Tag: Henry of Navarre

Can’t We Just Get Along? A Lesson the Past

Henri of Navarre - Jacob Bunel, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

One of the more fascinating personages of times past was Henry of Navarre, a ne’er-do-well and free thinker who became king of the French during the religious wars of the 1500s.  It was right after the Reformation, and society was rather tense, as seemed always to be the case when religious reformation broke out. The Protestants hated the Catholics. The Catholics hated the Protestants.  This was nothing new, but in France, the hatred was so intense that people killed each other by the thousands for over 30 years.

It should be noted that, religion aside, everyone involved was French, everyone spoke the French language, everyone ate baguettes, but if you believed in the wrong number of sacraments or had ornaments in your churches, you were bad, pure and simple — so bad, in fact, that you needed to be tortured and killed.

Henry of Navarre was a Protestant. For a while, then he became a Catholic.  For another while, then he got excommunicated twice and became a Protestant again.  And finally, just to put the proverbial icing on the cake, he converted back to Catholicism.  He called his last conversion a small price to pay to keep Catholic Paris happy in the new tolerant France that he intended to govern.

All this was accomplished, albeit slowly, through the enacting of the Treaty of Nantes, which flawed though it was, did permit Protestants some degree of religious freedom in France.  With this feat, decades of assault and battery, murder and bloodshed, came more or less to an end. And while the former combatants never got to peaceful coexistence, they were able to manage in a segregated fashion which was as good as could be expected in 16th century France.

There may be ideas worth dying for, but Henry didn’t think religion was one of them.  Which is why it’s rather ironic that he met his end at the hands of someone who did.  In 1610, some dozen years after establishing peace in the realm, he was fatally stabbed by a Catholic monk who was angry with Henry for not being sufficiently intolerant of Huguenots.

And so it goes.  More than 400 years later, our mutual hatred is just as great, although now it’s for political rather than purely religious reasons.  If there is any lesson to be learned it is this: beware of ideology.  It can never be appeased.

Image credit:  Jacob Bunel, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

How To Unify The Country

When divisions reign between the people, and there are sides, and each side hates the other, things can get very heated.  Consider the old truism that the worst feuds are family feuds.  Well, here in America, we used to be Americans but now we’re Good Americans and Bad Americans, and, if news media is any indication, we despise each other.  Moreover, we have had four straight years of this hatred.  I lived through the entire 1960s, but even during that similarly divided time, I never feared for the Republic.  Today, people are evoking the Civil War as a comparable period. 

Now cynics know that America’s current division does not have to lead to civil strife.  Our hatred for each other could be united into hatred for a third party somewhere else — a Russia, for instance, which Americans are accustomed to hating from at least the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, if not before.

What are we talking about here?  War, pure and simple.  Wars have a unifying effect on the populace.  It’s simpler to hate a foreign enemy, exciting even, and there aren’t the moral issues you have to deal with when hating your neighbors.  For whatever reason, people tend to fall for it.  By people, I mean the press and a significant number of the nation’s citizens.  There’s an added benefit for presidents, in the form of another truism:  “You can’t criticize the president during wartime.”  That was the story they told us with George W. Bush, and it worked!

Using war as a diversion to pacify the people is not a new device.  While reading about 16th century essayist Michel de Montaigne, I ran across a surprising example of the unifying effect of a common enemy on a warring populace.  Essentially, the France of his day was immersed in a brutal and bloody civil war between the Catholics and the Protestants, filled with massacres and torture and all the rest.  It was the definition of internecine strife, and there seemed to be no stopping it.  The people warred on for the better part of 30 years.  

So what finally ended the killing?  Why, a foreign enemy, of course.

Henri IV, a strong king in contrast to the weak monarchs who had preceded him, took the throne of France, after which he promptly started a war with Spain who had been funding an insurgency in parts of France.  It was a brilliant move.  The Spanish didn’t mind since fighting wars was about all they did in Europe then.  Meanwhile, the citizenry were forced to shift their attention to the war effort, as all the men were drafted into the military.  With the men out fighting the Spanish, there was no one left to commit atrocities at home, and the civil war that had consumed the country for more than a generation quickly ended.

That makes it all seem very tidy, but really, it must have been horrible to live in the 1500s.  They had their own pandemic (the Plague), extreme division between people, major economic hardship, and weak leadership at the top. Oh wait, that could be today…   

Returning to the point, the past is tidy, but the present is always uncertain.  While there’s no indication that Biden is going to start a foreign war, we shouldn’t be surprised if he does.  After all, his banner is Unity.