Faculty of Theology in Paris during the first half of the sixteenth century, and ranges from the Gallican Crisis of 1551 to the assassination of Henri III in 1589. Amalou argues that during these years, the doctors of the Sorbonne became frequently involved in major controversies over the politics of religion, and did so before an increasingly broad public audience through official proclamations, oral preaching and printed publications.

Amalou organizes the book into three parts, which in turn examine the reign of Henri II, the outbreak of the troubles in 1561–62, and the developing religious controversies of the civil wars over the following three decades. The book’s chronological focus is skewed towards the earlier end of the period, but this justifies its title which emphasizes how the Sorbonne entered the fray, as well as the consequences of that intervention. This is a somewhat convoluted history, but one that Amalou generally presents with an admirable balance of clarity in the exposition of his overall themes and complexity of analysis when applied to case studies of specific controversies, especially deliberations to censure books by well-known figures such as René Benoist, Charles Du Moulin and Guillaume Postel, or lesser known but nevertheless important authors such as François Grimaudet and Jean de Masencal.

Amalou situates the Sorbonne in relation to the city of Paris, the monarchy and the papacy. Its precise position within this triangle varied according to changing circumstances. In the reigns of Henri II and François II, the doctors of the Sorbonne allied with the monarchy in its campaign against heresy, but during the regency of Charles IX they moved to assert their independence from the monarchy and align more closely with papal authority. The rupture occurred around the Assembly of the Clergy (commonly known as a ‘Colloquy’) held at Poissy in 1561, when the Sorbonne doctors refused any attempt at compromise with the Protestants over the doctrine of the Eucharist. Amalou’s analysis of this event is particularly significant as it counters previous historians’ tendency to focus on moderate voices which seemed to offer a chance of religious concord that might have averted the religious wars. Yet Amalou argues that this perspective ignores the long-run history of resistance to Calvinist Eucharistic theology by the zealous doctors of the Sorbonne reaching back to the 1530s. It was the victory of the zealous Sorbonne theologians in these debates that led in many cases to their selection as the French delegates to the final session of the Council of Trent alongside the cardinal of Lorraine. Over the following decades, the Sorbonne doctors became more strident in their zeal for the Catholic cause and gradually cast off the conciliarist legacy of the later Middle Ages in favour of a more overt assertion of papal authority as a fundamental tenet of orthodoxy. In the 1570s and 1580s, the prophetic character of the doctors’ political theology reached its apogee in the preaching and publications of men such as Jean Boucher, Jacques de Cueilly and Antoine de Mouchy, who drew rhetorically on figures from the Old Testament to develop a charismatic authority that played a crucial role in the rise of the Catholic League in Paris.

Amalou’s argument is at times subtle and restrained in its approach to correcting the Black Legend of the Sorbonne as a cruel instrument of religious repression, an image created by its Protestant opponents and appropriated by partisans of Henri IV’s Bourbon monarchy as well as its Enlightenment and later republican admirers. Yet it also makes a number of significant contributions to the history of the Wars of Religion more broadly. For example, throughout Amalou engages with Denis Crouzet’s interpretation of the troubles as characterized by a collective imaginary of religious violence, and demonstrates how some of the most prominent Catholic preachers in Crouzet’s analysis (e.g. Artus Désiré and Simon Vigor) were popularizers of positions already debated and confirmed within the Faculty of Theology. Equally, Amalou does not intrude too far on histories the Catholic League in Paris, which have traced the political and social dimensions in detail, but he also illuminates an important dimension of Robert Descimon’s interpretation of the system of corporate Catholicism in the capital. He demonstrates that the spiritual alliance which bound together the city of Paris and the Sorbonne in support of the League following the assassination of Henri III also served to drive them apart after the victory of Henri IV, as the doctors’ explicit support for papal authority and the decrees of the Council of Trent ultimately served to entrench the distance between the clergy and the citizens of Paris, which briefly became so close during the political conjuncture of 1589–90. Overall, Amalou’s book makes a fundamental contribution to understanding the politics of religion in sixteenth-century France, and it should be essential reading for anyone interested in the period.