ABSTRACT
Judi Loach In the sixteenth century, the territory of the civic realm of Lyons was contested by opposing religious groups. The Catholics and Protestants appropriated in turn this secular sphere, and after the Roman Catholic party triumphed definitively, it ‘refounded’ the city as an avowedly Christian – that is, Catholic – one. Nevertheless economic exigencies delayed its physical reconstruction, so that urban redevelopment was not accomplished until a century later. The new civic centre became the setting for a series of rites – notably its own foundation and consecration, culminating at the centenary of the Catholics’ victory – which exploited vivid and dramatic imagery so as to impress the city’s refoundation into the collective imagination and memory of the citizenry. These ceremonies evoked the religious practices of their pagan forebears in Roman antiquity: their temples and altars with their attendant rites, notably public vows and secular games. The exceptional, and unexpected, aspect of all this is that civic rituals were presented in terms of pagan rites, by Counter-Reformation priests – Jesuits – who, moreover, claimed to do so specifically to affirm the Christian nature of the city’s refoundation. The Civic Realm of Lyons Lyons, one of Europe’s most prosperous and cosmopolitan trading centres since Roman times, was France’s second city, in secular terms. Yet it had long served for Catholics as the nation’s first city, possessing as it did the Primacy of Gaul. In the early sixteenth century, however, it was both the city in France closest to the capital of Calvinism, Geneva, and also the national – indeed an international – centre for printing and publishing. Consequently it found itself under heavy attack
from Reformers, subject to illicit missionaries and inflammatory propaganda, with several Protestant congregations provocatively establishing temples in its fauxbourgs and even psalm singing outdoors in the city centre itself.1
