Institutional Violence: The Takeover of Municipalities by Protestants in the South of France (1560-1562)

Based on a close and detailed investigation of local and strangely neglected municipal sources, combined with the meticulous scrutiny of documents conserved in the Russian archives for the period 1559-1562, and a focus on institutional history, I demonstrate how the early Calvinistic consistories cleverly manipulated the particular municipal organization (the consulates) of Midi communities and managed to take them over with relative ease. In many of these communities, which greatly varied in size, we find that the consistories were turned into “political councils”; this subsequently enabled them to control the election of magistrates (consuls) and, even before the beginning of the wars of Religion, to ensure that they controlled the municipalities, though the Protestants were very much a minority. This is a major factor towards explaining the famous “Protestant crescent” that characterizes the South of France with its tones of civil religion.