When Gargantua was being written, Paris was in turmoil over heresy, with religious riots firmly suppressed. Rabelais had to flee from Lyons to Italy in January 1535. After the Third Book (1546) he fled to Metz, then a free German city. Censors tried to suppress his Fourth Book of 1552. They failed, but rumour suggested (wrongly, it seems) that he was in serious trouble. In 1562, the Council of Trent put him on their Index of Forbidden Books as a ‘heretic of the first class’.
