EVERY great religious or spiritual movement is likely, sooner or later, to take a political direction. It will associate with itself the aspirations and the grievances of classes which are on the rise or which are oppressed; it will serve sometimes as a help, more often as a hindrance to the actual government. The movement will frequently begin by combating and counteracting pre-existent political tendencies, but will as a rule in the end accentuate and stimulate them, hastening the decline of the falling and the ascent of the rising, providing a programme and a war cry, bringing forces, long sullenly adverse, to the fighting point.
If this principle is true of any religious movement, it is certainly true of the Reformation, which left its political traces on every country in Europe where it obtained a footing. These are not to be ascribed to the characteristics of this religion or of that, but to the mere fact of a great religious struggle which brought all disputed questions to an issue. It was antecedently probable that the Reformation would be absorbed by a people so peculiarly receptive as the French, and it had great political opportunities in the malaise result¬ing from more than half a century of foreign wars, and in the discontent with the absolutism of a monarchy at once omnipotent and incompetent. It is of interest, therefore, to trace the effects of the Wars of Religion upon the political system of France, to estimate their influence upon the elements which formed the State, upon the Crown, the Church, the nobility, the towns, the people, upon the great constitutional institutions, the Estates General, and the Law Courts or so-called Parliaments; upon political theory, that is, upon the opinions held as to the relations of Crown to People...
