ABSTRACT
The conversion of Henri IV ensured that the Bourbons became Catholic monarchs, that the Roman Catholic Church was the official state church of France and that royalism was Catholicism; the famous formula was ‘one faith, one law, one king’. The canons and decrees of the Council of Trent were the official response of the Roman Catholic Church to the Protestant Reformation. The Council sought the restoration of church authority in lands lost to Protestantism, and asserted the jurisdictional and governmental primacy of papal authority. Henri IV for this reason refused to integrate the Tridentine decrees into French law and, like his successors, he refused to accept the assertion of Catholic zealots that the pope’s authority was infallible in all matters regarding the church and superior in that to royal authority. The intense Catholic spirituality that flourished in France during the early seventeenth century fuelled Catholic Reform.
