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REVIEWS
| Sacred Boundaries: Religious Coexistence and Conflict in Early-Modern France. By Keith P. Luria (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2005. xxxviii plus 357 pp. $69.95).
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| The sixteenth-century French Wars of Religion stand out as the most extreme case of Europeans killing each other in the age of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations. In no other state in western Europe did civilians turn on each other in such force—often neighbor against neighbor—killing each other in their thousands. The St. Bartholomew's massacres in 1572 are often highlighted as the bloodiest examples of this violence. A combination of significant Huguenot growth in the 1550s and 60s, the vacillating religious policies of the crown, as well as some extremist rhetoric on both sides of the confessional divide all helped to produce an unprecedented civil war that lasted two generations. Indeed, the principal task of historians of sixteenth-century France has been to explain why this degree of violence occurred in France and nowhere else in Europe during the Reformation. The situation changed markedly in 1598, however, as the Edict of Nantes ushered in a period of religious co-existence. The new king Henry IV, himself a recently converted Huguenot, pushed an agenda of harmony and co-existence that ended the civil wars and sought to establish a peaceful coexistence between the two confessions. To be sure, religious tensions and the occasional outbreak of violence continued long after 1598, but the situation on the ground was very different: French Catholics were no longer massacring their Huguenot neighbors, and Huguenots were no longer ransacking and destroying Catholic churches. Indeed, they were being forced by the state to learn to coexist peacefully. That is, they were forced to learn how to break down the cultural barriers and boundaries that had been built up so solidly over the course of the religious wars by the political and clerical elites. Keith Luria's Sacred Boundaries is a rich and sophisticated analysis of how surprisingly successful this policy was over the course of the seventeenth century; and I say surprisingly, because Henry IV's son and grandson eventually abandoned his policy of peaceful coexistence in favor of a return to repression. |
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