With Reforming French Culture, George Hoffmann has written the most important book on religious polemics in sixteenth-century France in years. It is a book that should spark lively discussion and debate. Its claims are bold and thought provoking. Hoffmann focuses exclusively on the Huguenot side (or, as the author prefers, the reformist side) of the exchange, and brings to life critical figures of this movement, such as Conrad Badius, Pierre Viret, and Henri Estienne. He also reads these polemicists through the more moderate filters of Rabelais and Montaigne. For the latter of these authors, he draws intriguing connections between the Essais and religious satire.
Reforming French Culture both complements and, to a lesser degree, challenges Luc Racaut's seminal study Hatred in Print (2002). Racaut's work convincingly called into question the widely held view that Calvinist propaganda was much more effective and successful than Catholic responses to it. Hoffmann, while agreeing with Racaut's argument, notes that in certain respects Racaut went too far, by leveling some of the same arguments against reformist propaganda that had been used against its Catholic counterpart. One of Hoffmann's boldest yet ultimately convincing arguments is that Calvinists utterly failed in their propaganda efforts. As he insists, “The story told in these pages has proven less a tale of Catholic victory than one of—there is hardly a more polite way to put it—Reformation failure” (191). He provides an abundance of evidence that the narrative of well-educated, urbane, and, as he phrases it, “sane” reformers (3) is erroneous; the extreme rhetoric and militant stridency of their satirical attacks seriously undermines this positive portrait of Protestant polemicists.
The story that Hoffmann tells is both lively and captivating. From the opening pages, where he recreates the first performance of Conrad Badius's play the Comédie du pape malade, to his exploration of Henri Estienne's tortured life, from the cavern of Dénezé-sous-Doué, near Saumur, where Huguenots created a menagerie of satirical sculptures (if, like me, you have never heard of this before, Hoffmann's account will leave you wanting to pay a visit to this site), to the adventures and misadventures of Jean de Léry, Hoffmann goes beyond literary analysis and recreates for his readers a rich, complex world of Protestant partisans who felt a profound sense of alienation, seeing themselves as both refugees and foreigners in their own land. After reading this book, one has a strong sense of the homesickness that plagued so many of these polemicists.
Out of this sense of alienation comes Hoffmann's strongest and most original argument. He asserts throughout that while Calvinist satire was ineffectual in convincing any wavering Catholics to abandon their religious traditions, it did serve as a unifying force among dispersed and isolated Huguenots, providing a form of community and even communion. As he explains, “The sense of laughing together that such satires elicited established a sense in which one could both share in a message and share through a message” (187).
Laughter, and the role of laughter within the context of French Protestant satire, is at the heart of Hoffmann's book. He situates the radicalness of the Calvinist enterprise in what he calls “the gestational space of laughter” (7). Laughter can serve to unite people and, in the case of Huguenot satire, the humor would ultimately become an inside joke, humor's version of preaching to the choir. Reformist satire, in its extremism and excess, served to establish sharper confessional boundaries, instead of persuading people who might have been questioning their faith. The Protestants spread throughout France, chased and persecuted, found solace in laughing at the exotic otherness of their Catholic persecutors. As Hoffmann eloquently argues, it allowed them both to recognize their alienation and to find community among strangers.
This book represents one of the finest contributions to our understanding of the role and function of reformist satire. Reforming French Culture is an expansive exploration of a key medium that would change the terms of religious and political debate in both France and Europe for generations to come.
