Religious Conflict and civic identity: Battles over the sacred landscape of Montpellier

Abstract

In 1685, Louis XIV famously revoked the Edict of Nantes by which his grandfather, Henri IV, legalized Protestant worship in 1598. Ordinary Catholics are said to have been nearly unanimous in welcoming France's return to religious unity, despite almost a century of largely peaceful religious coexistence, but why this was the case has seldom been asked and never adequately answered. Most scholars attribute this approval to the increasingly harsh rhetoric that militant preachers directed against the Huguenots during the last years before the revocation. This article interprets it rather as the expression of longstanding animosities repressed but not dissipated through decades of coexistence. Turning attention from words to practices, the article focuses on how people lived their faith, and because people lived their faith primarily on a local level, it adopts the form of a case study to examine the fierce contests over sacred space that occurred in the southwestern city of Montpellier between the founding of its Reformed church in 1560 and the abolition of Protestant worship there in 1682. Using a narrative approach to illuminate the cumulative impact of these contests, the essay shows how urban spaces were imbued with religious meaning, marked through ritual, and contested through acts of aggression. Montpellier became a stage on which conflicting visions of religious truth played out, and yet such battles are never fought uniquely over theological principles. Religious motivations are not independent variables in civil conflicts but serve as catalysts that exacerbate underlying social, political, and economic tensions. It is this powerful blending of religious conviction with the lived experience and visceral memory of civil strife that makes these conflicts so very difficult to overcome.