On Toleration
Intolerance and polarization are on the up, or so the headlines say. If true, it’s happened before, and been far worse. Thomas Jefferson wrote,
it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg,
but, then and earlier, that was a minority view.
Take early modern France. Calling it a Catholic country is calling Alaska a bit chilly. If today young Americans learn of a “wall of separation between church and state” (Jefferson), in ancien régime France church and state were fused, and fused in “the person of the monarch”: French kings swore to uphold and defend the Catholic faith, and combating heresy was an official duty.1 But—the Reformation was on. By 1572 the Huguenots (French Protestants) had become a state within a state. Their own religious institutions and religious practices, and a different social order built around them—yes, they had these, but they had more. They controlled cities. They fielded armies. And then: an attempt was made, in Paris, on the life of a Huguenot leader. The king, fearing Huguenot revenge, ordered the preemptive murder, under cover of darkness, of several Huguenot elites. The St Bartholomew’s massacres had begun. For three days the killing of Protestants in Paris continued—not now on the king’s orders, or (for the most part) by the kings men, but by civilian Catholics, who believed they were carrying out God’s will. The massacres spread to other cities; in the end, 5,000 Huguenots died.
The crown and the Huguenots had already fought three civil wars. They would fight five more. I’m no civil war expert, but that seems like a lot. Each war ended in a peace deal, giving Protestants some rights and privileges, but never complete equality. Why could they never last? The Huguenots were few in number, with no real prospect of conquering France. But the king and his loyal subjects lacked the wealth and will to fund and equip an army that could successfully besiege the well-fortified Huguenot towns. An overwhelming victory might have brought lasting piece; all they got was stalemate after stalemate.
The deeper problem, though, was that neither the ordinary Catholics nor the ordinary Protestants were willing to abide by the peace agreements their elites kept signing. Co-existence was unthinkable. Each “viewed the other as pollutants of their own particular notion of the body social, as threats to their own conception of ordered society.” Catholic acts of violence against Huguenots were not aimed at suppressing theological differences (say, disbelief in transubstantiation), but at “cleansing the body social of the pollutant of Protestantism, and in the process, preventing a dangerous and threatening cancer from spreading.”
The St Bartholomew’s massacres were more than killings; they were exorcisms. In an ideological atmosphere poisoned by “pamphleteers and preachers” who demonized Protestants, Catholics acted on the idea that
Huguenots not only had to be exterminated...they also had to be humiliated, dishonoured, and shamed as the inhuman beasts they were perceived to be. The victims had to be dehumanized—slaughtered like animals...death was followed by purification of the places the Huguenots had profaned. Many Protestant houses were burned, invoking the traditional purification by fire of all heretics.
Finally—26 years after the massacres, years of on-and-off civil war—Henry IV (a converted former Huguenot) signed the Edict of Nantes and created a somewhat lasting peace. Some Protestant practice was tolerated. But the peace worked by way of his individual political genius, not by changing the hearts and minds of the people. So when, as Henry III had been before him, he was assassinated “by another zealous Catholic unhappy with the religious commitment of the king,” war resumed, and this time the Huguenots lost, and were left “as heretics in a Catholic world.” If this peace was more stable, it was because the Huguenot political institutions had been dismantled—no longer did they control entire cities—and because they “were no longer perceived as the demons and pollutants of Catholic culture.”
Through all this, as top-down efforts to create tolerance and accomodation failed, slowly bottom-up ones succeeded, in their way. Over time it came to be that
in areas where Protestants were a minority, they were as receptive as their Catholic neighbours to the wide variety of folk believes about lucky and unlucky seasons to marry (customs and habits that both the Protestant and Catholic churches were doing their best to destroy). On the other hand, in Protestant regions where Catholics were a minority, Catholics also showed a tendency to postpone the baptism of their children by a week or more as was the Protestant custom.
If only that were the end of the story. Thirty years later Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, re-started the persecution of Protestants, and secured his place in the Hall of Unintended Consequences:
By forcing Protestants underground or abroad, [the revocation] ... not only guaranteed the minority’s survival, but introduced it into the New World. ... When religious toleration was finally introduced in the eighteenth century, there was a thriving community of maybe several hundred thousand Huguenots who emerged from their underground churches.
Source: The French Wars of Religion 1562–1629, Mack Holt.