Chrétiens et Sociétés (Dec 2023)
La controverse en vallées vaudoises : débats savants ou lutte antiprotestante ?
Abstract
Although there were many controversies in the Waldensian valleys, they left few traces: they rarely gave rise to the publication of reports, and many of them seemed more akin to fistfights than scholarly debates. This gives us a different picture of the controversies in this region, which is generally little studied in terms of its links with the kingdom of France. Although of little theological interest, these controversies were like light weapons among others in a civil war that never really ended throughout the seventeenth century, and were therefore overshadowed by more effective mechanisms of coercion. While French Protestants enjoyed a degree of security during the first two-thirds of the seventeenth century thanks to the Edict of Nantes, which encouraged controlled controversy, Protestants in Piedmont were subjected to several expulsion decrees, terrible massacres took place in 1655 and 1686, and Protestantism was banned in Savoy, as it had been in France since the Edict of Fontainebleau. Against this backdrop of war and the desire to suppress Reformed worship as soon as the opportunity arose, the disputes most often resembled not real debates but attacks and provocations, which may explain why Protestant ministers were reluctant to respond, and even more so to publish their responses, unless they felt they had to respond to slander or false reports of Catholic victories. If a few of them write books against Catholics, it is only very rarely and in the context of formal controversies. These cases were accompanied by other writing practices designed to reassure the Waldensians that they represented the true Church. A large number of histories of the Waldensians were published, all showing their apostolic origins and the maintenance of pure Christianity in the valleys: in addition to those by Perrin, Gilles and Léger, which are used extensively in this article, we should add Henri Arnaud's Histoire de la glorieuse rentrée des Vaudois dans leurs vallées (1710), as well as several anonymous writings on specific episodes, generally massacres.
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