While the Council was sitting, the Romanists of France were startled with the news that a statue of the Blessed Virgin had been beheaded and otherwise mutilated. It was the first manifestation of the revolutionary spirit of the Reformation in France. The King was furious. He caused a new statue to be made in silver, and gave his sanction to the renewal of the persecutions (May 31st, 1528). Four years later his policy altered. He desired alliances with the English and German Protestants; one of the Reformers of Meaux preached in the Louvre during Lent (1533), and some doctors of the Sorbonne, who accused the King and Queen of Navarre of heresy, were banished from Paris. In spite of the ferment caused by the Evangelical address of Nicolas Cop, and the flight of Cop and of Calvin, the real author of the address, the King still seemed to favour reform. Evangelical sermons were again preached in the Louvre, and the King spoke of a conference on the state of religion within France.
The affair of the _Placards_ caused another storm. On the morning of Oct. 18th, 1534, the citizens of Paris found that broadsides or _placards_, attacking in very strong language the ceremony of the Mass, had been affixed to the walls of the principal streets. These _placards_ affirmed that the sacrifice of Christ upon the Cross was perfect and unique, and therefore could never be repeated; that it was sheer idolatry to say that the corporeal presence of Christ was enclosed within the wafer, "a man of twenty or thirty years in a morsel of paste"; that transubstantiation was a gross error; that the Mass had been perverted from its true meaning, which is to be a memorial of the sacrifice and death of our Lord; and that the solemn ceremony had become a time "of bell-ringings, shoutings, singing, waving of lamps and swinging of incense pots, after the fashion of sorcerers." The violence of language was extreme. "The Pope and all his vermin of cardinals, of bishops, of priests, of monks and other hypocrites, sayers of the Mass, and all those who consent thereto," were liars and blasphemers. The author of this broadside was a certain Antoine Marcourt, who had fled from France and taken refuge in Neuchâtel. The audacity of the men who had posted the _placards_ in Paris and in other towns,--Orléans, Blois, Amboise,--and had even fixed one on the door of the King's bedchamber, helped to rouse the Romanists to frenzy. The _Parlement_ and the University demanded loudly that extreme measures should be taken to crush the heretics;[179] and everywhere expiatory processions were formed to protest against the sacrilege. The King himself and the great nobles of the Court took part in one in January,[180] and during that month more than thirty-five Lutherans were arrested, tried, and burnt. Several well-known Frenchmen (seventy-three at least), among them Clement Marot and Mathurin Cordier, fled the country, and their possessions were confiscated.
