An Unequal Apportionment: The Conflict over Space Between Protestants and Catholics at the Beginning of the Wars of Religion

Although theological and political aspects of the Wars of Religionhave been extensively studied, their spatial dimension has oftenbeen neglected. Despite the plethora of urban monographs, spacehas been considered as the setting rather than the object ofconflict. On account of its scarcity, space brought a varietyof benefits and accordingly generated strategies of appropriationand exclusion for which the two confessions were unequally prepared.If Charles IX was the first to ‘tolerate’ Protestants,he almost always confined them to domestic space or excludedthem from the centre of towns. Employing a sociology of dominationdrawn from the work of Pierre Bourdieu, this article seeks toexamine the unequal situation of the two confessions from aspatial perspective, refusing to explain this difference solelyby recourse to theological concepts. On the contrary, it attemptsto show how, in a manner that requires explanation, socioconfessionalinequalities were transformed into spatial ones.

The space which before any other seems to me to raise the problemand manifest just that strong social and historical differentiationbetween societies is the space of exclusion—of exclusionand imprisonment. Michel Foucault, La scène de la philosophie(1978)¹