ABSTRACT
Recent historiography on English republicanism has paid little attention to the religious question and its relation to politics in France and Italy in the late seventeenth century. Instead of focusing on Harringtonian republicanism and its two constitutive elements, the Erastian model of Church, State relations and the absence of a coercive ecclesiastical structure, let us turn the question upside down. Common ground with regard to Church, State relations can also be found between the English Erastian republicans and French as well as Italian Gallicans. French Protestants, the most natural allies of English republicans, stood in a very difficult position in the 1660s, even though their official political defeat was completed later in 1685. Jansenists, political Gallicans and Protestants thus shared affinities with the republican ideals of the relationship between Church and State and/or state government, albeit on very different religious and political grounds.
