HoP 465 Modern Times: France and the Netherlands in the 17th Century
27:02 Share

I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Modern Times, France and the Netherlands in the 17th century.

A famous story about Charles de Gaulle has him remarking in exasperation, how can you govern a country in which there are 246 types of cheese? The diversity of France has been challenging politicians for quite some time. Once when King Louis XIV was in Picardy, only about 50 miles north of Paris, he was harangued by a crowd and could not even understand what they were protesting about. Despite the short distance separating these people from Versailles, their dialect was incomprehensible to him.

Regional variation is something we're apt to underestimate when it comes to thinking about even the relatively recent past. In the 17th century, print culture was only just taking hold, and literacy was only beginning to rise toward what we might consider modern levels. Such unifying forces as radio, television, and the internet were not even on the distant horizon. Politically, too, the situation across Europe was more fragmented than we're used to now.

What we called Germany was just a patchwork of small states falling within the much larger federation of the Holy Roman Empire. In contrast, Louis XIV and other French monarchs of the 17th century enjoyed the opportunity to rule over the single political territory that was France. Still, there was devolved government in the form of regional parliaments, and the cultural differences between Paris and the provinces went beyond the bewildering variety of cheeses and dialects.

Nicolas Perrec, that indefatigable citizen of the Republic of Letters, was surely exaggerating when he said that residing in the Provence was like being in exile and being surrounded by the sands of Libya. But the remark still speaks volumes about the contrast between the center and the periphery of the French nation. The political story of 17th century France is largely defined by this very issue, the attempt of central monarchical authority to exert control over the whole nation.

the French kings wanted the buck to stop with them. The monarchy was also much concerned to maintain its autonomy on the wider European stage in the face of opposition from other powers like the Habsburgs and the Papacy. To this extent at least, one might say that the France of this period anticipates the rise of the modern nation-state.

It was France, more or less as we know it today, that was the prime mover of political, economic, and religious affairs, not small regions like Picardy or broader and more loosely unified entities like the Holy Roman Empire. But as I say, the king's jealously guarded power was under constant pressure, both from within and without.

We see this in the two spheres that would most have preoccupied Louis XIV and the other kings of this century, most of whom shared his name. This period has more Louis than the 1963 hit song by the Kingsmen. These two spheres were, first, warfare and economics, and second, religion. As of the middle of the 17th century, France was constantly at war.

Inside the nation, there was a significant civil war called the Fronde, which lasted from 1648 to 1653, and externally, France was involved in a whole series of wars. Between 1660 and the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century, there was only one decade, the 1720s, where the nation was not at war.

Internal and external conflicts were intimately connected, because the Fronde and numerous other smaller uprisings were in large part provoked by heavy taxes imposed by the monarchy, which were needed precisely to pay for fighting wars abroad. Towards the end of the century, the crown began to raise more money through such means as import duties and state monopolies, a clever move, since these measures were less apt to provoke riots than direct taxes were.

Another way to raise funds was to charge the nobility for honors and privileges. While this may sound like offering nothing and expecting something in return, the nobles clearly found it rational to fork over enormous sums for the soft power of titles and judicial appointments. Louis XIV in particular is renowned for having effectively tamed the nobility by integrating them into a new court culture at Versailles, where status was entirely dependent on his favor.

As a bonus, he got the nobles to pay handsomely for the chance to be manipulated by him. The main drawback was that the crown became dependent on this income. It became difficult to demote nobles, and like any commodity, privilege is only valuable if it is scarce. So, the longer the kings went on selling access and honor, the less these insubstantial distinctions were worth. From a philosophical point of view, this whole development is important because it bears on the question of absolutism.

This is something we've discussed before, notably when we looked at Jean Baudin. This French political theorist argued in his Six Books of the Commonwealth that the king wields absolute power, meaning by this that he is the ultimate source of all power to make law within the polity, even if he does often delegate this power to subordinates.

No other authority can bind the sovereign by passing or changing laws because power must be vested in a single legislator. If there were more than one and they disagreed, this would lead to an irresolvable conflict. The 17th century French state did not quite live up to the absolutist ideal because the parlements were needed to confirm laws proposed by the king before they could be registered.

In theory, this check on the king's power was just needed to confirm that the new laws didn't conflict with the old ones, creating a legal contradiction, but of course the parlements used the opportunity to delay laws before they were registered. Some authors, such as Montesquieu, saw the parlements as a significant break on royal prerogatives. In truth, though, they had little ability to restrain royal power.

In theory, there was also a proper representative assembly, the so-called Estates General, but this was not called to meet by the king at any point between 1614 and 1789, on the eve of the French Revolution, so it was not really a factor for the period we're considering in this series. The upshot is that the French monarchy in this period was not so far from what Bodin had in mind, particularly when the sitting king was intelligent, charismatic, and active like Louis XIV, which was not always the case.

There were two interludes when the sitting king was a child and his mother ruled as regent: Marie de' Medici on behalf of Louis XIII and Anne of Austria from 1643 to 1651, as her son Louis XIV was only five years old when his predecessor died. There was of course some discomfort with the rulership of women at this time, and it's no coincidence that two cardinal ministers, Richelieu and Mazarin, rose to power during the respective regencies.

If you've been keeping track of the dates, you'll notice that the Fronde also erupted right in the middle of Anne of Austria's regency. Actually, Cardinal Richelieu, or to give him his proper name, Jean de Plessis, he was the Duke of Richelieu, hence the name by which he is usually known, is probably the most famous statesman of 17th century France after the Sun King, Louis XIV.

We don't need to get too deeply into the policies of Richelieu, but it would be worth mentioning that one of those policies was to work towards the ultimate defeat of the Huguenots, or French Protestants, as a meaningful political and military force. This he achieved, but not without great violence. Notoriously, a siege of the Huguenot stronghold La Rochelle led to the death of more than half of the 27,000 inhabitants of the city. This brings us to our second major theme, religion.

If France has 246 different kinds of cheeses, then it has experienced just as many conflicts over Jesus. The spread of Protestantism, and more particularly Calvinism, to France had led to great upheavals in the 16th century. The St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in 1572 was only the most noteworthy single episode against a broader background of violence and religious war.

Such conflict was, if not ended, then at least enormously reduced with the Edict of Nantes in 1598. With this edict, the political status of the Protestants was upheld and all their past misdeeds against the state forgiven. The king who made this decision was Henry IV, who himself had converted from Protestantism to Catholicism back in 1593.

There were suspicions of insincerity. As the old story had it, Henry himself explained the conversion by saying, Paris is well worth a mass. And indeed, Henry was no sentimental idealist. He once sighed that instead of being offered loyalty from his subjects, he had to buy it. The Edict of Nantes fits into that picture of pragmatic political calculation.

It may look like a gracious and tolerant gesture from a Catholic ruler, but in fact it was just one in a long series of attempts by the crown to compromise between more fervent Catholics who wanted to move against the Huguenots and the Huguenots themselves. Some of them were powerful nobles and held either official or unofficial power over hundreds of French towns and cities.

Because there could also be suspicions that Protestants might not be loyal subjects of a Catholic king, the Huguenots tended to stress their devotion to the crown and to the French state. Thus we find one Protestant polemicist, Pierre de Moulins, insisting that the Edict of Nantes was not even necessary because the king could count on unconditional obedience. In his kingdom, the king of France is what the master is in his house. Henry and his successors had to decide how reassured to feel by such declarations of loyalty.

You probably know how this story ends. After Richelieu's success in crushing the Huguenots, Protestant rights were steadily curtailed. Under Louis XIII, the Edict of Mines confirmed that Protestants could be subjects of the crown in good standing, but undercut their political status by preventing them from holding fortified positions or forming political assemblies. More rights were removed later on, like the ability to hold any political office, oversee educational curricula, or marry Catholics.

Protestant churches were subjected to inspection, and sometimes destroyed, if the officers of the state didn't like what they found. And then finally came the Edict of Fontainebleau in 1685, better known as the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. All Protestant religious services were banned, Catholic baptism was made obligatory, and if Protestants chose to emigrate rather than convert, then they had to leave behind children over the age of seven.

To ensure compliance, the much-hated practice of traconade was used, in which Protestants were obligated to host soldiers in their homes. Perhaps you've had a house guest as unwelcome as a 17th century soldier whose whole job is to make you miserable, but I very much doubt it.

Over the next several years, around 150,000 Protestants fled France, and that's in addition to the many who had already departed, for instance the philosopher Pierre Pell, who fled after the Protestant Academy at Sedan was closed in 1681. French Catholics were at first jubilant at this victory, but their enthusiasm waned once they realized that many of the converts were in fact still Protestants at heart, the same worry that had greeted the conversion of Henry IV almost a century ago.

But I don't want you to get the idea that French Catholics of this period spent all their time worrying about French Protestants, because they also spent plenty of time worrying about their fellow Catholics. This part of the story is a kind of mirror image of what happened in early modern England. There, the state-approved Anglican Church adhered to a rather traditionalist set of practices and doctrines.

Though its adherents would presumably not appreciate me describing them in this way, you could think of the Church of England as offering a way to embrace Protestantism while remaining as Catholic as possible. That moderate version of Christianity was then continually attacked by more radical reformers, like the Puritans, who thought of Anglicanism as at best a job half done and at worst rank hypocrisy.

In France, we find a similar dynamic. The monarchy, of course, upheld Catholic orthodoxy against the Protestants, but also Catholic moderation against those they considered to be enthusiastic or extreme. These included the so-called "devouts," whose intense and private spirituality and personal encounters with Scripture and God tended to make more institutionally inclined Catholics nervous.

This sort of spirituality, which would culminate in the quietist movement toward the end of the 1600s, goes back to the Catholicism of the previous century. One might think of such different characters as Erasmus, Teresa of Avila, and the founder of the Jesuit order, Ignatius of Loyola. Speaking of which, the Jesuits also had a somewhat uncomfortable relationship with their French co-religionists. They had been banished but were welcomed back in 1603 and set up a royal college called La Flèche.

Here, teenagers were educated in Latin and the liberal arts, in a course of study that could lead on to a university degree. This school is significant for us, since the students educated there included none other than Descartes and his friend Mersenne. The place was so dear to Henry IV that he left instructions that, upon death, his heart and that of his wife would be buried at La Flèche.

Ironically, when his death then came in 1610 in the form of an assassination by a Catholic who refused to believe in the sincerity of the king's conversion, some pamphleteers accused the Jesuits of being behind it. Critics saw them as having a problematically ambiguous status, with one author complaining that the order was neither fully secular nor fully clerical, like a hermaphrodite.

The Jesuits were known for intellectual rigor and a forthright defense of Catholic theological doctrine, including an insistence on morally significant free will. As Saint Augustine had taught in antiquity, God's grace is needed for us to be good and win salvation, but there is also a role for genuinely voluntary human effort. We are not just predestined puppets of God, like the Calvinists seem to say. At the other end of the spectrum on this issue, at least among Catholics, was another group that worried the French rulers, the Jansenists.

Named after a Dutch emigre called Cornelius Janssen, this group emphasized human dependency on grace. Again, the Janssenists wouldn't like me describing them in this way, but you could think of them as embracing as much of the Calvinist theology as possible while remaining Catholic. Janssen wrote a massive treatise defending his views, tellingly called Augustinus, a sign of his desire to follow Augustine's teachings.

Jansenism became controversial, with the authorities cracking down on religious houses where it was influential, like a nunnery at Port-Royal. There even emerged a furious second-level controversy over what exactly Jansen had been claiming in his book. The modern scholar of French religion in this period has commented that no Jansenists ever claimed to hold the beliefs attributed to them.

While all this is of course more relevant to the history of Christianity than the history of philosophy, it too will play a role in our story, because the major French thinkers Antoine Arnault and Blaise Pascal were Jansenists. Amidst all these controversies, what was of most importance to the French monarchy was not so much the truth of any one doctrine as the right of the French monarchy and church to uphold whichever doctrine they deemed correct.

Historians speak of Gallicism, meaning the idea that the French Church has a large degree of independence from the papacy, while still remaining within the Catholic fold. As with political affairs, the goal was to impose uniformity rather than allowing an excess of diversity within France, while also resisting the imposition of uniformity from any external power, in this case the Pope.

Anything that threatened the doctrinal unity of the French or Gallic church was a threat to this project, hence the nervousness about such factions as the Jesuits, who might be agents of Rome, as well as the devouts and the Jansenists.

Two intellectuals who espoused the cause of Gallicism were the Dupuis brothers, Pierre and Jacques. The so-called "Cabinet Dupuis" was an academy that promoted this cause in cooperation with Cardinal Richelieu, fiercely defending the claims of the monarchy on both the political and the religious fronts. It was, by the way, to the Dupuis brothers that Perrec complained that living in the provinces was like being in the middle of the Libyan desert. Despite his supposed isolation, he really did know everyone.

An institution responsible for enforcing Galician orthodoxy was the theology faculty at the University of Paris, better known as the Sorbonne. As far back as the 13th century, the Parisian theologians had been doing their utmost to keep religious opinions within an acceptable range, and to connect those opinions to a version of Aristotelian philosophy purged of its more problematic aspects, like belief in the eternity of the world.

I've suggested in a previous episode that in early modernity, Aristotelianism finally stopped being the dominant force in the history of European philosophy. But to the extent that this is so, it was over strenuous objections from the Sorbonne. They in fact prevailed upon the Parlement in 1624 to require the teaching of Aristotle, something that provoked a satirical work to say that the scholastics had forbidden blood to circulate in our bodies because this would be against Aristotelian orthodoxy.

Of course, plenty of non-Aristotelian ideas managed to appear in print nonetheless. And plenty of religiously daring ones too. How did this happen, given the way the Sorbonne, the Parlement, and the monarchy were all working to prevent the dissemination of awkward and innovative teachings? This is a question to which we'll be returning, but the short answer is that while one could apply for royal permission to publish a book, one could also just publish it and see what would happen.

That might provoke sanctions like confiscation of the offending material, but it wasn't easy for the thought police to keep up with the publishers. Then too, much of this material was published abroad, often in French, which was gradually displacing Latin as what we might as well call the "lingua franca" of European intellectuals. We can track that process in the Republic of Letters, where we see missives being written mostly in the vernacular, whereas Renaissance humanists of course use Latin.

Ironically enough, the French state was unwittingly responsible for the production of French literature abroad, because they chased so many authors and publishers out of the country. And where did they go? As often as not, to the Netherlands.

The books that were churned out of Dutch printing presses wound up all over Europe, including in France. One churchman fulminated about this situation, In Holland they are just silly, and books coming from there are so insipid and impertinent that I do not know how a man with a little taste can keep from vomiting when reading them. But the list of fellow Frenchmen who would have disagreed is long.

At the top of that list might be Baal, who, as I already mentioned, fled to the Netherlands to find a more congenial place for pursuing his faith and his philosophy. He called the Dutch Republic a great "arc of refugees." Another immigrant said of Amsterdam: "All kinds of nations have been received and welcomed in this city where they can reside freely without any inquisition into their religion." Thus, many of the Huguenots who left France over the years, not least after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, wound up there.

Nor is it a coincidence that the most notoriously radical thinker of the century, Baruch Spinoza, lived in the Netherlands. His presence there was due to the fact that Jews also went there from less tolerant parts of Europe, including the Iberian Peninsula. This had been going on since the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492. Spinoza's family was an example, as they belonged to the Portuguese Jewish community in Amsterdam.

But even in the Netherlands, it wasn't as if everyone could say or publish whatever they liked. Here too, there were attempts at censorship, which will become relevant once we get into the details of Spinoza's writings and their wider impact. Just as in France, Dutch religious institutions were at pains to identify and, insofar as possible, enforce orthodoxy.

Whereas the Jansenists caused an uproar in France by coming too close to determinism in their teaching on grace, in the Netherlands, the followers of Jacobus Arminius, known as the Remonstrants, caused an uproar by being too keen to emphasize free will. They rejected the predestination that was so central to Calvinism, and therefore to Dutch and Huguenot Protestantism.

Instead of just letting everyone decide for themselves what to think, the Dutch Reformed Church arranged a council to settle the issue, the famous Synod of Dort of 1618-1619. It was held in Dordrecht, which at the time was called Dort in Dutch. The Remonstrants were defeated at this meeting and expelled from the church. But, showing yet again that nearly every religious position could be attacked from both flanks, the Reformed Church was also opposed by those who felt they were insufficiently zealous.

In the early part of the 17th century, a loose coalition of Anabaptists, Evangelicals, and Spiritualists launched a kind of second reformation. They founded religious academies, called colleges, which gave a name to those who belonged to the movement. These were the Collegiates. Yet again, this religious development is not unimportant for the evolution of philosophy.

It's been argued that these particularly fierce Protestants wound up occupying a strongly rationalist position, because they believed that the independent use of reason was needed to interpret the Bible in the absence of a special revelation about its meaning. This may have paved the way for the anti-clerical rationalism we associate with the Enlightenment.

The fact that the Netherlands could be the setting for such Protestant controversies was owing to its success in breaking away from Spain in the previous century. The Southern Netherlands remained predominantly Catholic, this being roughly the area where you'll nowadays find Belgium and Luxembourg. The Netherlands had secured independence after throwing off the shackles of Spanish dominion under the leadership of William of Orange. The "Princes of Orange" were never accepted as the kind of supreme autocrats we just saw with the French kings though.

Their power was offset by a long-standing spirit of Dutch republicanism, with great value placed on the autonomy of individual cities. Political thinkers like Pieter de la Court railed against the tyranny of the House of Orange. But such republican thinkers could agree to promote the power and wealth of the Netherlands as a whole. It was entirely possible to be a patriot, or perhaps we might somewhat anachronistically say a nationalist, without wanting to see the nation's power centrally concentrated.

The Dutch even developed a national origin myth, which traced their ancestors back to the Batavi, an ancient people who had proudly resisted the armies of Rome. It was in honor of them that they called the capital of the Dutch East Indies Batavia. That city, in modern-day Indonesia, is now called Jakarta. This brings us to something else the Dutch generally agreed about: extending their influence around the world for the sake of getting stinking rich.

Their merchants vied with the Spanish, the Portuguese, the British, and the French to plant colonial settlements across the globe, and with no little success. The Dutch overcame the Portuguese to become the dominant European power in Indonesia. They controlled ports in Japan and Persia, founded Cape Town in southern Africa and several more settlements in West Africa, all the while contending with Spain and Portugal for a foothold in the Americas.

As you no doubt know, New York City was at first called New Amsterdam, founded by the Dutch in 1625. Since the old enemy, Spain, was such a significant rival in the colonial contest, the Dutch relentlessly described them as cruel tyrants, blaming them for their brutal enslavement of the Amerindians. Yet, the Dutch too were guilty of massacres and of enslaving the victims of their own colonial adventure in Asia.

Incredibly, one of the intellectuals who defended this practice was himself an ex-slave from Ghana, named Jacobus Capitaine. In the podcast series on the history of Africana philosophy, Chike Jeffers and I covered Capitaine's disturbing and self-explanatorily titled work, On Servitude, which does not contradict Christian liberty. This is an early example of an issue that will crop up occasionally as we go along.

We'll be coming across authors who could have been given detailed coverage in this present series on early modern philosophy, but will not get much more than a passing mention because they've already been dealt with in our Africana philosophy series. Other examples from the early modern period would include Anton Wilhelm Amo, another thinker who originally came from Ghana, but was active as a philosopher in 18th century Germany, and Ignatius Sancho, who was born on a slave ship, but wound up as a successful merchant and author in 18th century London.

It's worth mentioning such figures again in this context so that you can understand where they fit into the larger story of European philosophy, but for the full story, do please check out those other episodes. At any rate, you will hopefully now have some sense of why I'm covering France and the Netherlands together. Though there was free movement of ideas and people across Europe in this time, the ties between these two places were especially strong.

That, despite the fact that the many wars waged by France included an invasion of the Netherlands under Louis XIV. Thanks to the assistance of other European powers, including the Holy Roman Empire, the Dutch managed to fend off this attack and the war led to no conclusive result. But as we've seen, the two nations were not trading only cannonballs and cavalry charges. Migrants were going back and forth too, especially from France to the Netherlands, most often to escape religious persecution.

In fact, the initial boom in the Dutch economy, which happened in the 1590s and helped launch the Netherlands towards being a global colonial power, was probably in part due to an influx of Protestant refugees from France and elsewhere. A couple of decades after that, a young Frenchman came north to join the Dutch army in combating the Spanish.

to be honest i don't think his arrival did all that much for the economy but the ideas he began to develop there would have an enormous impact on the business of philosophy in the netherlands in his native france and beyond the young soldier's name was of course rene

It's taking me almost 15 years of podcasting to get to him, but the wait is now over. Or at least it will be in a couple of weeks as we begin to cover him by looking at his life and works next time on the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.