The French wars of religion, 1562-1629 by Mack P. Holt

Author:Mack P. Holt [Holt, Mack P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Religion, History, Europe, Military, France, Reformation, Christianity, Religion and politics - France, Religion; Politics & State, France - History - Henry IV; 1589-1610, France - History - Louis XIII; 1610-1643, Huguenots, 17th century, Religion and politics, Reformation - France, Huguenots - History - 17th century
ISBN: 9780521547505
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2005-01-15T05:00:00+00:00

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The French Wars of Religion

textile-worker and former soldier named Jean Serve, also known as Paumier, was elected ‘king’ of the drapers’ ‘kingdom’, one of the traditional festival groups that traditionally took part in pre-Lenten festivities.

He managed to raise troops and unite the artisans and peasants of both faiths under his banner as La Rouvière had done in Vivarais. On the feast day of St Blaise (3 February) – the patron saint of drapers, carders, and woolcombers – this peasant band mounted an armed demonstration that soon led to physical confrontation. According to the town notable, Antoine Gue´rin, Serve-Paumier commanded ‘with so much indiscretion and bestiality that he made the gentlefolk dread him’. The notables’ fears were well founded when the armed peasants stormed Romans’s town hall, ‘replaced the council, and instead of the gentlefolk who had filled it, he had others of his own following take over, who were as unworthy of this responsibility as a shoemaker would be as presiding officer of a High Court’.26 This social tension between commoners – made up of rural peasants and urban artisans – and the elites was also echoed by the diarist Eustache Pie´mond: ‘In Romans, the common folk, having elected Paumier as their chief, took the keys [to the city’s gates] from the captains of the said town, and especially captain Antoine Coste and other notable personages who were the keepers of the town.’27 Like their counterparts in Vivarais, the Romans peasants parlayed this rhetoric of social tension to underscore other demands: a suspension of the taille and the many indirect taxes placed on goods produced, bought, and sold in Romans, as well as an end to the systematic pillage and plunder of their homes and property by the various noble warlords in the province. The most visible successes of this insurrection came with the sacking and burning of the chaˆteaux of Chaˆteaudouble and Roissas, where two such warlords had set up their bases of operations. The peasants remained an effective force for the next twelve months, however, as they continued as a guerrilla force in the countryside.

The insurrection came to a bloody climax during Carnival 1580. The elites of Romans organized their own military force and took part as their own ‘kingdom’ in the pre-Lenten festivities. Having elected Gue´rin as their ‘king’, they conspired to use the traditional mock battles between the various ‘kingdoms’ of Carnival to defeat the peasant ‘kingdom’ of Serve-Paumier. The mock battles turned to genuine violence on Mardi Gras itself, 16 February 1580, the highlight of Carnival. Heavily armed, Gue´rin’s supporters drove the peasant militia out of town, with the 26 Quoted in Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Carnival in Romans, Eng. trans. Mary Feeney (New York, 1979), p. 103.

27 Quoted in ibid., p. 104.

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