This is a repost of a question that I asked two months ago but didn't get any answers, sadly.
This question came to my mind when reading the amazing book “The Dawn of Everything” by David Graeber and David Wengrow. They write in a footnote:
The British historian Keith Thomas, for instance, compiled a whole list of casual rejections of Christianity from medieval and Renaissance English sources. ‘The Bishop of Exeter complained in 1600 that in his diocese it was “a matter very common to dispute whether there be a God or not”…In Essex a husband-man of Bradwell-near-the-Sea was said to “hold his opinion that all things cometh by nature, and does affirm this as an atheist”…At Wing, Rutland, in 1633 Richard Sharpe was accused of saying “there is no God and that he hath no soul to save”. From Durham in 1635 came the case of Brian Walker who, when asked if he did not fear God, retorted that, “I do not believe there is either God or Devil; neither will I believe anything but what I see”: as an alternative to the Bible he commended “the book called Chaucer”’ (1978: 202).”
If people in the 16th and 1`7th centuries in England could freely discuss and dismiss belief in a god, how was France different?
Apologies for missing this query when it was first posted.
Lucien Febvre's discussion of whether or not it was possible for the concept of "atheism" to exist in France during the early modern period depends on making the argument that the language required to express the thought did not exist until later. He was writing in the immediate post-war period and about France in the middle of the 16th century, so a bit before the examples that you cite.
I covered his enquiry and the conclusions that he drew in an earlier response. You might like to check that out:
Was everyone religious in the old days, like Medieval Times, or were there irreligious people?