Countering the Reformation in France and the Netherlands: Clerical Leadership and Catholic Violence 1560 –1585*

Abstract

On 2 September 1572, the city of Antwerp was awash with rumours that ‘the soldiers and Spaniards and Italians might commit murder like in Paris’. Just over a week had elapsed since the Feast of St Bartholomew. Three thousand Huguenots had died in Paris, and in the French provinces the killing was still going on. But, as the Lutheran chronicler Godevaert van Haecht noted, Antwerp was not Paris: ‘In Paris, the citizens have turned on each other, and although the people here, too, were diverse in religion, they trusted that nothing like that would happen, unless it were done by the foreigners’.1 Six years earlier, in the annus mirabilis of 1566, the Calvinist public prosecutor of the city of Tournai, Pasquier de le Barre, had also remarked on this contrast between France and the Netherlands. In the Low Countries, he noted, Calvinists who left town to attend a clandestine prêche — an open-air sermon — had nothing to fear: ‘the other workers gave them no hindrance, nor did they pour forth insults or sharp words, which was much the contrary of what happened to them [in France] where similar prêches were held in the fields and outside the cities’.2

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