@article{LibertyofConscienceandtheBoundariesofthePolity:Toleration:1984,
      recid = {1984},
      author = {Jones, Elisa Joy},
      title = {Liberty of Conscience and the Boundaries of the Polity:   Toleration, Sovereignty, and Citizenship in  Sixteenth-Century France},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2019-08},
      pages = {336},
      abstract = {Political instability and a theological crisis in France  led to the outbreak of civil war in 1562 in the first of  eight consecutive wars known as the Wars of Religion.  The  royal edicts of pacification that ended these wars were  variously praised or condemned for granting liberté de  conscience to French subjects.   This dissertation  establishes that the monarchy instituted a limited idea of  liberty of conscience starting in 1563 in order to avoid  granting French Protestants the full legal privileges of a  corps - a rights-bearing association characteristic of old  regime societies – and officially recognizing their church.   This toleration was legally implemented through the  Gallican kings’ earlier secularization of heresy  prosecution combined with the royal ability to grant  privileges to French subjects.  In the end, the monarchy’s  limited toleration separated the freedom of an individual’s  conscience from the right of a church to assemble for  worship.  This royal policy of not forcing consciences was  in opposition to both full toleration of a second religion  in France and continuing to persecute Calvinists as  heretics.  It also separated citizenship from Catholicity.   This new Calvinist citizenship was perceived as a direct  threat to both the Catholic Church and the French  polity.

In this dissertation, the problem of toleration is  seen through the battle over where the boundaries of  conscience ended and began, which correlated with a debate  about French citizenship, but also about what was and was  not proper religion.  It demonstrates that these two things  were interrelated: to be a French citizen meant having  access to a range of Gallican institutions, from various  types of assemblies to the French Church itself.   Calvinists wanted their own church as well as continued  access to the politico-theological public sphere created by  these Gallican institutions.  The idea that conscience  could be free while worship was limited was not recognized  by the majority of Protestants to whom it was granted.   

Toleration and the risk of pluralism was seen by many  French subjects, Catholic and Protestant, as a direct  threat to the polity.  Liberty of conscience was used to  try and get around the problem of pluralism by bounding  conscience in the household; this dissertation explores how  this dialectic between sovereignty and private property  instantiated in the household was both the logic of liberty  of conscience and that of logic for the basis of  citizenship through the household in Jean Bodin’s 1576 Les  six livres de la République.  By juxtaposing this  theoretical argument with Bodin’s role in the debates over  liberty of conscience and property in the 1576 Estates  General, the centrality of liberty of conscience in both  defining French citizenship in a plural France and its deep  connection to the practice of absolute royal power is  revealed.  

By rejecting the mapping of a  rational/irrational dichotomy onto a political/ religious  one, the Catholic League’s rejection of a Protestant king  through the adoption of Huguenot resistance theory and  communal action in individual towns can be seen as the  rejection of the private/public boundary of conscience that  de-Catholicized French citizenship and the re-drawing of  that boundary around their communal corps and, ultimately,  the kingdom.  Henri IV’s eventual victory over the Catholic  League and conversion to Catholicism can be seen as a  triumph for Gallican institutions and a confirmation that  the politico-theological sphere would remain Catholic.   

French Calvinists continued to fight for inclusion as  full members of the polity through the Reformed General  Assemblies that negotiated with Henri IV after his  conversion in 1593.  Because their ability to participate  relied upon the king’s sufferance, Protestant institutional  resistance to limited liberty of conscience had the obverse  effect of its intention; Calvinist institutional  self-organization both mirrored and strengthened the role  of centralized monarchical institutions.  Its conclusion  determines that the battle over the boundaries of  conscience resulted in strengthening the monarchy from the  bottom up, while freedom of conscience itself, long seen as  the hallmark of nascent individual rights in the 1598 Edict  of Nantes, was really a rejection of religious pluralism  imposed on French subjects from the top-down.  This early  example of individual religious rights in the sixteenth  century demonstrates to what degree civil rights are  constructed and negotiated, and in what ways they can be  circumscribed by their very existence.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/1984},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.1984},
}