Note 132 — Chapter XI · THE REFORMATION, POLITICALLY CONSIDERED

Under such circumstances religious zeal naturally went far. In six months there were passed 102 sentences of death, of which twenty-seven were executed, the majority of the condemned having escaped by flight. Thereafter the individual burnings are past counting. On an old demand of the Sorbonne, the king actually sent to the Parlement an edict abolishing the art of printing;132 which he duly recalled when the Parlement declined to register it. But the French Government was now committed to persecution. The Sorbonne’s declaration against Luther in 1521 had proclaimed as to the heretics that “their impious and shameless arrogance must be restrained by chains, by censures—nay, by fire and flame, rather than confuted by argument”;133 and in that spirit the ruling clergy proceeded, the king abetting them. In 1543 he ordained that heresy should be punished as sedition;134 and in 1545 occurred the massacres of the Vaudois, before described. The result of this and further savageries was simply the wider diffusion of heresy, and a whole era of civil war, devastation, and demoralization.