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Laurent Jalabert, Catholiques et Protestants Sur la Rive Gauche Du Rhin: Droits, Confessions et Coexistence Religieuse De 1648 a 1789

2012; Duquesne University Press; Volume: 47; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

2162-3937

Raymond G. Helmick,

European Political History Analysis

Laurent Jalabert, Catholiques et protestants sur la rive gauche du Rhin: Droits, confessions et coexistence religieuse de 1648 a 1789. Brussels: P.I.E. Peter Lang, 2009. Pp. 546. $72.95, paper. Franck Lemaitre, Anglicans et Lutheriens en Europe: Enjeux theologiques d'un rapprochement ecclesial. Studia Oecumenica Friburgensia 55. Fribourg: Institut d'etudes oecumeniques de l'Universite de Fribourg Suisse, 2011. Pp. 356. These two very disparate books--one a detailed historical study of events on the Left bank of the Rhine through a critical period, the other an account of the determined effort of two Christian communions to reach mutual recognition--yield between them an illuminating insight into the genuine state of the ecumenical enterprise. Veteran historian Jalabert traces the hard road to some relative confessional tolerance in the long-contested territories of the Third Kingdom, the lands lying between the French and German heritages of the time when Charlemagne divided his kingdom among three sons. In 1648, the treaties of Munster and Osnabruck, which together constituted the Peace of Westphalia, were meant to put an end to the religious wars that had convulsed Europe since the Reformation. An earlier formula, the cuius regio eius religio of the Augsburg settlement of 1555, had tried to divide the Holy Roman Empire neatly into Catholic and Lutheran territories, their confessional adherence dependent on the will of their princes. The development of a third major confessional brand, that of the Calvinist Reform, had not helped this effort; and religious hatreds had still gone their bloody course all over Europe. The Peace of Westphalia meant to stop that by putting it on a reliable map. Territories that had been of one confession before 1618 would stay so, with the exception of some for which the date would be 1624. Limits, not always meticulously observed, were placed on the princes' rights to alter that. By the end of the seventeenth century, after further treaties of Ryswick and Utrecht, also disputed and sometimes honored in the breach, it become fashionable, at least, to speak a language of tolerance; and the thing itself grew gradually through the eighteenth century until, at the Revolution in 1789, religion as such carne to be seen as a hindrance to the freedom of the new society. What was at stake here? Behind it all was the concept, held since Constantine, that for the unity of society, of empire, it was imperative that there be uniformity of religion. The imperative was not one of faith, but of empire. States saw religion as an instrument for the control of society. Religious authority was, in fact, so potent that rivalry regularly sprang up between church and state as to whose instrument it should be. The Peace of Westphalia would recognize and accept, in terms that were basically secular, this priority of power over faith, subordinating the exercise of faith to the needs of the civil power holders. The most potent of these for much of the period was Louis XIV, for whom Catholicism, not as submission to a pope bur in an Ultramontane subordination to himself, was a necessary adjunct. …