Conclusion

If we accept that ‘honour and status are implicit in violence', in the case of violent intercommunal clashes during the Reformation, it was often the group or confession's honour that was perceived to be at stake.^[825] More than that, the forceful removal or defeat of confessional opponents, or the destruction of objects sacred to them, demonstrated divine approval for the victor or iconoclast's faith or version of religious truth.

The Reformation challenged the authority of the early modern state and encouraged its assertion of greater control over its population. The impact of dealing with intercommunal violence and the consequences of religious war forced rulers to legislate for both the public peace and religious concord. The Treaty of Westphalia (1648) is traditionally seen as having brought the period of religious wars, or conflicts fought over religion, to an end. This is misleading in two ways; as we have seen, religious violence continued well after 1648, and secondly, there had already been a whole series of peace settlements by which rulers sought a resolution to the religious turmoil which had violently disrupted the lives of their subjects. Just as the Edict of Nantes of 1598 was only the most well known of such attempts at peaceful coexistence in France, so Westphalia provided an international forum for the establishment of peace, the form of which, however, was shaped by earlier settlements, such as the Catholic/Lutheran agreement of the Peace of Augsburg (1555) in the Holy Roman Empire, and the Dutch Republic's ongoing struggle for independence from Spain. Yet, since intercommunal violence was often localised, so, too, by necessity was the establishment of the mechanisms by which that violence might be pacified. Thus, individual communities addressed local issues in seeking solutions to the animosities previously displayed. Churches were shared, the use of bells restricted, procession and feast day etiquette mutually agreed. In the Dutch Republic, the concealment of chapels within apparently ordinary townhouses allowed a blind eye to be turned and little offence caused. All faiths were encouraged to respect the rituals and sites for worship of the others and discouraged from disrupting their devotions in any way. This did not always work, of course, and there continued to be sporadic violence from time to time.

The difficulty of reconciling opposing sides within a civil war context is particularly obvious. The terms of any proposed peace often prove controver­sial and divisive, making conflicts more bitter and long-lived. Stathis Kalyvas argues that the presence of, or potential for, violence during peacetime results from the same antagonisms which propagate war. Therefore, unless they can be resolved or forgotten, a lasting and meaningful peace cannot be achieved, and violent clashes will continue.^[826] Even when a working coexistence has been established, therefore, confessional differences always have the potential to re­emerge when tensions are running high. Nevertheless, Wayne Te Brake argues that a ‘more-or-less durable religious peace' had been established in Europe by the second half of the seventeenth century, but also that religious diversity was deliberately hidden from view by these settlements.^[827] He sees them as messy, complex and fragile compromises, involving improvisation and offering only imperfect solutions. At least, however, confessional violence within communities eventually became a less frequent occurrence as a result, even if official acts of repression by force were still a feature of early modern politics. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV in 1685 was preceded and accompanied by violence as troops were billeted on Huguenot households whose members were given little choice but to convert or leave the French kingdom. The Waldensians of Savoy experienced even more severe treatment. The brutal repression of the revolt of the Protestant Camisards of southern France in 1706 was a further demonstration of official intolerance of resistance and non-conformity. The suppression of the Jansenists, too, and the razing of their headquarters at the convent of Port­Royal in 1711, would not be the last such episode of violent coercion of a religious minority. Rulers readily embraced the opportunity presented by the need to regulate peace to keep their minority groups in check and to safeguard their own authority. They promoted official suppression of disrup­tive or subversive activities while condemning intercommunal violence which was more unpredictable and, therefore, disorderly, and increasingly had the means to enforce their will in this regard. In this way, by 1800, political violence had displaced confessional violence within communities as the predominant form of repression and exclusion.