In Pursuit of Charity: Nicolas Houel and his Maison de la Charité chrétienne in Late Sixteenth-Century Paris

Late sixteenth-century Paris was a hotbed of religious and political divide, particularly from the outbreak of civil war in 1562 between the French Catholics and Protestants, those converts to the new ‘heretic’ religion of Jean Calvin. The outbreaks of civil war until the peace settlement of Henri IV with his Edict of Nantes in April 1598, were temporarily halted by uneasy truces, however violence and unrest remained in Paris, as in other French towns and cities. Following the Peace of Saint-Germain in 1570, in which one of the conditions ordered the destruction of Catholic monuments to victories over the Protestants, citizens of Paris converged upon the cemetery of the Holy Innocents where guards had been ordered by the king to remove the Cross of Gastines. The guards were attacked and forced to hide their weapons in an attempt to divert attention from themselves as the crowds descended upon the cemetery. The crowd also ‘smashed the windows and workshops of … Huguenots’ in the area, whilst others ‘took a few small things from the Huguenots’ houses’. ¹ Violent skirmishes between the two groups and attacks by the majority Catholics against the minority Protestant population were a daily occurrence in Paris. Exacerbating the religious and political unrest were regular outbreaks of plague causing great devastation upon the city’s populace. In the final four decades of the sixteenth century, Paris was hit by plague from 1560–62, 1566–68, 1577 and a devastatingly long outbreak from 1580–86, which resulted in the death of around 30,000 Parisians. This was followed, according to the historian Pierre Chaunu, by ‘the terrible years’ of 1595–97. ² In his journals, Parisian Pierre de L’Estoile wrote of an outbreak of another disease, la coqueluche, that swept through Paris in mid-1580, killing 10,000 people in six days. He described the disease as ‘characterised by headache, stomach ache, intestinal trouble and much pain in all parts of the body’. ³ Added to this were climate anomalies and disasters, floods, droughts and frosts that caused havoc on harvests and threatened the livelihoods of many Parisians, particularly the poorer classes. In the early 1570s, weather caused continual damage to the annual harvests, leaving Parisians short of basic provisions and sending the cost of grains, for example, sky rocketing beyond the reach of the capital’s poorer citizens. ⁴