ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a detailed analysis of Catholic militancy across the south-west of France during the pre-League period. It examines three distinct loci: Bordeaux and the Bordelais, Agen and the Agenais and Toulouse and its environs. With confessional affairs so strained, Catholics of the south-west became energized from an early stage, and began to form associations to better defend their communities. During the 1550s and 1560s, however, resident Catholics actively sought alliances with neighbouring co-religionists to bolster their standing, trading intelligence for funds and military provisions. Confederation and coalition soon became the standard medium for security for Catholics, with the result that Guyenne and Western Languedoc would witness Catholic leaguing on a scale rarely seen elsewhere in France at this time. The existence of widespread militancy in the southwest during the 1550s and 1560s, for instance, challenges the historio-graphical axiom that places the Council of Trent at the centre of the sixteenth-century movement of Catholic renewal in France.
