French wars of religion

French wars of religion (1562-98). The wars of religion were much more than a confessional dispute. They embodied dynastic, factional, social, and personal frictions, set against a European financial, political, and religious crisis. The Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis (1559) ended a long period of Habsburg-Valois rivalry (see Italian wars, French). France already displayed a homogeneity—summed up as ‘une foi, un loi, un roi’ (one faith, one law, one king) —which has encouraged André Corvisier to term it ‘the model of nation-states’. However, the monarchy was not absolute, but relied on the support of a powerful and divided nobility. Its finances had been overburdened by war, causing tax increases which brought growing hardship. The nobility, though exempt from taxation, faced problems of its own: many families had been beggared by the wars, and peace left their sons without employment. Some capitalized on patronage exercised by the crown and high nobility to enter the Church: others joined those already demanding Church reform.

Inspiring Calvinist preachers attracted growing congregations. Calvin's policy of targeting nobles for conversion bore fruit, especially in the south. Calvinism was also attractive to lesser men who saw it as an attack on the old order. The royal commander in Guienne, Blaise de Monluc, wrote that a local Huguenot leader had claimed: ‘We are the kings, and he that you speak of is a little turdy roylet; we'll whip his breech and set him to a trade, to teach him to get his living as others do.’ Huguenot communities placed themselves under the protection of sympathetic noblemen, and by 1560 were organized on quasi-military lines, each church with its captain and each synod with its colonel.

Neither the crown's poverty nor the burgeoning strength of Protestantism need have proved fatal had the monarchy supported its local governors against the Huguenots. And, as N. M. Sutherland has written: ‘The division of France behind religious banners, which played so dangerously into the hands of Spain, would not have been possible without … the old rivalry of the nobility and their new struggle for power upon the death of Henry II.’ Henri II died in 1559 from a wound received in a tournament, and his sickly son François II, 15 when he came to the throne, threw himself into the arms of his wife's relatives, the powerful Guise family. François, Duc de Guise, was a soldier who had defended Metz against Charles V and recaptured Calais from the English; his brother the Cardinal of Lorraine was an accomplished politician. Their rise affronted two other great families, the Montmorencies and the Bourbons, both divided by religion. The constable Anne de Montmorency was Catholic, but his nephew, the admiral Gaspard de Coligny, was a devout Huguenot. Antoine de Bourbon, king of Navarre through his wife, was Protestant but infirm of purpose, while his brother, Louis, Prince de Condé, was not only a Protestant but had agreed, in 1560, to become the protector of all French Huguenots. The slide to war was gradual. In March 1560 Huguenots botched an attempt to seize the king (the Conspiracy of Amboise), and Condé was imprisoned. He was released when the king died in December, and his family claimed, as first princes of the blood, the guardianship of the young Charles IX. The Queen Mother, Catherine de Medici, refused, and strove to preserve royal authority, balancing the princes against one another and trying to achieve political and religious compromise. She also kept a watchful eye on Philip II of Spain, to whom the religious struggle in France—reflecting his own difficulties in the Netherlands—was a serious political concern. In 1561 she initiated the Colloquy of Poissy, where rival theologians failed to agree, and early in 1562 granted a measure of religious freedom to the Huguenots in the Edict of January.

The Montmorencies and the Guises had already withdrawn from court, and persuaded Antoine de Bourbon to support them. In March 1562 Guise, on his way to his estates in Lorraine, stopped to hear mass at Vassy, south-west of Saint-Dizier, and his servants became involved in a scuffle with Huguenots, about 30 of whom were killed. Open war broke out, with the Huguenots seizing control of many towns in the south and Condé taking the Loire valley to establish his headquarters at Orléans, while Guise and Montmorency secured Paris.

This first war (1562-3) was inconclusive, and its conduct testified to the deep-seated distaste for civil war and the Queen Mother's repeated attempts to broker a negotiated settlement. The Pacification of Amboise granted the Huguenots liberty of conscience and the limited right to worship but was no basis for a lasting peace. Catherine was fortunate in that Antoine de Bourbon had been killed during the war and Guise murdered after it, increasing her room for manoeuvre. The French conflict was already part of a wider dispute, and there were growing Huguenot fears that Spanish troops, who used the ‘Spanish road’ through eastern France to reach the troublesome Netherlands, would be diverted to France. After Catherine met Philip's commander the Duke of Alba at Bayonne in 1565 these fears, though factually groundless, provoked a Huguenot attempt to seize the king at Meaux in September 1567. A second war (1567-8) followed. Like the first it was inconclusive, though the intervention of foreign troops—the Catholics were supported by Alba and Swiss mercenaries, and the Huguenots by German heavy cavalry (reiters) under John Casimir, son of the Protestant Elector Palatine—increased the conflict's ferocity and re-emphasized its international implications. The Treaty of Longjumeau re-established the Amboise terms, but proved short-lived, for the third war (1568-70) broke out almost immediately.

This time there was more serious fighting. Although the Catholics, under the king's younger brother the Duc d'Anjou (later Henri III), beat the Huguenots at Jarnac and Montcontour (1569), Coligny, who succeeded to command of the Huguenots when Condé was killed at Jarnac, kept the war alive by skilful manoeuvre. The crown's chronic shortage of money made it difficult to keep an army in the field, and peace was made at Saint-Germain in August 1570. It marked a return to the status quo, although this time the Huguenots were allowed to garrison four towns—Montauban, La Rochelle, la Charité, and Cognac—as security.

Catherine now did her best to achieve unity, agreeing to marry her daughter Margaret to the young Henri of Navarre (later Henri IV) in an effort to secure a Valois-Bourbon alliance, negotiating for the marriage of Anjou to Elizabeth I of England, and achieving a general, if short-lived, Anglo-French rapprochement. Coligny was readmitted to the king's council, where he urged an anti-Spanish policy and won the affection of the young king.

The odds were against Coligny. Spain's military prestige was restored by Lepanto and Alba's successes in the Netherlands, and neither Elizabeth nor the Protestant German princes could be counted upon to provide serious military support for France. Sharp price rises promoted unease which fuelled Catholic demands to root out heresy. The Guises blamed Coligny of complicity in Duc François's murder nine years before, and Catherine now came to believe that only death would lift his influence from the king, remove the prospect of a disastrous war with Spain, and enable her to maintain a balance of power. Coligny was wounded by an assassin on 22 August 1572. Some time the next day, the feast of St Bartholomew, the decision was taken to finish off Coligny and kill other Huguenot leaders, in Paris for Henri of Navarre's wedding. Early on the morning of 24 August, Coligny was butchered and a massacre of Huguenots within Paris, in which the population and militia played an enthusiastic part, spread, with varying intensity, to the provinces: thousands were killed. Henri and his cousin Henri, Prince de Condé, narrowly escaped with their lives, though both were forced to convert to Catholicism. Elsewhere many other Huguenots abjured their faith, but those that did not, embittered and mistrustful, armed in the expectation that war would be renewed. The fourth war (1572-3) featured the unsuccessful royal siege of La Rochelle, and ended in the peace of the same name.

Although French Protestantism had now passed its zenith, it remained enormously strong in the south. It also gained some support from the rise of a moderate Catholic party, the politiques, its members, prepared, as H. G. Koenigsberger put it, ‘to seek a way out of the horrors of religious and civil strife by sacrificing the religious rather than the political unity of the state’. Hostility to the Guises and, as always, personal ambition, played their parts. Catherine's youngest son, the Duc d'Alençon, was portrayed as an attractive alternative to Charles IX, while Montmorency-Damville, governor of Languedoc, was amongst those prepared to back the Huguenots against the king or vice versa to strengthen his own position.

Charles died in 1574, and his elder brother Anjou, briefly installed as king of Poland, returned to rule as Henri III. Condé escaped from court that year, and Navarre soon followed suit. Both raised troops, and John Casimir brought a large contingent to support the Huguenots. The Peace of Monsieur (Alençon) ended the fifth war (1576) on terms very favourable to both the Huguenots and to Alençon, given the dukedom of Anjou. That year saw the formation of the first Catholic League, with the declared aim of supporting royal authority, but with a powerful local organization and strong links with Spain. It was successful in preventing Huguenots from being elected to the Estates General that met at Blois in 1576, and went on to champion the privileges of the estates and provinces against royal absolutism. The king, well aware of the danger, declared himself head of the League in place of the Duc de Guise, and the Peace of Bergerac, which ended the sixth war in 1577 on terms less favourable to the Huguenots than the previous peace, abolished all leagues and associations. In 1580 a brief seventh war enabled Navarre to strengthen his hold on the south-west. Anjou, meanwhile, intrigued to obtain the sovereignty of the Netherlands in place of Philip II, but died in 1584. Henri III was childless and seemed likely to remain so, leaving Henri of Navarre as heir presumptive to the French throne.

The prospect of a heretic king induced Catholics, led by Guise and his relations, to revive the League. The Cardinal of Bourbon was persuaded to claim the succession in place of his kinsman Navarre. Leaguers replaced royalist governors and garrisons in many towns, and in December 1584 they concluded the Treaty of Joinville with Philip of Spain, who agreed to give them financial and, if need be, military support. Catherine, fearful of the growth of Spanish power, concluded the Treaty of Nemours with Guise, abolishing all previous edicts of pacification with the Huguenots, banning the practice of Protestantism.

The longest of the wars—sometimes called the War of the Three Henries, from Henri III, Henri of Navarre and Henri, Duc de Guise—raged from 1584 to 1589. In 1587 Navarre won a spectacular victory at Coutras and Guise beat John Casimir's Germans. These battles weakened Henri III's authority, which was further reduced when the volatile population of Paris rose, forcing him to flee and welcoming Guise. However, the defeat of the Armada damaged Spanish prestige and imperilled Philip's wider strategy, encouraging Henri III to lure Guise to Blois, where he was murdered in the king's presence: his brother, the Cardinal of Guise, was killed the following day. Catherine died almost immediately, as a wave of Catholic fury saw Henri declared unfit to rule, and the League, now headed by Guise's brother the Duc de Mayenne, became an openly revolutionary party. The king moved against Paris, and was besieging it with Navarre's support when a fanatical friar stabbed him on 1 August 1589. On his deathbed, Henri nominated Navarre as successor provided he converted to Catholi-cism.

The last of the wars, the War of the League (1589-98), began with the League consolidating its grip on many cities. Henri IV beat Mayenne at Arques in September 1589, and even more dramatically, at Ivry in March the following year. He besieged Paris, but Philip sent his ablest commander, the Duke of Parma, to relieve it. In the meantime, the Cardinal of Bourbon had died, and the Estates General, which met in 1593, was asked to consider the succession of the Infanta, Philip II's daughter by the late Henri III's sister. This was a deeply unpopular move, and at the crucial moment Henri IV declared that he was prepared to return to the Catholic Church. Allegedly quipping that ‘Paris is well worth a Mass’, he was received into the church at Saint-Denis in July 1593 and crowned at Chartres—for Rheims, where French kings were traditionally crowned, was in League hands. His conversion removed a major obstacle to peace, and Henri exploited his position with skill. He entered Paris in March 1594, and set about winning the support of towns and commanders by lavish distribution of officers and pensions, joking that loyalty was ‘vendu, pas rendu’ (sold, not given). He declared war on Spain in 1595, and although this helped unite France against an external enemy, the Spaniards had the better of it. The war ended with the Treaty of Vervins in 1598, the year the last of the League's leaders made peace with Henri. The Edict of Nantes, granted that year, gave the Huguenots freedom of conscience and wide rights of worship, and the right to garrison some hundred places of security at royal expense. It was a compromise which permitted the existence of two religions in one body politic, and was to last for the best part of a century.

The wars saw little real change in the military art. Although most soldiers still wore armour and fought with cold steel, firearms were used on a growing scale. This irritated old warriors like Monluc, who complained: ‘Would to heaven that this accursed engine had never been invented, I had not received those wounds I now languish under, neither had so many valiant men been slain for the most part by the most pitiful fellows and greatest cowards’. Battles usually involved the clash of blocks of infantry, their onset prepared by arquebus and cannon fire, with cavalry—many of them pistoleers trained to use the caracole—posted on the flanks. Armies embodied a variety of semi-feudal contingents and mercenaries: assembling 25, 000 men for a major battle was no mean feat. Their cost outstripped the ability of the royal exchequer to pay them, and its attempt to do so by raising taxes further weakened social cohesion. There were some improvements in organization, though nothing the French produced could equal the Spanish tercio. Discipline was uncertain: Condé was beaten and captured at Dreux in 1562 because his hitherto-victorious men got out of hand before the decision was secured. Much depended on brave and skilful leaders—at Ivry Henri led the crucial cavalry counter-attack in person—though they were frequently killed in battle or assassinated subsequently. As conflict became endemic in French society, many men were driven to take up soldiering, for it was better to plunder than be plundered. This helped reduce the previously high proportion of noblemen in French armies, though even at the wars' end perhaps 30 per cent of soldiers were noble. In some cases, where there were local outbursts against great men of any party, violence became democratized. Atrocities were frequent, sometimes reflecting deliberate policy inflamed by religious passions, and sometimes demonstrating the casual brutality of a society at war for too long. Civilians died in large numbers. Perhaps 12, 000 of the inhabitants of Paris starved to death during the siege of 1590, and another 30, 000 died of disease subsequently. In all, some two to four million perished.

Bibliography

• Corvisier, André, ‘Les Guerres de religion’, in Philippe Contamine, Histoire Militaire de La France (Paris, 1992).
• Koenigsberger, H. E., ‘Western Europe and the Power of Spain’, in The New Cambridge Modern History, vol. 3 (Cambridge, 1968).
• Pernot, M., Les Guerres de religion en France (Paris, 1987).
• Roy, Ian (ed.), Blaise de Monluc (London, 1971).
• Sutherland, N. M., The Massacre of St Bartholomew and the European Conflict 1559-1572 (London, 1973)

— Richard Holmes

For more information on Wars of Religion, visit Britannica.com.

France's recovery from the dismemberment threatened by the Hundred Years War was relatively rapid. By the Renaissance, kings such as François I^er and Henri II ruled a stronger, much more centralized kingdom. The tensions created by the rivalry between the great houses of Montmorency and Guise and by the deteriorating religious and economic climate were released, however, by the premature death of Henri II in 1559. His successor, François II, was a minor and was quickly dominated by the duc de Guise and the cardinal de Lorraine, who were the uncles of his wife (Marie Stuart). In the short term their power was contested not so much by the Montmorency family as by Louis de Condé, brother of Antoine de Navarre, the ineffectual leader of the Bourbon family and prince of the blood [see Amboise, Conjuration De]. Condé was able to use the cloak of the Protestant religion to mask his ambition, thereby setting the tone for a period of over 40 years of civil war, in which religious passions and factional disputes exacerbated French divisions to the point where the continued existence of the French monarchy was actually in doubt. The religious disputes between Protestants and Catholics were rendered much more serious by two factors. First, the conversion to Protestantism of many members of the noblesse d'épée, which provided the already highly organized Calvinist Church with a parallel military structure. Secondly, the clientage system, which enabled great lords—Catholic as well as Protestant—to enrol many nobles in their armies.

The French monarchy at first tried a policy of conciliation: through the Colloque de Poissy (1561), which failed to achieve the hoped-for religious compromises, and then through the Edict of January (1562), which granted a great deal of freedom to the Protestants. The Catholic backlash was immediate. The massacre of Protestant worshippers at Wassy by troops belonging to François de Guise (1562) unleashed a series of increasingly bloody civil wars. Despite several Catholic victories, the Protestants were granted very favourable peace terms in 1570 and appeared to be on the point of winning Charles IX over to their cause when, in 1572, the inevitable Catholic reaction led to the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre. This provoked a hardening of the Protestants' position, since it induced them openly to question the political authority of the French monarchy [see Hotman; Gentillet].

The death of the duc d'Alençon in 1584, however, left the Protestant Henri de Navarre (the future Henri IV) as heir presumptive to the throne. This immediately created a reversal in the relative positions of extremist Protestants and Catholics. The former suddenly became defenders of the royalist tradition, while the latter came to argue that, if the king jeopardized the fate of Catholicism, he could be deposed or even assassinated. Henri III tried to overcome the problem by persuading Henri de Navarre to adjure the Protestant faith. The latter's refusal to comply gave the Catholic Ligue the excuse it needed to arm itself not only against the Protestant heir to the throne, but also against the Catholic king, who, it was felt, was not resolute enough in his defence of Catholicism. It is not clear whether Henri de Guise intended to depose Henri III; but his challenge to the royal authority eventually led to his assassination at the hands of the king's bodyguard in 1588. The reaction of the Ligue was predictably hostile, leading eventually to the assassination of Henri III in 1589. The Ligue declared the cardinal de Bourbon king in Henri de Navarre's place, but he was never king in more than name. The Ligue's position was weakened by its own increasingly revolutionary activities (especially in Paris), and by the fact that its various supporters had their own candidates for the French throne.

In the event, Henri de Navarre cut the ground from beneath their feet by removing the most serious obstacle to his own candidacy: his Protestantism. He converted to Catholicism (almost certainly as a result of political calculations) in 1593 and was finally absolved by the Pope in 1595. (‘Paris vaut bien une messe’ was a contemporary view of this conversion.) He still had to reconquer his kingdom and buy off his enemies. His conversion alienated many of his Protestant followers, but he was sufficiently loyal to them to enforce the Edict of Nantes (1598), which granted them limited but none the less substantial concessions. In the meantime the experience of protracted civil war led many Frenchmen to believe that there was no alternative to a strong monarchy. In this way the Wars of Religions prepared, however paradoxically, the absolutism of Louis XIV. The influence of the Religious Wars on literature is particularly evident in the Tragiques of d'Aubigné, the polemical works of Ronsard, and the Essais of Montaigne. [See Reformation.]

[James Supple]

Bibliography

• J. H. Salmon, Society in Crisis (1975)

The rapid growth of Protestantism in France that began in the 1530s reached a climax around 1560, when roughly one in every twenty French men and women had converted to the new faith. This extraordinary growth resulted in a predictable backlash by French Catholics, whose church and monarchy declared all Protestants—and in France they were overwhelmingly Calvinists, who came to be called Huguenots—to be heretics. For Catholics, Protestants living in their midst not only threatened their eternal souls, but were believed to threaten their earthly existence as well. In an age when every major outbreak of plague, famine, and disease tended to be interpreted as a sign of God's punishment for their sins, most French Catholics believed that heresy within their midst was an open invitation for God's wrath to be visited upon them. Thus, the majority of French Catholics were openly hostile to the Reformation. These popular feelings were reinforced by the French monarchy, as kings Henry II (ruled 1547–1559) and Francis II (ruled 1559–1560) sought to eliminate heresy in their kingdom via both persecution and prosecution. The surge in Protestant growth in the late 1550s, however, meant that the official royal policy of suppression was never likely to succeed. And when the Huguenots seized several major towns by force in 1561–1562, it was clear that suppression had not worked.

Moreover, by 1562 several key members of some prominent noble families such as the Bourbons and the Albrets had converted to the new religion, further exacerbating political tensions and rivalries at court. Their chief rivals, the Guise family, had long championed the Catholic cause; and since the young King Francis II's wife was Mary Stuart of Scotland, whose mother was Mary of Guise, the Guises found themselves in a position of authority during Francis's reign. When the king died of an ear abscess in December 1560, however, his successor was his nine-year-old brother, Charles IX (ruled 1560–1574). The unwritten French constitution required a regent to be appointed until the young king reached his fourteenth year, when he could then govern in his own right. Catherine de Médicis, Henry II's widow, as queen mother of both Francis II and Charles IX, accepted this position, and it was she who had to face the prospect of dealing with the Protestant problem, given that suppression as a policy had simply not worked. Although she was not in favor of religious toleration in principle—indeed, it was very difficult in the sixteenth century even to imagine such a concept—Catherine attempted to work out some kind of limited coexistence. First, she called together leaders of both the Huguenot and Catholic churches at the Colloquy of Poissy in 1561 to see if a compromise were possible. But both the cardinal of Lorraine on the Catholic side and Théodore de Bèze, Calvin's lieutenant from Geneva on the Protestant side, recognized that significant compromise on either the doctrinal or liturgical issues that divided them was impossible. Despite the lack of success at Poissy, however, Catherine went ahead and issued an edict in January 1562, recognizing the legal right of French Protestants to exist and even worship in a few limited areas of the kingdom for the first time. This milestone was far from religious toleration, but it marked a sharp break with the previous royal policies of persecuting Protestants as heretics. French Catholics, however, refused either to accept or enforce the edict. When the prince of Condé, a Protestant member of the Bourbon family, raised troops to enforce the edict on his own, civil war was the result. Over the next thirty-six years, not only did French Huguenots and Catholics raise armies to fight each other on the battlefield, they also fought each other as civilians in towns and cities across the kingdom. Thus, violence in the streets among civilians became a hallmark of the French Wars of Religion for an extended period, imposing on France an experience unmatched by other territories affected by the Reformation: two generations of civil war.

The outbreak of civil war in the spring of 1562 began a long series of armed conflicts, followed by brief periods of siege or battlefield confrontation between the two armies, and concluded by extended peace negotiations and a peace treaty. Each of these successive civil wars followed a similar pattern. While one side might manage to defeat the other's army on the battlefield, there was no way that either could effectively administer a heavy enough defeat to disarm all the civilians and nobles on the other side, much less occupy its opponent's cities and towns. Thus, each successive peace treaty had to be a forced compromise, offering very limited rights and legal guarantees that were never enough to provide complete security and freedom of worship for French Protestants. But even limited rights were far too numerous for French Catholics, and each period of peace was soon followed by another outbreak of war. In all, France was to suffer through eight separate civil wars between 1562 and 1598.

The St. Bartholomew's Day Massacres

The first major turning point in the religious wars came in August 1572 with the massacres in Paris that began in the early morning hours of 24 August, St. Bartholomew's Day. Two days earlier, members of the Guise family, probably with the tacit support of Catherine de Médicis, had come to the decision to assassinate Gaspard de Coligny, admiral of France and the military leader of the Huguenots, because of fears of a Huguenot military reprisal in Paris, where many Protestant nobles had gathered for the royal wedding between the king's sister Margaret and Henry of Navarre, son of the Protestants Anthony de Bourbon and Jeanne d'Albret, king and queen of Navarre. Though there was no Protestant coup being planned by Coligny, the assassination attempt nevertheless took place. Because it failed, however, only seriously wounding Coligny, the many Huguenot nobles in Paris began to fear for their lives. This only exacerbated the fears of the Guise family and the queen mother, who managed to persuade the king, Charles IX, and the rest of his council on 23 August to undertake another murder attempt on Coligny, this time accompanied by the killing of roughly two dozen of the leading Huguenot nobles in Paris. When these murders were duly carried out in the early morning hours of 24 August, the feast day of St. Bartholomew, many Catholics in Paris misunderstood the killings as a sign that the king wished all Huguenots in Paris to be killed. Since there had already been violence between Protestants and Catholics in Paris the previous year, it did not take much to set off widespread attacks against all Huguenots in the capital. Over the next two days Parisian Catholics killed upwards of 2,000 French Protestants. The events in the capital sparked similar massacres in a dozen provincial towns across the kingdom over the next few weeks. By October 1572 as many as six to eight thousand Huguenots had been killed. These massacres marked an end to Protestant growth in France, not so much because of the loss of life, as considerable as it was, but because of the chilling symbolic impact of the massacres. It appeared to many that the crown had returned to a policy of cruel suppression, while many Huguenots saw the massacres as a sign that God had abandoned them. A significant number of them began to abjure their religion and convert to Catholicism as a result. Most Huguenots did not convert, however, and the intermittent cycle of war and peace soon commenced once again.

The Catholic League

The second major watershed in the civil wars occurred in June 1584 when the last surviving Valois heir to the throne, Francis, duke of Anjou, died from tuberculosis at the age of 29. King Henry III (ruled 1574–1589), who had succeeded his brother Charles IX two years after the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacres, was childless. The death of his younger brother Anjou, who was the last and youngest of Catherine de Médicis's and Henry II's four sons, meant that the next in line to the throne was Henry of Navarre, a Protestant. This unfortunate consequence resulted in the Guise family's organizing a Holy Catholic League, backed by money and troops from King Philip II of Spain, to pressure the king to disavow Navarre, who, despite his legitimacy as heir by birth, was rendered illegitimate because of his religion. The political pressure mounted by the league was so great, in fact, that in 1585 these militant Catholics even managed to get Henry III to issue an ordinance making it illegal to be Protestant in France, revoking all the limited rights of existence that Huguenots had won since Catherine de Médicis's original edict in January 1562. It certainly appeared that the policies of suppression of the 1550s had returned once again. Moreover, when Henry, duke of Guise, entered Paris against Henry III's will in May 1588, Guise's reception was so warm and his popularity among the Parisian people so great that the king was forced to flee his own capital. He gained his revenge by having Guise and his brother murdered in December 1588. Victory was only temporary, however, as Henry III himself was murdered the following August by a disgruntled Catholic monk. Thus, from August 1589 Henry of Navarre was recognized as the legitimate king of France—as King Henry IV (ruled 1589–1610)—only by French Protestants and a small minority of Catholics who were willing to place his legitimacy by birth above his Calvinist religion. The overwhelming majority of French Catholics, however, urged on by the league, refused to accept Navarre's claim to the throne and held out against him. The cycle of civil war was destined to continue.

The Edict of Nantes

The final watershed in the French Wars of Religion occurred in July 1593, after four long years of indecisive fighting between the armies of King Henry IV and the Catholic League. The city of Paris had been besieged by the royalist forces of the king in 1590, and some Parisians even starved to death in a long, ruinous summer. The turning point came when Henry made the decision to abjure his Protestant religion and take instruction in the Catholic faith. It was certainly not a cynical decision, as his enemies claimed, nor one made lightly. Henry had been a devout Calvinist ever since he was first instructed in the faith by his mother. He was forced to recognize, however, that the French constitution required the king to be Catholic. To resolve the long religious conflict and bring the disorders in the kingdom to an end, Henry publicly converted to Catholicism in the summer of 1593. When the pope formally absolved the king shortly thereafter, the many nobles and towns loyal to the league began to submit to his authority and accept him as their new monarch. But Henry IV still faced the same problem as all his predecessors: how to produce a peace treaty that was acceptable to both sides with a chance of survival. The Edict of Nantes, published in the spring of 1598, looked on paper to be very similar to many of the numerous earlier edicts of pacification, none of which had proved very durable. France had suffered horribly during the wars of the league, however, as increased warfare combined with economic and agrarian crises in the 1590s to create loud demands from within various elements of the population to stop the fighting. Bands of armed peasants in Burgundy, Perigord, and Limousin, some of whom may have been organized by elites, organized to keep soldiers out of their villages whether they were Huguenots or Catholics. Thus, the situation was very different from the earlier peace edicts, as the entire kingdom's resolve to continue to wage war in such dire economic circumstances began to waver.

Another principal difference between the Edict of Nantes and the seven earlier edicts of pacification is that Henry IV explicitly appealed to both sides. To the Catholic majority, he promised in the preamble of the edict that France would forever remain a Catholic country, and that one day God would bless his kingdom by reuniting all French men and women in the one true Catholic faith. The various articles of the edict spelled out that the monarchy, the state, and all French institutions would also remain Catholic, thus ensuring that Catholicism would never be jeopardized as the official religion of the kingdom. The edict also restored the Catholic Mass in all Protestant areas where it had been banned, introducing it into some areas for the first time in forty years. In addition, the edict required all Huguenots to begin paying the ecclesiastical tithe to the Catholic Church, just as their Catholic counterparts had always done, in order to provide for the salaries of parish priests throughout the kingdom. On the surface, then, the Edict of Nantes was meant to appease French Catholics, especially those former members of the league who had opposed the king prior to his conversion.

On the other side, the edict made clear that Huguenots had freedom of conscience in France, meaning they would not be persecuted for simply being Protestant. Their right to freedom of worship, however, was severely restricted, limited to those towns mainly in the south of France already under Huguenot control in August 1597. Moreover, all former Catholic churches in these areas were to be turned back over to the French Catholic Church. The Huguenots would have to build their own churches, or worship in private (meaning largely aristocratic) homes in the towns they controlled. But the king also granted the Huguenots concessions not made public in the edict. First, they were given a special subsidy to pay the salaries of their ministers, offsetting the ecclesiastical tithe required in the edict itself. More importantly, Henry granted the Huguenots the right to garrison troops in the towns they controlled, thereby guaranteeing their own safety and defense. Thus in a variety of ways, while the Edict of Nantes initiated a period of religious coexistence, it was far from a policy of religious toleration. And for most among the French Catholic majority, even this religious coexistence was thought to be only temporary, until those remaining Protestants might be won back to the true faith, following the example set by King Henry IV. For them, the future of France was as a kingdom of Catholic uniformity of religion. The Huguenots, however, recognized that their gains in the edict would last only as long as they were loyal to the crown and only as long as their newly converted king chose to enforce them. Henry's son Louis XIII (ruled 1610–1643) sought to dismantle the subsidies and military protection of the Huguenots, while Henry's grandson Louis XIV (ruled 1643–1715) revoked the Edict of Nantes altogether in 1685.

Bibliography

Primary Source

Potter, David, ed. and trans. The French Wars of Religion: Selected Documents. New York, 1997.

Secondary Sources

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—MACK P. HOLT