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 therefore wanted to read everything indiscriminately, but soon suffered the consequences; for a Parliamentary search of those possessing Lutheran books caught him in the act, and on 1 August 1523 he was imprisoned at the Conciergerie. This time the regent Luisa di Savoia saved him from the ensuing trial.
Still not admitting defeat, B. translated Erasmus’s Enchiridion militis christiani, but reinforced it with a Lutheran coloring, to such an extent that Erasmus himself could not approve of this bad business and asked him to cease meddling in his literary affairs, also making some obscure predictions to him. The fact is that on 10 January 1526, by order of Parliament, B. returned to prison, and his library at Rambures was searched. His guilt and obstinacy once again emerged fully; yet this time, through the intervention of the King, who had just returned from captivity in Spain, B. was released, indeed placed in the service of Queen Margherita di Navarra, herself of Protestant inclinations. For the third time engaged in the struggle, always over anti-Catholic polemics, he was imprisoned in March 1529. One of his letters had now aggravated his position, as had his refusal to heed the counsel to repent offered by Guglielmo Budé. Events then took a sinister turn, and the very hasty judicial procedure reveals that he must have had some truly formidable adversaries, since on 16 April of that same year he was condemned to make amends for his errors in the cathedral of Notre-Dame and to perpetual imprisonment; and the following day—before the king, to whom he had submitted a plea for clemency, could return to the capital from Blois—he was strangled and burned in Place-de-Grève. After the carder Jean Leclerc of Meaux (1524), B. ranks as the first among the heretics condemned to capital punishment in France. His translation of Erasmus was immediately reprinted (Antwerp 1529 and Lyon 1542), and his apostasy alerted Catholic France to the infiltration of Lutheranism.