Cathares, vaudois, hussites, ancêtres de la Réforme ?

In order to answer the question : where was the true Church before Luther, the Protestants have found several kinds of ancestors. The first one is the Czech Reformer Jan Hus. Luther has known Hus’ writings very early, but he didn’t appreciate them, because Hus gloried in his acts. Only in 1520 he has thought that he could be a Hussite without knowing it; but he has added that he was quite superior to Hus in his critics against the Roman Church. Nevertheless, the Lutheran Churches had regarded Hus as a precursor of the Reformation. The second ones are the Waldenses. There are the heirs of the old medieval Peter Valdo’s heresy, who took refuge in some Alpine valleys. During the synod of Chanforan (1532), some of them decided to join the Reformation. For many Protestant historians of the 16th and 17th centuries, the Waldenses were the direct heirs of the first Christian communities, and they have maintained the primitive creed. Thanks to them, the French reformed churches could claim to be of apostolical origin. The third ones are the Albigenses. At first, Protestants were antagonistic towards this old heresy. But, in the 1560s, Catholic polemists have claimed that Protestants were the same as the Albigenses, and the Protestants have agreed with this idea around 1562. Soon this heresy was considered as the forerunner of French Protestantism. For the Protestants, on one hand, the albigensians’ persecution facilitates reflection on their own experience; on the other hand, it provides an opportunity for them to turn adversity and defeat into victory in the conflict with the Catholics. But it was necessary for that to imagine a direct link between the Albigenses and the Protestants