Society for French Historical Studies

Putting History Back into the Religious Wars: A Reply to Mack P. Holt
Author(s): Henry Heller
Source: French Historical Studies, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Spring, 1996), pp. 853-861
Published by: Duke University Press
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 Putting History Back into the Religious Wars:
A Reply to Mack P. Holt
Henry Heller

Mack P. Holt's review essay on the historiography of the French reli-

gious wars entitled "Putting Religion Back into the Wars of Religion,"
which recently appeared in French Historical Studies 18:2 (1993), at-
tempts to assess the meaning of recent work on the French religious
wars. Scrutinizing the work of Denis Crouzet, Barbara Diefendorf,
Denis Richet, Michael Wolfe, and myself, Holt argues that-my work
excepted -the tendency is more and more to view religion as an inde-
pendent variable explaining the civil wars. Tracing the sources of the
recent historiography of this period to its origins in Weber, Durkheim,
the Annales, and twentieth-century anthropology, Holt seeks to show
how as a result of the work of Natalie Davis and John Bossy a new ap-
preciation of religion has emerged, seen as practice and consciousness
as well as dogma. As a result of this deeper understanding of religion,
contemporary historians have become increasingly inclined to view
religion as a historical force in its own right.
Holt allows that my work "does a superb job of showing that social
tensions were rife during the civil wars and that class conflict was a
significant element of sixteenth-century society." He nonetheless con-
cludes that "he [Heller] is unable to delineate the correspondence
these tensions have with the Wars of Religion." Holt regards my book
as the latest and perhaps most extreme example of a series of works
by Henri Drouot, Elie Barnavi, and Robert Descimon which wrongly
seek to explain away the religious by invoking the social and economic.
In so doing Holt raises some important methodological issues which

Henry Heller is professor of history at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada.

His most recent publications are Labour,Science,and Technology in France:1500-1620 (Cambridge,
1996) and "Copernican Ideas in Sixteenth-Century France," Renaissanceand Reformation,forth-
coming in 1996. He is currently interested in anti-Italianism in sixteenth-century France.

FrenchHistoricalStudies,Vol. 19, No. 3 (Spring 1996)

Copyright ? 1996 by the Society for French Historical Studies

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854 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

need to be aired. In particular, the distinction between explaining the

religious wars by means of religion or by means of the sociology and
psychology of religion has to be drawn more sharply. These issues are
all the more important because they pose the question of the relation-
ship between the historiography of the French Reformation and that
of the Reformation at large.
Before taking up the theoretical points raised by Holt, let me
briefly comment on his treatment of my work. Marxist analyses of
sixteenth-century society such as my own deserve to be criticized like
any other. But it becomes difficult to take Holt's critique seriously,
when, for example, he claims my view of the Protestant party is that it
was based on the urban proletariat. What is to be gained by presenting
the readers of FrenchHistoricalStudieswith such a lurid caricature?
But the principal point of my book which is contested by Holt is
the notion that the Wars of Religion were among other things a seig-
neurial reaction. Holt deals with the evidence presented of a rising tide
of commoner hostility to noble oppression and growing perception of
collusion between Protestant and Catholic nobles by making light of it
or ignoring it. By so doing he can conclude that I have not been able to
delineate the correspondence between these tensions and the Wars of
Religion without explaining why not. Indeed, if we are to follow Holt,
it is not merely religion that ought not or cannot be related to secular
causation but likewise the Warsof Religion.This is quite an extreme view
of the nature of war. Historians of the Crusades, for instance, would
shrink from adopting so extreme a viewpoint. Holt furthermore wants
us to respect the consciousness of the sixteenth century by taking its
religion seriously; yet, he is prepared to ignore or deny that same cen-
tury's emergent politiqueviewof religion, which was born of the anguish
of a generation of ongoing religious conflict.
Holt lauds the work of Crouzet, Diefendorf, and Richet as insist-
ing on the centrality of religious motivation among the protagonists
of the civil wars. Indeed, taking consciousness or mentaliteseriously is
praiseworthy and, indeed, essential. It is undeniable that many if not
most people were religiously motivated during the Wars of Religion.
But the main thrust of Holt's discussion of contemporary historiogra-
phy is to insist that such motivation is self-explanatory and should be
seen as such. Yet the really historical question is to try to understand
why people were so motivated. This brings us to the central problem of
Holt's essay, that is, its self-contradictory use of the term religion. As we
have seen, the main body of his review is devoted to praising those his-
torians who privilege religion as the overriding motivating force while
castigating those who apparently do not. But in order to fortify this

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PUlTING HISTORY BACK INTO THE RELIGIOUS WARS 855

view with a pedigree he begins his discussion by tracing the perspec-

tive of those who take religion seriously through Davis and Bossy back
to Durkheim among others who, he admits, regarded religion not as
apart from society but as an inverted representation of the force of the
collective social order. What the psychic and social dynamic in religious
belief is which allows it to be historically mobilizing is an important
question. If Holt was acclaiming the work of Crouzet, Diefendorf, and
Richet for putting this question in the forefront, one could not quarrel
with him. But he seems to be giving them marks instead for stressing
the importance of religion while not raising this question. It is true
that Holt initially appears not to refuse Durkheim's or for that mat-
ter Weber's sociological perspective on religion, but having invoked
these classical sociologists as authorities, they play no further part in
his analysis of the historians under review. Indeed, it is apparent that
the elaboration of such a point of view is uncongenial to his historio-
graphical discussion. Yet, in so far as he would assent to Durkheim's
view of religion as a kind of socially generated consciousness, it is dif-
ficult to understand why Holt sees religion as a factor necessarily held
apart from and superior to other explanations, such as politics, class,
and economic forces, when it may in fact be their ghostly epitome. Holt
apparently views religious thoughts, acts, or utterances as ultimate his-
torical explanations, when they too, as complex structures, need to be
analyzed into their social, psychological, and semiotic components.
Holt chastizes Drouot, Barnavi, and Descimon especially for ex-
plaining the development of the League in social and economic rather
than religious terms. Although one cannot claim that these histori-
ans are disciples of Durkheim, one can assert, nonetheless, that their
conception of sixteenth-century society is closer to Durkheim's than
is that of Holt's. Holt's assumption that we must somehow choose be-
tween social and religious explanations fundamentally misconstrues
Durkheim. Holt seems to think that Durkheim can be used to argue
that the religious cannot be reduced to the social. Yet Durkheim be-
lieved that the collective representations by a society of itself are what
we call religion. In Durkheim's eyes religion is nothing else than such
collective representations. The sense of the sacred arises from the ex-
perience of society as a unity which is embedded in such collective
representations. The members of premodern societies acquire a sense
of their social identity through the language and rituals of such rep-
resentations. Moreover, the sacred is defined by constant reference to
what is considered to be profane. Thus, the forms of religious expres-
sion are socially generated and socially referent although perhaps in a
distinctively symbolical and indirect manner. Holt's view that the social

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856 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

and the religious are separate realms has nothing in common with
Durkheim's social definition of religion.
It is true that of the three historians of the League criticized by
Holt Descimon is more sensitive to the importance of the ideologi-
cal dimensions of the movement than are Barnavi and Drouot. But
Descimon as well as Barnavi and Drouot assume that the corporate
character of the institutions of sixteenth-century France, including the
monarchy, were strongly marked if not completely defined by religion.
The social conflicts with which these historians are concerned were by
their very nature fought out for the most part in religious terms. To
assert that these three seizie'mistes,deeply immersed in the history of
sixteenth-century France, did not appreciate the significance of reli-
gion in this society is untenable. What Holt is complaining about is
that their understanding of religion is an essentially social one in the
sense of Durkheim. Yet, compared to Durkheim's extreme reduction
of religion to the social, their treatment of religion must be seen as re-
spectful and moderate. As to the legitimacy of their efforts to elicit the
social bases of these religious conflicts, there can be little doubt.
Weber more than any other of the classical sociologists of religion
appreciated the historical force of constituted religious ideologies. But
his analysis of European religion is part of a cross-cultural comparative
sociology of religion in which such ideologies do not exist indepen-
dently of their social matrix. On the contrary, Weber understood them
to be historically generated, shaped by social and economic circum-
stances and closely tied to certain specific carrier social groups. It is
especially in Weber that we find justification for a concern with the
social stratification of religious interest which has been such a preoccu-
pation of historians of sixteenth-century French religion. In Weber
Holt can find a rationale for reemphasizing the historical power of
religious ideology. But in Weberian terms this does not justify treat-
ing such ideologies as final causes. Rather, an appreciation of Weber
should spur us to better understand such ideologies in terms of their
institutional and social contexts.
Holt to all appearance belongs to that school which denies that
the task of the student of religion is to explain religion. In the final
analysis, this is nothing but old-fashioned theistic faith. Unfortunately,
it confuses the philosophical issue of the truth or falsity of religion with
attempts to study the psychological, social, and economic aspects of
religion. In its modern guise it has assumed the form of the so-called
interpretative school of religious studies led by Mircia Eliade, which
claims that the function of the student of religion is to interpret or

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PUTTING HISTORY BACK INTO THE RELIGIOUS WARS 857

explicate religion from the perspective of the believers. The efforts

of those who seek to explain religion in economic, social, or psycho-
logical terms are dismissed as reductionism.' But as Robert Segal has
suggested, "To confine oneself to the believer's point of view is to treat
the believer as the subject not of study but of worship. Believers are
so engaging a subject of study exactly because they may have no idea
what makes them tick."2 If the object of the study of religion is to ac-
quire knowledge from the perspective of a discipline such as history,
it is certainly important to take the experience of the individual into
account. But that experience is far from the whole process of gaining
knowledge; it is no more the complete process than the testimony of a
witness in a judicial proceeding. The significance of such testimony is
only established in the context of a process of cross-examination, cor-
roboration, and review in terms of legal and sociological principles,
which establishes its standing.
From the historian's viewpoint the stress of the interpretative
school on personal experience represents a throwback to the position
of Dilthey and Collingwood, who argued that the role of the historian
was to try to recover the perspective of the actor in the historical past.
Such an effort of sympathetic understanding by the nature of things
can never be fully successful. How can one ever fully know the subjec-
tive experience of someone else, past or present? On the other hand, a
sense of historical empathy certainly ought to be part of the historian's
method where possible. But it can hardly constitute the whole of it, be-
cause it can only represent a part of the meaning of the experience of
the historical subject. The latter cannot possibly have a full sense of the
meaning of the events in which he or she has participated, which, in
any case, change over time. The historian's responsibility is to take such
evidence and elucidate it in terms of a current understanding, which
hopefully would include an awareness of contemporary social science
and cultural criticism. Religious thought ought to be no more exempt
from this process than political and social ideology, legal thought, or
natural or moral philosophy. The aim of the historian ought to be to try
to show the historical contingency or historicity of all these aspects of
ideology, including religion. To the charge of reductionism the answer
must be that, however reductive, the analysis of such experience in
psychological, social, and economic terms leads to important histori-

1 For an introduction to recent controversies surrounding the study of religion see Thomas
A. Idinopulos and Edward A. Yonan, eds. Religionand Reductionism:Essayson Eliade, Segal, and the
Challengeof the SocialSciencesfor the Studyof Religion(Leiden, 1994).
2 Robert A. Segal, Explainingand InterpretingReligion: Essayson theIssue(New York, 1992), 23.

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858 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

cal insights into the nature of that experience in terms of the society
in which it has occurred.
Holt extols recent historical work which emphasizes the impor-
tance of the religious factor. Yet, it is notable that he studiously avoids
the recent book which takes the ideology of the Huguenots most seri-
ously, namely, William Bouwsma's John Calvin: A Sixteenth-Century Por-
trait.3In this work Bouwsma proposes to study the historical Calvin
from the perspective of a fresh examination of the reformer's own writ-
ings. In the course of a careful reading of the entire corpus of Calvin's
work, Bouwsma illuminates the religious thought of the great reformer
against the full background of sixteenth-century life and culture. It is
impossible to accuse Bouwsma of underestimating the historical impor-
tance of Calvin's ideas or of not appreciating their richness and com-
plexity. Indeed, Bouwsma'sanalytical achievement is in certain respects
an act of reverence. Yet, while cherishing Calvin'slegacy, Bouwsma does
not hesitate to explore some of the psychodynamic elements behind
Calvin's thinking, suggesting the parallel between Calvin's conception
of an omnipotent God and his overidentification with an authoritarian
father or his use of his powerful rational faculty as a defense mecha-
nism against his own ongoing anxiety about this relationship. Indeed,
the way in which Bouwsma is able to slip below Calvin's theologi-
cal rationalism and suggest the confrontation between father and son
which underlay it represents an extraordinary tourdeforce.
It is Holt's belief that the language of religion is somehow set apart
from the discourse of politics, economics, or war. But if this is the case,
it is not necessarily because it points to something higher or beyond
these matters but because it addresses a level which is more personal
and subjective. In fact, more often than not, religious language is filled
with a rhetoric of love, fear, and anxiety about objects which are all too
close to our deepest human subjectivity.That is one of the reasons for
religion's appeal. It is in part because it evokes unresolved and emotion-
ally charged infantile states of identification, separation, and longing
laden with ongoing conflict that religion refers to them through the
distancing language of theological transcendence. Indeed, Calvinism's
attractiveness lay in part in that it dealt with such psychologically con-
flictual matters through a reserved and cool language which helped to
fortify the sense of independence of its adherents. The psychological
resonances of the language of the League with its passionate rhetoric
of at times self-tortured attachment to the body of the Old Church,

Portrait(New York, 1988).

3 William Bouwsma, John Calvin:A Sixteenth-Century

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PUTTING HISTORY BACK INTO THE RELIGIOUS WARS 859

hatred of heretics and projection of aggressive feelings onto them, and

fears of annihilation and pollution deserve a similar analysis.
To be sure, understanding religious thought requires a sensitivity
to the social location of the religious subject. The religious idiom of
a professor of theology like Calvin was very different from that of an
evangelical shoemaker or a young peasant woman. In this respect the
recent work of Pierre Bourdieu, TheField of CulturalProduction,is sug-
gestive.4 Bourdieu points out that in modern society the artists who
stand at the summit of prestige and influence are those that are posi-
tioned at furthest remove from the immediate commercial pressures
of the existing order. Such individuals paint or write according to
genres whose norms are relatively autonomous of the rest of society.
The canons of such artistic expression are rooted in problems, theo-
ries, and disputes which are internal to the specific field of cultural
production. The self-expression of other artists who are more directly
subject to commercial pressures are necessarily more immediately sus-
ceptible to the dictates of society at large. A proper analysis of artis-
tic creation thus has to take into account the location of the artist
both within the field of cultural production and relative to the overall
society. Bourdieu, in passing, compares the situation of the modern
artist or writer with the role of the medieval preacher or court fool who
enjoyed an analogous relative autonomy. Bourdieu's approach, in fact,
suggests the possibility of developing a similar analysis of the field of
early modern religious expression. The location of the religious sub-
ject, not only with respect to society at large but also within the field
of religious production, would have to be taken into consideration. In
the case of the thought of a theologian like Calvin, the professional
and institutional context in which he operated, with its special vocabu-
lary, particular problems, and internal controversies existing relatively
apart from society at large, has to be taken into account.
Holt's attempt to set religion apart from material factors is appar-
ently rooted in, among other things, a certain view of culture which
abstracts it from the material foundations of society. Culture is per-
ceived to be ritual, customs, traditions, ideology, and belief as against
the social and economic system. Vulgar Marxism is dedicated to try-
ing to show the dependence of the first on the second, whereas others,
such as Holt, attempt to argue for the autonomy of the first from the
second. But culture ought properly to be understood as an ongoing
human creation including means of production no less than rituals,

4 Pierre Bourdieu, TheField of CulturalProduction:Essays on Art and Literature,ed. Randal

Johnson (Cambridge, 1993).

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860 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

customs, traditions, ideology, and beliefs. Society's work, food, or tools

are as much invested with symbolical meanings as are its altars, vest-
ments, patens, and chalices. On the other hand, an understanding
of sixteenth-century Christianity which sees it solely as performance,
consciousness, and belief without constant reference to the material
reality of church fabrics, real estate, treasuries and liturgical goods, or
printed books, lecterns and church pews, is to deprive it of historical
depth. As Richard Goldthwaite has recently noted, "Christianity was,
almost from its inception, a religion oriented around things."5 Yet be-
cause Holt's view of culture is dichotomous, he finds discussion of the
wars of religion which juxtaposes the religious and the economic to be
unacceptable.
Holt's blindspot in this regard is exemplified in his article "Wine,
Community, and Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Burgundy," lately
published in Past and Present.6In this in many respects excellent study
Holt paints a convincing picture of the oenophilist culture of the vine
growers of Dijon, who became the core of the Catholic party in the
city. Holt concludes that their allegiance to the old religion was rooted
in a wine culture which was closely connected to the rituals and tra-
ditions of Catholicism. It is the overlap between the two sets of cul-
tural practice, both portrayed as relatively timeless, which becomes
the explanation of religious allegiance. But notably absent from Holt's
description is an exploration of the wine trade in its relation to the
overall direction of the economy of Dijon in the sixteenth century. It
is known that the price of wine rose spectacularly in the second half
of the sixteenth century, making it a better investment that renteand
threatening the production of grain.7The religious choices of the wine
growers like those of rich peasants may well have been influenced by
their relative prosperity. Such possibilities are not even considered by
Holt, who represents the Dijonnais wine growers as moved exclusively
by timeless tradition rather than perhaps by market forces as well.
The study of the French Reformation and the religious wars can-

5 Richard A. Goldthwaite, Wealthand theDemandforArtin Italy: 1300-1600 (Baltimore, Md.,

1993), 72.
6 Mack P. Holt, "Wine, Community, and Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Burgundy,"
Past and Present138 (1993): 58-93.
7 On the rapid rise in wine prices see Jan Craeybeckx, Un Grand Commerce d'importations:
Les VinsdeFranceaux anciensPays-Bas(XJII-XVIesi&les)(Paris, 1958), 36, 267; Histoirede Bordeaux,
ed. Charles Higounnet, Bordeauxde 1453 d 1715, ed. Robert Boutruche (Bordeaux, 1966), 133.
For a contemporary discussion of the advantages of wine as an investment see Jacques Gohory,
Devis sur la vigne, yin et vendagesd'Orl,de Suave, auquel lafapon anciennedu plant, labouret gardereste
descouverteet reduicteau presentusage (Paris, 1550). On the threat to grain culture by the spread of
vineyards see Nicolas de La Mare, Traitgde la police(Paris, 1705-38), 3:524.

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PUTrING HISTORY BACK INTO THE RELIGIOUS WARS 861

not be separated from the historiography of the Reformation as a

whole. In the last generation great progress has been made in under-
standing the German Reformation as a result of the contributions of
Marxist and non-Marxist historians alike. Based on this research it has
become clear that an economic and social crisis coincided with the
religious upheavals of the period 1517-25. There is disagreement on
the ways and extent to which this crisis impinged on the religious re-
bellion. But few historians of the subject would today deny that there
was such a relationship. As students of the sixteenth-century French
religious crisis, are we prepared to deny or ignore that such a relation-
ship existed in France as well as in Germany? The issue is whether we
are going to turn our backs on an analysis of this period in secular and
historical terms. To attempt to do so, as Holt does, is to try to build a
Maginot line between France and its neighbor with disastrous conse-
quences for the future progress of French historical scholarship.

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