It was after Francis I.'s time that the Reformation, instead of confining itself to submitting with dignity to persecution, made a spirited effort to escape from it by becoming a political party, and taking up, in France, the task of the opposition--a liberal and an energetic opposition, which claims its rights and its securities.

It then took its place in French history as a great public power, organized and commanded by great leaders, and no longer as a multitude of scattered victims falling one after another, without a struggle, beneath the blows of their persecutors.
The martyrdom of Berquin put a stop to the attempt at quasi-tolerance in favor of aristocratic and learned Reformers which Francis I.had essayed to practise; after having twice saved Berquin from a heretic's doom, he failed to save him ultimately; and, except the horrible details of barbarity in the execution, the scholarly gentleman received the same measure as the wool-carder, after having been, like him, true to his faith and to his dignity as a man and a Christian.

Persecution thenceforward followed its course without the king putting himself to the trouble of applying the drag for anybody; his sister Marguerite alone continued to protect, timidly and dejectedly, those of her friends amongst the reformers whom she could help or to whom she could offer an asylum in Bearn without embroiling herself with the king, her brother, and with the Parliaments.

We will not attempt to enumerate the martyrdoms which had to be undergone by the persevering Reformers in France between 1529 and 1547, from the death of Louis de Berquin to that of Francis I.; the task would be too long and intermingled with too many petty questions of dates or proper names; we will confine ourselves to quoting some local computations and to conning over the great historic facts which show to what extent the persecution was general and unrelenting, though it was ineffectual, in the end, to stifle the Reformation and to prevent the bursting out of those religious wars which, from the death of Francis I.to the accession of Henry IV., smothered France in disaster, blood, and crime.
In the reign of Francis I., from 1524 to 1547, eighty-one death-sentences for heresy were executed.

At Paris only, from the 10th of November to the 2d of May, a space of some six months, one hundred and two sentences to death by fire for heresy were pronounced; twenty-seven were executed; two did not take place, because those who ought to have undergone them denounced other Reformers to save themselves; and seventy-three succeeded in escaping by flight.