Introduction

Conversion was a complicated matter during and after the Wars of Religion in France. It was never a certain matter, as it was impossible to verify the sincerity of this act. The proliferation of conversions in the wake of the massacres of Saint Bartholomew's day, occurring in the autumn of 1572, encapsulated this complexity. One example was the conversion of the Protestant pastor Hugues Sureau Du Rosier, whose lengthy confession of Catholic faith, extracted in prison and under the threat of death, was triumphantly published by his Catholic captors in 1573. The same year, Sureau Du Rosier published a retraction in Heidelberg, using the account of his brief conversion as a means to prevent similar conversions on the part of other Calvinists. His case is particularly well-known because his status as an outspoken defender of the Protestant faith led his captors to use him in the attempt to convert other Protestants to Catholicism. But his turn back to Protestantism made him suspect in the eyes of adherents of both religions. As Michael Wolfe explains, for Catholics ‘Conversion could thus mean a miraculous transformation of physical property, a commitment to moral probity in everyday life, a spiritual flight from base illusion to a higher truth, and a vigilant observance by the individual of sacred duties that afforded membership in the community of the elect’. Both the Protestant and Catholic versions of Sureau Du Rosier's conversions deploy these last two concepts, the appeal to a higher truth and the invocation of a community of the elect, to justify their version of events. Of course, Henri de Navarre, later Henri IV, himself converted, or at least promised to, several times. In order to survive the massacres of Saint Bartholomew's Day, he had to promise to become a Catholic, but he fled before he had to make good on that promise. He converted to Catholicism in 1593 in order to be crowned King of France; his track record as a Protestant military leader and his previous feigned conversions made this transformation suspect to many. The unstable nature of these conversions was a source of concern in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century France.