Accueil
"On the eve of the civil and religious wars that devastated the kingdom during the second half of the sixteenth century, the regent, Catherine de’ Medici, summoned representatives of the Catholic and Reformed churches to a national synod at Poissy in 1561 to discuss strategies for avoiding civil war. Rather than address the urgent political realities that confronted them, however, the religious leaders began an acrimonious theological dispute about transubstantiation, which ended when the Catholic party accused their opponents of blasphemy and threatened to walk out. Biblical and theological disputes so permeated the political, cultural, and intellectual life of that period that it was almost impossible to identify disciplinary boundaries for philosophy. Thus, although it would be a category mistake today to quote the Bible to decide a disputed question in philosophy, no philosopher in early modern France could avoid engaging with biblical texts or with the authority that competing Christian churches claimed (with legal support from civil powers) to define orthodox religious doctrine. Within that multi-disciplinary mix, however, numerous authors proposed theories and constructed arguments that, with appropriate filtering, may be recognized today as genuinely philosophical." (p.XI)
"While Aquinas, Scotus, et al. made original contributions to philosophy, those who repeated or modified their arguments in the schools were generally as unoriginal as their early modern critics alleged. For that reason, I focus almost exclusively on lawyers, physicians, theologians, and natural scientists because, with one minor exception, none of the contributors to original philosophical thought in this period was employed as a philosophy professor. Philosophical innovation was primarily the preserve of writers who rejected traditional scholastic philosophy or, in exceptional cases (such as Pascal), those who had not even studied at a college or university or who were officially disbarred from doing so because they were women. [...]
Many publications were still written in Latin (and were therefore accessible to scholars internationally) and because some authors lived and published outside the countries that determined their national identity. Thus neither the language in which authors wrote nor their habitual domicile was a satisfactory criterion for defining them as French. Hobbes lived in Paris and wrote some of his most famous works there, although the focus of his reflections was primarily the political and religious situation in England. In contrast, Descartes was born in France and spent almost the whole of his scholarly life in the United Provinces, while the most prominent representatives of the Reformed Church all emigrated from France to Geneva. By ignoring residency as a decisive criterion, therefore, I exclude any significant discussion of Hobbes (who features prominently in another volume in this series) and include the expatriate Descartes as epitomizing French philosophy of the period." (p.XII)
"Following the St Bartholomew massacre (1572), the monarchomachs and their great rival, Bodin, discussed political philosophy in ways that anticipated the fundamental questions about democracy and representative government that reverberated throughout Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. That event provided the occasion for the political reflections of Bèze and Hotman and set the starting date at 1572.
The terminus ad quem was less easy to demarcate in a precise year, for two reasons. One was because the content of this history is arranged thematically, and there was no convenient date by which all the authors who are relevant to the various themes had died. Secondly, the publisher plans to dedicate another volume in this history series to Cartesian philosophy after the death of Descartes (1650). For that reason, La Forge, Cordemoy, Malebranche, and their successors have been excluded, apart from brief references, although many of their works appeared before 1675. In contrast, the publications of Poulain de la Barre in the years 1673–5 have been included because of their significance for Chapter 8.
The focus of this selection from the history of ideas, therefore, is on novel theories written by French philosophers (in Latin or French) after the St Bartholomew massacre and before the emergence of Cartesianism as a distinct school. The extent to which relevant authors engaged with disputed biblical interpretations and various Christian churches persuaded me to cite more often than usual the appropriate official teaching of church councils (especially the Council of Trent) and of religious leaders such as Luther or Calvin. It is clear, in retrospect, that disputed interpretations of biblical passages frequently set the limits within which philosophers were free to explore safely. Three of the most widely disputed questions with which philosophers of the period contended resulted from a literal reading of biblical texts: transubstantiation, heliocentrism, and the immortality of the human soul." (p.XIII)
"Scepticism was one such issue, with which the name of Montaigne remains permanently linked. So likewise was natural philosophy, the development of which was officially acknowledged by the foundation of the Académie royale des sciences, and to which Descartes and Pascal made lasting contributions. The theological and political disputes that threatened the survival of the kingdom before Louis XIV reached his majority produced a wealth of reflection on ethics and politics, while the Lateran Council’s invitation to Catholic philosophers to prove the immortality of the human soul influenced a generation of writing in the philosophy of mind." (pp.XIII-XIV)
"The invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century, and the proliferation of printers who borrowed and adapted Gutenberg’s innovation in the sixteenth century, provided relatively cheap and accessible means of publication for those who wished to share their thoughts with contemporary or later readers. As a result, almost every significant historical event—whether political, religious, cultural, or scientific—provoked a profusion of commentary, often in the form of inexpensively produced pamphlets. The fact that Latin was the common language throughout early modern Europe in which an educated minority had been instructed made possible the dissemination of ideas across geographical borders of states and principalities; in a real sense, there were no borders and relatively few linguistic impediments that could effectively control the diffusion of opinions." (p.1)
"During the century that is discussed in the following pages, France was almost constantly at war, both internally and externally. The ineffective leadership of a succession of kings, often in their minority, affected the conduct of those wars significantly until Louis XIV assumed the full powers of his office in 1661." (p.2)
"The religious affiliations of the three leading noble families, the Bourbons, the Guises, and the Montmorencies, added a political dimension to what might otherwise have appeared as primarily a theological dispute between rival Christian churches. The Guises favoured the repression of Huguenots, while the King of Navarre’s brother, Condé, and Montmorency’s nephew, Coligny, became public leaders of the Huguenot cause. The assassination of the Duke of Guise in 1563 helped suspend hostilities in a truce that was formalized by the Edict of Amboise in March 1563. The Cardinal de Lorraine—who belonged to the house of Guise—returned from the Council of Trent with ambivalent views about religious toleration, and civil war broke out again during the period 1567–70. Continuing hostilities with Spain were exacerbated by the revolt of Calvinists in the Netherlands, and Charles IX apparently considered an intervention in that conflict, less to support the Huguenots than to oppose their common Spanish enemy. While the king procrastinated, he arranged the marriage of his sister Margaret to the King of Navarre, and welcomed Huguenot leaders, including Gaspard de Coligny, to celebrate this diplomatic coup in Paris. Coligny was attacked and wounded, apparently by a sympathizer for the Catholic cause, on 22 August, and rumours spread that the Huguenots were about to launch a counter-attack on the crown. Two days later, soldiers under orders from Henri, Duke of Guise, killed Coligny in his bedroom; an angry mob in Paris then killed thousands of Huguenots, and similar attacks on a smaller scale occurred in other French towns.
When Charles IX died two years later (1574), his brother returned from Poland— where he had been king—to assume the French crown as Henry III. Henry’s attempts to make peace with the Huguenots were frustrated by hardening attitudes among Catholic supporters of repression. A new political force in the form of the Catholic League emerged, led by the new Duc de Guise, and within a decade another phase of civil and religious war broke out and continued with periodic unsuccessful attempts at peacemaking until Henry had both the Duc de Guise and his brother, the Cardinal de Guise, murdered in December 1589. The subsequent open war encouraged an alliance between Henry and the Huguenot king of Navarre. Together they laid siege to Paris in the summer of 1589, in the course of which Henry III was assassinated by Jacques Clément. Despite the attempts by the League to appoint the Cardinal de Bourbon as king with the title of Charles X, and an even less plausible overture by Philip II of Spain to suspend Salic law and promote the claim to the French throne of Henry II’s granddaughter, the Infanta, Henry IV managed the smooth transition of the crown from one
noble family to another." (pp.3-4)
"The uncertain peace of the subsequent years was interrupted by Condé’s challenge to the crown in 1616 and the exile of the Regent from the court to Blois in 1617. The outbreak of the Thirty Years War in 1618, in the course of which France was relatively unscathed in contrast with the German lands, compounded the insecurity that the French state anticipated in 1621, when the temporary truce in the Netherlands was due to expire. In the Southeast, the Valtelline was the focus of continued hostilities between France and Spain, since it was a crucial route north to the Spanish Netherlands for troops who were recruited by Spain in the Duchy of Milan (which was part of the Habsburg empire). The stability of Louis’s reign was also challenged for many years by the fact that, prior to the birth of his son in 1638, his erratic brother Gaston d’Orléans was the heir to the throne and his wife, Anne of Austria, was less supportive of her husband than he might have wished.
These domestic and international insecurities were alleviated by the appointment of the former bishop of Luçon, Richelieu, who became a cardinal in 1622 and was appointed chief minister to the crown two years later. Richelieu was a famously decisive, shrewd, and supportive minister who compensated more than adequately for the talents that Louis lacked. He fulfilled the same role for Louis XIII as Colbert did subsequently for Louis XIV, and was so widely recognized as the central figure in the government of the kingdom that contemporary authors competed to dedicate their works to him and thereby win the patronage that would support their social or political aspirations. For example, while it was not atypical of Jean-François Senault to dedicate his principal work, The Use of the Passions, to the ‘most eminent’ Richelieu, the length of the dedicatory letter—at fifty-eight pages—testified as much to the power of the dedicatee as to the obsequiousness of the author and the literary style of the period. Richelieu’s tenure was marked by bold military action against a number of Huguenot strongholds, including most famously La Rochelle. La Rochelle was besieged by royal troops on 27 September 1627 and, after a full year, it conceded defeat on 30 October 1628. In the course of that siege, almost 15,000 of the town’s total population of 27,000 died of hunger and associated sicknesses (Crété 1987). Richelieu and Louis dealt equally firmly with a revolt in Languedoc in 1632, which had been instigated by Montmorency; following his capture and defeat, Montmorency was executed in Toulouse in October 1632.
Richelieu died in 1642 and the king died six months later, in May 1643. Once again the minority of the Dauphin, who was only four years old, and the regency of his mother threatened to destabilize the government of the kingdom. The fact that Anne of Austria’s first minister, Cardinal Mazarin, was Italian provided an extra excuse for disloyalty to the crown. The peasant revolt of the Nu-Pieds in the salt flats of Normandy in 1639, and of the so-called Croquants in the Southwest in 1637 and 1643 (Parchnev, 1963), were symptoms of widespread social problems and the erosion of loyalty to the crown. They resulted from high taxes collected by corrupt royal officials, almost continuous civil war, marauding armies that despoiled the countryside in which they were billetted or through which they marched, and the growing divisions between the nobility—some of whom were also facing poverty—and the population from which they extracted rents. This was a period in which royal taxes paid for the extravagant lifestyle of the king’s household, for purchasing the co-operation of disloyal princes and, especially, for the very high costs of foreign wars. Taxpayers did not receive any national benefits in return for their taxes, unless the uncertain security of the kingdom against further foreign invasion was considered an adequate compensation." (pp.5-6)
"The political instability and civil wars that dominated civil life in France since the St Bartholomew massacre were very significant influences on those who penned political philosophy in that period. But their influence was not limited to political theorists. They also helped determine which authors survived, which ones remained in France, and who decided to emigrate and live permanently abroad. Those who remained in France and published philosophical essays could not have been unmindful of the dangers of expressing unorthodox views or, in contrast, the potential benefits, financial and otherwise, of dedicating their works to royal patrons or others who exercised political offices. The pressure on authors to conform to received opinions arose from the close links between philosophy and theology, and from the baneful influence of competing churches—which was usually applied through local parlements." (p.7)
-Desmond M. Clarke, French Philosophy (1572-1675), Oxford University Press, 2016, 275 pages.
