The Spread of Protestantism in Francophone Europe in the First Century of the Reformation

Abstract

As the first mass movement in European history whose dissemination depended on printed propaganda in the vernacular, the Protestant Reformation unfolded at different speeds and assumed different theological hues in Europe’s different linguistic areas. In the German speaking regions, thousands of Flugschriften spread word of the causa Lutheri from Switzerland to the Baltic within a few years of the posting of the 95 theses. Evangelical preachers appeared in many localities by the early 1520s; acts of iconoclasm and other incidents demonstrating open rejection of Catholic practices became frequent by 1523–1524; and a growing number of free cities and duchies of the Holy Roman Empire and the Baltic region instituted territorial Reformations from 1525 onward, occasionally on the initiative of a princely convert, more frequently under pressure from a substantial and aroused fraction of the population won to the cause by the preachers and the printed propaganda. Outside the German linguistic area, the spread of Protestantism was a slower process. The Latin writings of Luther and other early reformers carried their ideas rapidly to university towns or convents, but wider dissemination among the population at large took longer since extensive vernacular propaganda was slow to develop, printing presses and graphic artists being fewer in number in many parts of Europe than in Germany or, where they were equally abundant, clustered in a few localities where they could be subject to tight control.1 As a result, the critical moment for the implementation or shipwreck of territorial Reformations did not come until the years between 1540 and 1580 in the British