Rebellion and Peace: The paths for conflict resolution in Huguenot and Catholic propaganda during the French Wars of Religion
Rebellion and Peace: The paths for conflict resolution in Huguenot and Catholic propaganda during the French Wars of Religion

Summary/Abstract: The second half of the sixteenth century saw France descend into civil war, after several decades of increasing religious tensions brought about by the Reformation. It was an outcome which traditional political thought dreaded, because internal union was one of the most prized features of a healthy political body. Civil war, the line went, was much worse than any other calamity which might befall a polity and threatened it with complete dissolution. Therefore, once France found itself in such a situation from 1562 onwards, one of the main issues in French political discourse became the restoration of internal peace: all the parties involved in the conflict paid at least lip service to it, although each envisioned their own path in order to achieve this goal. For the radical Catholics, internal peace could not be divorced from religious unity, therefore, the Protestants had to be exterminated, chased out or brought back into the Catholic fold. A more moderate group of Catholics came to argue that this was not possible without doing irreparable damage to the country and that coexistence with Protestants had to be accepted at least temporarily, looking to the king to impose such a solution. Finally, the Protestants, who envisioned at the beginning of the wars the possibility of converting the whole France to the Reformation, came to embrace the second point of view, as well, under the pressure of political realities. This paper aims to analyze the discourse of peace in the propaganda issued during the French Wars of Religion, examining its main themes and how it unfolded over this period of more than thirty years.

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