BERQUIN, Louis de. - A nobleman of Artois, born at Passy near Paris in 1499, died in 1529. His defection from Catholicism to Protestantism was due to a quarrel with the Sorbonne professor Guillaume Du Chêne. He then set about reading indiscriminately, but soon suffered the consequences; for a search by the Parliament for holders of Lutheran books caught him in the act, and on 1 August 1523 he was imprisoned in the Conciergerie. This time he was saved from a trial by the regent Louise of Savoy.
Though not deterred, B. translated Erasmus’s Enchiridion militis christiani, but with a Lutheran slant so pronounced that Erasmus himself could not approve of such misuse and begged him to stop interfering in his literary affairs, even making dark predictions. The fact remains that on 10 January 1526, by order of the Parliament, B. was returned to prison and his library at Rambures was searched. His guilt and obstinacy were again fully exposed; yet this time, through the intervention of the King, just returned from imprisonment in Spain, B. was set free and even placed in the service of Queen Margaret of Navarre, who herself inclined toward Protestant views. For a third time embroiled in controversy, always through anti-Catholic polemics, he was back in prison in March 1529. A letter of his now worsened his position, as did his refusal to heed calls for repentance from Guillaume Budé. Matters then took a bad turn, and the very summary judicial procedure reveals that he must have had formidable adversaries; for on 16 April of that same year 1529 he was condemned to do public penance in Notre-Dame Cathedral and to life imprisonment, and the next day—before the king, to whom he had appealed for mercy, could return to the capital from Blois—he was strangled and burned in Place de Grève. After the agitator Jean Leclerc of Meaux (1524), B. ranks first among the heretics condemned to capital sentence in France. His translation of Erasmus was soon reprinted (Antwerp 1529 and Lyons 1542), and his apostasy sounded the alarm in Catholic France against Lutheran infiltration.