Church and magistrate in early modern France: Politics, ideology and the Gallican liberties, 1550-1615

The nature and extent of the so-called "liberties of the Gallican Church" were vital issues in early modern France. From the late sixteenth century well into the eighteenth, they formed the subject of an extended legal, scholarly and political dispute between a group of legal professionals centered around the sovereign courts and a group of religious personalities who had the support of most of the higher clergy. The problem had its roots in medieval conflicts between popes and secular rulers, and between the jurisdictions of royal and ecclesiastical courts within France. These phenomena lost political prominence after the Concordat of Bologna (1516), but resurfaced after 1550 when jurists took advantage of intermittent disputes between kings and the papacy to advance a new and systematic view of the Gallican liberties.;This erudite Gallican ideology combined elements of a skeptical rejection of dogmatic claims to expertise in human affairs, a reverence for the power of custom and of the ability of legal and philological history to reveal custom, and assurances that the magistrates were in a unique position to provide disinterested counsel to the monarchy--all concepts drawn from contemporary humanist culture--with a commitment to collect, disseminate and apply to political ends documentary evidence which would underwrite the Gallican position. The Gallican jurists soon clashed with the French higher clergy, bent on guarding its own prerogatives and on introducing the universalizing and very public Tridentine reformation. Acting together and in alliance with the Papacy, the prelates detailed a philosophy exactly counter to that of the erudite Gallicans, stressing the Church's transcendent knowledge and authority in human affairs. More in tune with the absolutizing ideals of divine-right monarchy than their opponents, the prelates achieved some political successes, particularly at the Estates General of 1614-5. Their spokesman on that occasion, Richelieu, carried some of their program into his ministry. Conflict between Gallican magistrates and a Church confident of its own authority, each supporting the monarch to further its own agenda, became a fixture of old-regime political culture, disappearing only when Enlightenment undermined that culture's foundations.