French Wars of Religion

By the early 1570s France had already fought three rounds of civil war between its Catholic majority and its Huguenot, French Reformed, minority, and an uneasy peace held long enough for the crown to arrange a marriage meant to bind the two sides together: Margaret of Valois, the Catholic king's sister, to Henry of Navarre, the leading Huguenot nobleman and future Henry IV. The wedding brought much of the Huguenot leadership to Paris in August 1572, a Catholic city where their presence was already resented.

What happened next began as a targeted assassination attempt against the Huguenot military leader Admiral Gaspard de Coligny and spiraled, within days, into a general massacre. Starting in Paris on Saint Bartholomew's feast day, August 24, and spreading to other French cities over the following weeks, Catholic mobs and, in places, royal forces killed an estimated several thousand to as many as ten thousand Huguenots, including much of the nobility gathered for the wedding. The killing shattered any remaining trust between the two communities, drove a new round of warfare, and became, for Protestant Europe for generations afterward, the standing example of Catholic violence against reformed believers, still cited centuries later wherever the period's religious conflicts are discussed.

Henry of Navarre, the Huguenot bridegroom of the 1572 massacre, survived to inherit the French throne in 1589 as Henry IV, but only after converting to Catholicism in 1593, reportedly remarking that Paris was worth a Mass. As a Protestant-born king now ruling a Catholic-majority country, he was positioned as few others could have been to try to end the fighting on terms both sides might accept, and in 1598 he issued the Edict of Nantes, granting Huguenots freedom to worship in specified locations, full civil rights including access to public office, and control of a number of fortified towns, known as places de surete, as a military guarantee against future persecution.

The edict was not full toleration in a modern sense, worship remained restricted to designated places and excluded from Paris itself, but it was unusually durable for its era, holding through most of the seventeenth century even as royal policy toward Protestants hardened under Louis XIV. That durability ended in 1685, when Louis XIV revoked the edict outright in the Edict of Fontainebleau, outlawing Protestant worship and triggering a wave of Huguenot emigration to England, the Dutch Republic, Prussia and the American colonies that scattered a significant French Protestant population across Europe and the Atlantic world, a diaspora still traced by genealogists and historians of the Reformed tradition today.