ABSTRACT
There was a strong tradition of intervention of the French monarchy in religious and therefore charitable affairs dating back to the Middle Ages. The kings of France claimed to rule by divine right-and indeed had long been held to cure cases of scrofula-‘the King’s Evil’—by the royal touch.2 This thaumaturgic power was divinely bestowed on a new ruler at his coronation, traditionally held at Reims, in a ceremony whose liturgy evoked an episcopal consecration. Indeed, by virtue of his crowning, the king became ‘outside bishop’ (évêque du dehors), a kind of honorary superprimate of the French church. In a long-enduring struggle, which had included the Papacy’s ‘Babylonian Captivity’ in French-controlled Avignon in the fourteenth century, the king had wrested significant concessions from the Pope. The Pragmatic Sanction of 1438 and then in 1516 the Concordat of Bologna granted French rulers extensive powers including rights of appointment to major benefices. It was customary to view the ‘Gallican Church’—as the Catholic church in France, was generally named-as quasi-independent from Rome. The four ‘Gallican Articles’ which in 1682 were made state law in France actualised and gave further expression to a long-existing tradition of autonomy, evident in the persistent refusal of the
king to make the decrees of the Council of Trent state law.3 The resolutions made at Trent in regard to poor relief as everything else only filtered slowly onto the French ecclesiastical agenda, through being accepted by diocesan synods in the last years of the sixteenth century and the early decades of the seventeenth. An important step was taken in 1614 when the Assembly of the Clergy-the Gallican Church’s national representative institution-gave the resolutions its approval. But this fell short of formal state commitment and endorsement of the Tridentine package of measures. It meant that in Counter-Reformation issues such as poor relief, the monarch was always a major player.
