Coexisting in Intolerance under the Edict of Pacification

Abstract

This article examines the legal battle between Catholics and Huguenots over the articles of the Edict of Nantes from 1650 to 1685 in Normandy. Their legal disputes show us how seventeenth-century French people perceived the issues of religious tolerance and coexistence by focusing on how the edict's articles controlling Protestant worship spaces were interpreted and implemented. Norman Catholics attempted to outlaw Protestant temples, but they had to move within the edict's authority. Norman Huguenots still could deflect unfavorable decisions through legal recourse based on the edict. Even if confessional antagonism remained alive, and the Revocation finally upended the legal cohabitation of the two confessions, the legal battle reveals that by transforming the main character of religious conflict from a deadly fight to a judicial matter, French Catholics and Protestants bit by bit adapted into a new type of confessional relationship: coexisting with “abominable heretics.”