{"id":1906,"date":"2025-03-18T11:33:29","date_gmt":"2025-03-18T11:33:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/religious-studies\/?p=1906"},"modified":"2025-03-18T11:33:29","modified_gmt":"2025-03-18T11:33:29","slug":"the-reformation-of-the-refugees-jean-de-lerys-religious-and-national-identity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/religious-studies\/?p=1906","title":{"rendered":"The Reformation of the Refugees: Jean de L\u00e9ry\u2019s Religious and National Identity"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Niall Oddy\u00a0<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018We\u2019ve kind of forgotten that what underpins everything is our Judeo-Christian culture, and that\u2019s where we need to start.\u2019 These words emphasising the significance of faith in British society were uttered last month by Nigel Farage, the leader of the political party Reform UK.[i]<\/a> But is religion really important in Britain? After all, the 2021 census indicated that less the half of the population of England and Wales considered themselves to be Christian and over half of Scottish people declared themselves to have no religion.[ii]<\/a><\/p>\n

The relationship between religious identity and national identity is contentious. In contrast to Farage\u2019s claim that British identity has \u2018Judeo-Christian\u2019 underpinnings, the National Secular Society campaigns to lessen the influence of religion in British society.[iii]<\/a> Debates about the role of religion in society have a long history, and in this blog post I want to travel back to the sixteenth century, when the Protestant Reformation had unsettled the religious uniformity that had long prevailed in most of western Europe.<\/p>\n

The spread of Protestantism forced governments to grapple with how to respond. In England, Henry VIII broke from Rome to establish an independent Church of England. In France, the monarchy remained steadfastly Catholic. Yet, around 10% of France\u2019s population of 15 million converted to the Calvinist branch of Protestantism. Hardline Catholics opposed religious freedoms for this large minority. The monarchy\u2019s attempts to broker compromise failed, leading to over three decades of warfare known as the French Wars of Religion (1562 \u2013 98).<\/p>\n

France was not the only country to experience bloodshed as a result of the Reformation. In fact, refugees fleeing religious persecution were so common that the historian Heiko Oberman coined the phrase the \u2018Reformation of the Refugees\u2019.[iv]<\/a> John Calvin was one of over 5,000 French people who fled to the safety of Geneva as the city doubled in size. Basel, Strasbourg and Zurich were also safe places for exiles. As many as 100,000 Protestants from the Low Countries (Netherlands and Belgium) fled to cities in England and the Holy Roman Empire, including London, Cologne, Hamburg, and Frankfurt. Not every Protestant was a refugee, but enough were that exile was a significant and well-known part of Protestant experience, identity and culture. Religious reformers were conscious of belonging to a pan-European community that had suffered persecution and exile from their homeland.<\/p>\n

The refugee experience can help us to think about the relationship between religious identity and national identity. What does it mean to have to leave your country of birth because of your religious identity? How does that feel? A travel account by one French Calvinist, Jean de L\u00e9ry (1536 \u2013 1613), offers some insights.<\/p>\n

Born in France, L\u00e9ry studied in Geneva, became a Calvinist minister and got embroiled in the French Wars of Religion. He was in Sancerre with many fellow Protestants in 1572 when Catholic forces began an eight-month siege that resulted in starvation and acts of cannibalism. L\u00e9ry survived and eventually settled in Switzerland.<\/p>\n

In 1578 L\u00e9ry published an account of the time he spent in Brazil in 1557 \u2013 58. His History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil <\/em>recounted how he went with a group of Calvinists to assist with the establishment of a French colony. After some months, disagreements with the Catholics there about religious practices led to L\u00e9ry and his co-religionists being expelled from the French fort. They spent time living with the indigenous Tupinamba people before returning to France.<\/p>\n

In his published account L\u00e9ry explores his split loyalties to his country and his faith.\u00a0 He calls France \u2018my homeland\u2019 and of himself writes, \u2018native Frenchman that I am, desirous of the honour of my prince\u2019.[v]<\/a> Monarchy, though, was problematic from the point of a Calvinist subject to a Catholic king. Writing twenty years after his return from Brazil, and having witnessed the horrors of the Wars of Religion, L\u00e9ry is nostalgic about his time across the Atlantic and expresses his \u2018regret\u2019 that he is not there. For him, Brazil represented a potential safe haven from Catholic France and an opportunity to resolve the contradictions between religion and nationhood:<\/p>\n

\u2018if we had stayed longer in that country, we would have drawn and won some of them to Jesus Christ [and\u2026] there would be at present more than ten thousand Frenchmen who, besides staunchly protecting our island and our fort against the Portuguese [\u2026] would now possess under allegiance to our King a great country in the land of Brazil\u2019.<\/p>\n

L\u00e9ry here blames the Catholics for the failure of the colony, expressing a belief that if the Calvinists had not been forced out, he would have been able to perform a service for both his faith and his country.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Jean de L\u00e9ry did not get what he hoped for from the Reformation. He was born into a country that was predominantly Catholic, in which the majority of the population was Catholic, the King was Catholic, and Catholics had more rights than Protestants. He fought against French Catholics and suffered at the hands of French Catholics. Despite it all, he still felt himself to be proudly French.<\/p>\n

The example of Jean de L\u00e9ry illustrates the complex and contested relationship between nationhood and religion. Today\u2019s disagreements about the role of religion in national life are nothing new.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[i]<\/a> Nigel Farage Calls On Brits To Have More Children | HuffPost UK Politics<\/a><\/p>\n

[ii]<\/a> Less than half of England and Wales population Christian, Census 2021 shows – BBC News<\/a>;<\/p>\n

[iii]<\/a> Our work | National Secular Society<\/a><\/p>\n

[iv]<\/a> Oberman, Heiko A.. “Europa afflicta<\/em>: The Reformation of the Refugees”\u00a0Archiv f\u00fcr Reformationsgeschichte<\/em>, vol. 83, 1992, pp. 91-111.\u00a0https:\/\/doi.org\/10.14315\/arg-1992-jg05<\/a><\/p>\n

[v]<\/a> Jean de L\u00e9ry, Histoire d\u2019un voyage faict en la terre du Bresil<\/em>, ed. by Frank Lestringant (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1994). Translations are mine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Niall Oddy\u00a0 \u2018We\u2019ve kind of forgotten that what underpins everything is our Judeo-Christian culture, and that\u2019s where we need to start.\u2019 These words emphasising the significance of faith in British society were uttered last month by Nigel Farage, the leader of the political party Reform UK.[i] But is religion really important in Britain? After […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":1907,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1906","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/religious-studies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1906","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/religious-studies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/religious-studies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/religious-studies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/religious-studies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1906"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/religious-studies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1906\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1908,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/religious-studies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1906\/revisions\/1908"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/religious-studies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1907"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/religious-studies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1906"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/religious-studies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1906"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/religious-studies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1906"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}