Edict of Compiègne

The Edict of Compiègne ( _fr. Édit de Compiègne), issued from his Château de Compiègne [A second Edict of Compiègne issued from the same château in August 1765, in the name of Louis XV, aimed at a minor adjustment of the process of electing mayors.] by Henri II of France, 24 July 1557, applied the death penalty for all convictions of relapsed and obstinate "sacramentarians", [This meant Calvinists not Lutherans.] for those who went to Geneva or published books there, for iconoclast blasphemers against images, and even for illegal preaching or participation in religious gatherings, whether public or private. [Robert Jean Knecht, "The Rise and Fall of Renaissance France: 1483-1610" (rev. ed., Blackwell, 2001:241.] It was the third in a series of increasingly severe punishments for expressions of Protestantism in France, which had for an aim the extirpation of the Reformation. [The first punitive code, the Edict of Fontainebleau, had been issued in 1540. The second, more severe, was the Edict of Châteaubriant of 1551. The Edict of Écouen was issued in 1559, the year of the king's death.] By raising the stakes, which now literally became matters of life and death, the Edict had the result of precipitating the long religious crisis in France and hastening the onset of armed civil war between armies mustered on the basis of religion, the series of French Wars of Religion, which were not settled until Henri IV's edict of toleration, the Edict of Nantes (1598).

The source of the "contagion", as court pamphleteers put it, was ever Geneva, where the former Frenchman John Calvin achieved undisputed religious supremacy in 1555, the very year that the French Reformed Church organized itself at a synod under the king's nose, as it were, in Paris. At the Peace of Augsburg signed that same year in Germany, the essential concept was "cuius regio eius religio", "Whose region, his religion". In other words, the religion of the king or other ruler would be the religion of the people. The petty princes of Germany were enabled to dictate the religion of their subjects, and it came to be sensed as a mark of weakness that the King of France could not do so: "One King, One Faith" would become the rallying cry of the ultra-Catholic party of the Guise faction.

The Parlement de Paris was deeply divided on the issues. When the King approached the Parlement for its formal advice beforehand on the best means of punishing and stamping out heresy, the moderate voices of président Séguier and "conseiller" du Drac urged against the proposed new edict (as unnecessary) and specifically opposed the introduction of an Inquisition into France, an "innovation" that would appear to circumvent the king's justice, vested in the "parlement". [Roelker 1996:229f.]

The preamble of the Edict of Compiègne, like earlier ones, remarked on the ineffectiveness of the courts in acting against "heretics", because of the malice or lenience of judges. The Edict sanctioned a papal brief that established a court of Inquisition in France, though the Parlement delayed in acting upon it, and it was rescinded in April 1558. [Knecht 2001:240f.] For now it hesitated even to take up the edict: "On the last day of 1557, the "gens du roi" complained again that the court had still not deliberated the king's latest edict (Compiègne), "presented four months ago." They understated the case: the edict had been presented on July 24, 1557, and was registered in January 1558." [Roelker 1996:230.]

But the first effects of the Edict had already transpired. On 4 September 1557 an angry mob had broken into a Calvinist meeting being held in a private house in the rue Saint-Jacques. They found nobles and royal officials, respected artisans, women and children. About 132 persons were arrested and thrown into prison. On 14 September, three, including a noble widow, were publicly burned in the place Maubert. [Knecht 2001:241.]

Notes

References

* Roelker, Nancy Lyman, "One King, One Faith: The Parlement of Paris and the Religious Reformations of the Sixteenth Century" (Berkeley: University of California Press) 1996 [http://content.cdlib.org/xtf/view?docId=ft409nb2zv&brand=eschol "The Road to Civil War (1): 1555-1561"]