French Protestants, known as Huguenots, were never more than a tenth of the population and probably less. On the arithmetic alone they should have been suppressed like the earlier heresies and forgotten.
They were not, because of where they were. The Calvinist form described in the last chapter spread through the towns of the south and west, through the printing and legal trades, and, critically, through a substantial part of the nobility. In some regions half the local gentry converted, and a nobleman in sixteenth century France came with a fortified house, armed clients and the customary right to raise men.
So the crown faced not a scattering of dissenters but an organised minority with towns, money, aristocratic leadership and a church structure that could function without royal approval, precisely as it had been designed to.
And the crown at that moment was weak. A strong king had died in an accident at a tournament in 1559, leaving three sons who reigned in succession, the eldest of them fifteen. For thirty years France was governed through regencies and by a queen mother manoeuvring between two great noble factions, neither of which she could destroy.
The fighting ran from 1562 to 1598, in a series of wars separated by settlements that nobody kept.
The pattern was consistent. A massacre or a provocation would set off a campaign. Neither side could win outright, because the Protestants held fortified towns that were expensive to besiege and the Catholics had the numbers and the capital. A peace would be negotiated granting the Protestants limited rights of worship in specified places. The Catholic side would find this intolerable, the local authorities would not enforce it, and within a year or two it would break down.
The violence was not mainly battles. It was urban. Crowds killed neighbours, desecrated the other side's churches and cemeteries, and did so with a symbolic precision that historians have studied closely: Catholic crowds attacked bodies and burned them to deny resurrection, Protestant crowds attacked images, relics and the consecrated host. These were not random riots. They were people acting out a theology about what was polluting the community.
Underneath, ordinary aristocratic faction. The great houses were competing for control of a weak monarchy and each attached itself to a confession, which gave a family quarrel an army of believers. Whether the wars were really about religion or really about noble power is a question that has been argued for four centuries, and the truthful answer is that the participants did not experience the two as separable.
In August 1572 the court arranged a wedding intended to reconcile the factions: the king's sister to the Protestant Henry of Navarre. The Protestant nobility came to Paris for it, into a city that was overwhelmingly Catholic, hungry, and furious about the marriage.
Four days after the wedding the leading Protestant nobleman, Admiral Coligny, was shot in the street and wounded. Who ordered it has never been established. Two days later, on the eve of Saint Bartholomew's day, the king's council decided, in some panic, to kill the Protestant leadership pre emptively.
What was intended as a decapitation of perhaps a few dozen men became a general massacre. The city militia and the crowd took it up, and killing continued in Paris for three days and then spread to a dozen provincial cities over the following weeks. The Paris dead are usually estimated at two to three thousand and the national total anywhere between five and thirty thousand, and the figures are guesses built on burial records and hostile reporting.
The consequences were the opposite of what was intended. The surviving Protestant leadership concluded that no agreement with this crown could be trusted, and the movement's political theory hardened: pamphlets appeared arguing that a tyrant may lawfully be resisted, and that authority is held on conditions from the people. That literature fed directly into the arguments of chapters thirty one and thirty six.
It also removed the middle. Before 1572 a negotiated coexistence was conceivable. After it, each side believed the other intended extermination, which is the condition in which a civil war becomes very hard to stop.
Out of the exhaustion came a third position, held by people the pamphleteers called politiques, usually as an insult.
Their argument was that the kingdom mattered more than the confession. A state destroying itself over which liturgy was correct was choosing a doctrine over the survival of everyone in it, and a ruler's first obligation was public order, not orthodoxy. A jurist named Jean Bodin gave it theoretical shape in 1576 with a treatise on sovereignty, arguing that a state requires a single supreme authority, unbounded by any other, whose duty is the peace of the whole.
This is not toleration as an ideal. Almost nobody in the sixteenth century thought religious diversity was good. It is toleration as triage: better a divided kingdom than no kingdom.
It became policy when the last of the three brothers was assassinated in 1589 and the legal heir turned out to be Henry of Navarre, the Protestant. Catholic France would not accept him and Paris held out under siege. In 1593 he converted to Catholicism. The remark about Paris being worth a mass is almost certainly not his, but it describes the transaction accurately, and it worked: the capital opened its gates the following year.
In 1598 he issued the Edict of Nantes, and its terms are worth stating precisely because it is often described as a charter of religious freedom. Protestants were granted freedom of conscience everywhere, freedom of worship in specified places only, full civil rights, access to offices, special mixed courts for cases involving them, and, uniquely, around a hundred fortified towns garrisoned at royal expense. That last is not toleration. It is a peace treaty with an armed party inside the state.
Between the massacre and the settlement there is an episode that is usually compressed into a sentence and deserves more, because it is the moment the Catholic side turned on its own king.
When it became clear in the 1580s that the heir presumptive was a Protestant, a Catholic League formed under the house of Guise, backed with Spanish money and preached from the pulpits of Paris. Its position was that no heretic could inherit the throne whatever the law of succession said, and that a king who tolerated heresy forfeited his own claim to obedience.
The king, Henry the Third, had the duke of Guise murdered in his own chateau in 1588 and was himself stabbed to death by a Dominican friar eight months later. So within a year a Catholic king killed the leader of the Catholic party and was killed by a Catholic monk, which should complicate any simple account of who was fighting whom.
Paris under the League government held out against the legal heir through a siege in 1590 in which several thousand people starved. The preachers held the city to its position long after the granaries were empty, and the sources describe bread made from ground bones out of the cemeteries.
That is the experience the politique argument grew out of, and it explains why an idea as unattractive as putting the state above the faith could win. People had watched what happened when the faith was put above the state, in their own street, for a generation.
Henry was assassinated in 1610 by a Catholic who thought the settlement a betrayal, and the dismantling began under his son's minister.
Cardinal Richelieu's objection to the Huguenots was not that they were heretics but that they were a state within a state, with their own fortresses, assemblies and foreign contacts. In 1627 he besieged their principal stronghold at La Rochelle for fourteen months, built a mole across the harbour mouth to shut out an English relief fleet, and starved it into surrender with the loss of most of its population.
The peace he then imposed was revealing. He removed the fortified towns, the assemblies and the military privileges entirely, and left the religious articles of the edict intact. A Catholic cardinal, running the government of a Catholic king, had just fought a war against Protestants and left them their churches, because the objection had always been political.
The final act was different in kind. In 1685 Louis the Fourteenth revoked the edict altogether, on the argument that a single king required a single faith and that most Protestants had converted anyway, which was false. Churches were demolished, ministers expelled, children ordered baptised Catholic, and emigration forbidden on pain of the galleys.
The propaganda effect abroad was as large as the economic one at home. Protestant Europe read the accounts of the dragonnades, the practice of billeting soldiers on Protestant households until they converted, and drew the conclusion that a Catholic monarch could not be trusted with a Protestant minority. Three years later that conclusion helped decide an English succession crisis, which is chapter thirty one.
Somewhere between one hundred and fifty thousand and two hundred thousand people left anyway, illegally, for the Dutch Republic, England, Switzerland, Brandenburg and the American colonies. They were disproportionately urban, skilled and literate, and the states that received them said so at the time and competed for them. It is one of the clearest cases in European history of a ruler damaging his own country to obtain uniformity, and it was popular.
Firm: the edicts, the treaties, the sieges and the political narrative. Sixteenth century France produced a large volume of legal, diplomatic and polemical writing, and much of it survives.
Soft: the massacre figures, badly. There was no count, the sources are partisan on both sides, and the range in the literature is wide enough that any single number quoted without a range should be distrusted.
Soft: who ordered the shooting of Coligny, which remains genuinely unsolved.
Soft: the size of the Protestant population, which is estimated from church records, town censuses and the emigration figures, none of which are complete.
Contested: whether these were religious wars at all. One tradition emphasises noble faction, provincial resistance to centralisation, and dynastic ambition, with confession as a banner. Another points to the character of the popular violence, which is saturated in theology and makes no sense as a cover for anything else. The current position mostly accepts both, on the grounds that a nobleman calculating advantage and a weaver killing his neighbour over the host were participating in the same conflict for different reasons.
One thing this chapter does not claim: that the Edict of Nantes was an early liberalism. It was a truce with an armed faction, granted by a king who had changed religion twice for political reasons, and it was revoked as soon as the crown was strong enough. Religious toleration in Europe arrived, when it arrived, because the alternative had been tried thoroughly and had failed.