Conflict and the Making of Religious Cultures in Sixteenth-Century France

In 1973, Natalie Zemon Davis published what has become the most influential article on the wars of religion: “The Rites of Violence: Religious Riot in Sixteenth-Century France.” The impact of this article reached well beyond specialists in the field to become a pioneering model of cultural history. At the time of its publication, most historians were laboring in the vineyards of social history, trampling out the grapes of class conflict. This was equally true of sixteenthcentury specialists whose arduous plodding up and down in tax rolls and judicial records seemed to yield a robust vintage of bourgeois-led religious movements (in the loose sixteenth-century sense of urban, middling groups ranging from master artisans to municipal magistrates). In France, at least, the socio-economic status and ambitions of these men made them useful allies in aristocratic struggles over control of the French monarchy, debilitated by the bizarre death of Henri II in 1559. In this way, class struggle apparently helped both to complement and complicate existing explanations that emphasized either religion or politics as the dominant forces in a series of civil wars that devastated France from 1562 to 1598. Davis’ article was hugely successful because it sweepingly replaced class conflict with what can only be described as cultural conflict, though she did not use the term. Her article discredited supposed causal connections between grain prices and popular riots using religious rhetoric and persuasively suggested that Protestant victims and Catholic perpetrators represented more or less proportionately the full range of urban identities except for unskilled workers. This last argument rested on detailed evidence she claimed would appear in a forthcoming book, Strikes and Salvation at Lyon, which actually never came forth (pp. 80-1). The article’s appeal also lay in the fact that it completely ignored the extraordinarily complicated politics of this period; furthermore, it neglected most of the resulting violence because it was perpetrated not by crowds, but by organized armies bolstered by regional militias and foreign mercenaries. Nonetheless, omitting the details of nine civil wars in thirty-seven years that invited intervention from numerous foreign powers, while still presenting a powerful interpretation about the nature of