Michel de L'Hospital

French statesman

• Born: c. 1505
• Birthplace: Aigueperse, Auvergne (now Puy-de-Dôme), France
• Died: March 13, 1573
• Place of death: Belesbat, France

An eminent jurist and Humanist, L’Hospital was a conciliatory officeholder under Henry II and into the French Wars of Religion. Despite the failure of his policy of moderation during his lifetime, his plea for civil peace still inspires advocates of religious tolerance.

Early Life

A first-born nobleman, Michel de L’Hospital (loh-pee-tahl) studied law and classical literature in Toulouse and also was drawn to Latin verse writing. In 1523, he had to leave for Italy with his father, Jean, who was the physician and councilor of the constable of Bourbon a traitor to King Francis I. They fled to join Charles V’s retinue, and young L’Hospital was then suspected and long imprisoned in Toulouse, from 1523 to 1526, when the king released him.

After assisting his father in Milan, he completed his juridical training and taught civil law in Padua, from 1526 to 1531, surrounded by Christian Humanists. He was briefly named auditor of the Rota in Rome, then attended the University of Bologna (1531-1533). When he returned to France in late 1533, due to amnesty, he intended to become a magistrate.

In 1537, in order to gain a position as a councilor in the Paris Parlement (the judiciary and legislative court), he married Marie Morin, a moderate Protestant. Once in Parlement, he gained a solid reputation as an exacting lawyer. In his writings, he deplores the corruption of Paris and the severity of growing religious dissent and repression. Eager to influence events, he participated in national meetings (Moulins, 1540; Riom, 1542), and soon solicited appointments to positions in public affairs.

Henry II first sent him to the ecumenical Council of Trent, then in Bologna (1547-1548), as an ambassador. There, disheartened by the multiple postponements of the council, he associated with Italian Humanists. He frequented the court of Duchess Renée in nearby Ferrara, which was a refuge for French Protestants and liberal thinkers and a place that deepened L’Hospital’s secular piety. He became the tutor of Renée’s daughter, Anne d’Este, and he arranged her marriage to François of Lorraine, second duke de Guise, who became his new patron. When he returned to Paris and the Parlement in 1548, he also befriended the powerful cardinal Charles of Lorraine.

Life’s Work

When Henry II’s sister Marguerite married, she appointed L’Hospital chancellor of Berry in 1550 (a title he held until 1560). Faithful to his other patrons, the duke of Guise and the cardinal of Lorraine, he became “Master of the Requests” in 1553 and first president of the Court of Exchequer in 1555. His correspondence with the chancellor of France, François Olivier, displays their common moral and pragmatic concerns regarding rising religious tensions between the Roman Catholics and the Protestant Calvinists, called the Huguenots, in France. On the accession to the French throne of fifteen-year-old Francis II (1559), and while still serving Marguerite in Nice, L’Hospital entered the Privy Council and dedicated a Humanistic memoir on kingship to the young monarch. The young king, however, died a year later.

After the death of Chancellor Olivier, L’Hospital was unexpectedly named chancellor of France on April 1, 1560. Francis II’s mother, Catherine de Médicis , now regent, worked to reconcile the two religious camps. L’Hospital labored for conciliation and toleration for sedition by the Protestants and two noble families: the Guises, who aligned themselves the Spanish crown and Catholicism , and the generally Protestant Bourbons, who were next in line to the French crown after Catherine’s children. He promoted the Edicts of Romorantin for national unity (May, 1560), and he induced Catherine de Médicis to call the assembly of notables at Fontainebleau in August, 1560, which Bourbon leaders boycotted. Another failed conspiracy from the Guises against the Bourbons in September and the unexpected death of Francis II in December aggravated civil disorder.

At the Estates-General of Orléans in January, 1561, L’Hospital rejected seditious violence in the name of ethics and faith. The Edicts of February, April, and July, 1561, which suspended all prosecutions for private religious opinion and forbade seditious gathering, were soon abolished. At the Colloquy of Poissy (September 9-14, 1561), L’Hospital managed to get the Catholic and Huguenot leaders to sit together, but it turned into a riot. Despite the colloquy’s failure, the chancellor kept striving for moderation and national unity.

At the Estates-General of Saint-Germain, he proposed the liberal and later acclaimed Edict of January (1562), granting Huguenots liberty of worship outside cities and the right to hold meetings in private homes. Yet such pacifying gestures only increased seditious rage, which soon led to the first War of Religion (1562-1563). When the Crown provided no justice for the assassinated Protestants at the Massacre of Wassy, the French civil war started. L’Hospital retreated to his estate in Vignay, though still in office. He was recalled after the precarious Pacification of Amboise, which favored the Protestants. Facing increasing turmoil, the chancellor and Catherine declared Charles IX of age and accompanied him on a tour of the kingdom from 1564 to 1566. Factions, however, kept quarreling over the means to reform the kingdom and questioning royal authority.

Also active in foreign policy, L’Hospital wrote the thirty-four articles representing France at the Council of Trent in 1564, but it appears that he faced the powerful pope and Philip II of Spain as the only statesman in Europe advocating moderation and peace. Still endeavoring toward pragmatic balance and civil concord, he insisted that the Protestant ruler Jeanne d’Albret grant Catholics in Béarn (a region in southwestern France) the same rights Protestants demanded in the north. France finally declined the Council of Trent’s decrees.

While growing hostilities deprived L’Hospital of actual power, he concentrated on administrative efficiency, reforming court justice and the royal treasury. He is said to have elaborated the Ordinance of Moulins (February, 1566), an edict that sealed an apparent reconciliation by balancing royal and local governments’ authority. This reform was one of L’Hospital’s last and most enduring juridical legacies.

When a new civil war threatened in September, 1567, L’Hospital once again advocated tolerant measures, but his policy of moderation was faulted for aggravating dissent. Still believing in appeasement, however, he personally addressed party leaders and notables, trying to curb national dissent, until pacification was reached in March, 1568. When L’Hospital, however, refused to seal the papal bull authorizing aggression that Catherine had requested, the regent allied herself with the ultra-Catholics to eliminate the Huguenots. The chancellor, therefore, had to surrender his official seals in 1568 as the third war of religion began.

L’Hospital retired in grief and seclusion. His 1570 Discours politiques, 1560-1568 to Charles IX explicates his integrity and pacifism. The massacre of Protestants on St. Bartholomew’s Day (August 24, 1572) not only marked his failure but also made him fear for his daughter, who was saved by the duchess of Guise, while Marguerite protected him. He resigned after the Peace of Saint-Germain was made official on February 1, 1573, and died only six weeks later, before civil war again broke out.

Significance

L’Hospital embodies the committed Christian Humanist. A jurist and scholar, he reformed justice, protected French poets (La Pléide), and wrote letters and speeches (in Latin and French) advocating peace, ethics, and irenic faith. As a public servant, he strengthened the monarchy through treasury control, trade regulation, and criminal justice, thereby partly prefiguring Cardinal de Richelieu’s absolutist policy.

A realist statesman in wartime, he supported civil toleration and regarded moral and lawful patriotism as a pillar of politics. To his mind, national unity stemmed from the interdependence of “one faith, one law, one king” (faith as a moral bond, law as a reminder of it, with the king incarnating religious and temporal unity). He pragmatically advocated religious pluralism in order to avoid civil conflict a largely incomprehensible mind-set at the time.

L’Hospital’s policy of moderation and toleration is now viewed as one of the first attempts at the separation of church and state, and at entrusting temporal authority against partisan sedition. Variously called Civil Evangelicism, Gallican irenicism, or the third-party Politiques, his followers succeeded when Henry IV’s Edict of Nantes (1598) ended the civil war by reaffirming the right to private worship for Huguenots. Civil pluralism, a concept L’Hospital’s work foreshadowed, soared with Enlightenment philosophers, who demanded genuine toleration and limited church power.

Bibliography

Beame, Edmond. “The Politiques and the Historians.” Journal of the History of Ideas 54, no. 3 (July, 1993): 355-379. Surveys polemical designations of the Catholic moderate party during and after the religious wars.

Holt, Mack, et al. The French Wars of Religion, 1562-1629. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Provides authoritative and extensive historical background with a description of L’Hospital’s chancellorship in the first section.

Hunt, Richard. Religion and Law: The Chancellorship of Michel de L’Hospital (1560-1562). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1973. Covers L’Hospital’s first two years in office and his attempt to avoid civil war by reinstating legal justice as a civil ward.

Kim, Seong-Hang. “The Chancellor’s Crusade: Michel de L’Hôpital and the Parlement of Paris.” French History 7, no. 1 (1993): 1-29. Portrays L’Hospital as a sponsor of royal authority opposed by the Parlement and misunderstood by royalty.

Kim, Seong-Hang. “’Dieu nous garde de la messe du Chancelier’: The Religious Belief and Political Opinion of Michel de L’Hôpital.” Sixteenth Century Journal 24, no. 3 (1993): 595-620. Explains toleration of Protestantism as a means for the Catholic statesman to maintain national unity under a strong monarchy.

Kim, Seong-Hang. Michel de L’Hôpital: The Visions of a Reformist Chancellor During the French Religious Wars. Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies 36. Kirksville, Mo.: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1997. Exhaustive, acute, and accurate biographical account of L’Hospital’s ideas and practice.

Turchetti, Mario. “Religious Concord and Political Tolerance in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century France.” Revue de Théologie et de Philosophie 118 (1986): 255-267. Analyzes the 1560-1562 toleration edicts as a compromise to attain religious unity.