French Wars of Religion
Between two and four million people died from the French Wars of Religion, killed by violence, famine, or disease the fighting set loose. They were a series of civil wars between French Catholics and Protestants, called Huguenots, running from 1562 to 1598. Across thirty-six years, peace treaties were signed and then broken, leaders were murdered in their own council chambers, and Catholic mobs slaughtered their Protestant neighbours in the streets of Paris. The monarchy itself nearly came apart. So how does a quarrel over how to read the Bible become a war that severely damaged the power of the French crown? Who were the queen mother and the rival noble houses fighting behind three short-lived kings? And how did a Protestant prince end the whole thing by walking into a Catholic mass?
Renaissance humanism arrived in France in the early 16th century, carrying with it the principle of ad fontes, the return to original sources. Scholars argued that interpreting the Bible required reading the New and Old Testaments in their original Greek and Hebrew, not the 4th century Latin translation known as the Vulgate Bible. This was not an abstract academic point. It put the foundations of Catholic authority up for debate.
In 1495, the Venetian Aldus Manutius began using the newly invented printing press to make small, inexpensive pocket editions of Greek, Latin, and vernacular literature. Cheap pamphlets and broadsides let theological ideas spread at an unprecedented pace. In 1519, John Froben published a collection of works by Martin Luther and noted that 600 copies were shipped to France and Spain and sold in Paris.
In 1521, a group of reformers including Jacques Lefèvre and Guillaume Briçonnet, recently appointed bishop of Meaux, formed the Circle of Meaux to improve the quality of preaching. They were joined by François Vatable, an expert in Hebrew, and Guillaume Budé, a classicist and Royal librarian. Lefèvre's writings stressed the literal interpretation of the Bible and the centrality of Jesus Christ.
Marguerite de Navarre, sister of Francis I and mother of Jeanne d'Albret, also belonged to the Circle. Her collection of stories, the Heptaméron, attacked clerical immorality. Another member, Guillaume Farel, was exiled to Geneva in 1530 and persuaded John Calvin to join him there. Calvin's return to Geneva in 1541 would let him forge the doctrine that bears his name.
On the night of the Affair of the Placards in October 1534, Protestant radicals put up posters in Paris and provincial towns rejecting the Catholic doctrine of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. One was fixed to the door of the king's own bedchamber. Francis I, furious at the breach of security, abandoned the tolerance he had shown and moved to punish those responsible.
On the 21st of February 1535, a number of people implicated in the Affair were executed in front of Notre-Dame de Paris, an event Francis attended alongside members of the Ottoman embassy to France. The episode let Protestantism be clearly defined as heresy. The crown had tried to remain neutral in the religious debate, and now that neutrality was gone.
In October 1545, Francis ordered the punishment of Waldensians based in the south-eastern village of Mérindol, a Proto-Protestant tradition dating back to the 13th century that had recently affiliated with the Reformed church. In the Massacre of Mérindol, Provençal troops killed numerous residents and destroyed another 22 to 28 nearby villages, sending hundreds of men to the galleys.
Francis I died on the 31st of March 1547. His son Henry II was even more severe, sincerely believing all Protestants were heretics. On the 27th of June 1551, his Edict of Châteaubriant sharply curtailed the right of Protestants to worship and let the crown seize the property of those it called heretics.
Calvin, originally from Noyon in Picardy, went into exile in 1535 and settled in Basel, where he published the Institutes of the Christian Religion in 1538. From Geneva he then provided leadership and organisational structures for the Reformed Church of France. The new faith proved attractive across the social hierarchy, yet its spread was highly regionalised, with no coherent geographical pattern.
Lutheranism flourished in the cities and among the commercial class but was not adopted by the peasantry. The rapid growth of the movement was driven by the nobility, among whom being a Huguenot became fashionable. It is believed to have started when Condé passed through Geneva on his way home from a military campaign and heard a Calvinist sermon.
Jeanne d'Albret, Queen of Navarre, converted to Calvinism in 1560, possibly through the influence of Theodore de Beze. Along with Condé, her husband Antoine of Navarre, and their son Henry of Navarre, she became a leader of the Huguenot cause. The conversion of large sections of the nobility lent the movement real weight.
Historians estimate that by the outbreak of war in 1562 there were around two million French Calvinists, including more than half of the nobility, backed by 1,200 to 1,250 churches. That was a substantial threat to a monarchy already nearly bankrupted by the Italian wars, which had ended in 1559 with the treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis.
The death of Henry II in July 1559 created a political vacuum and a struggle for power that the 15-year-old Francis II lacked the ability to control. Francis, Duke of Guise, whose niece Mary, Queen of Scots, was married to the king, moved to dominate his rivals in the House of Montmorency. The English ambassador reported that the house of Guise ruleth and doth all about the French King.
When Francis II died on the 5th of December 1560, his mother Catherine de' Medici became regent for her second son, the nine year old Charles IX. With the state financially exhausted, she had to preserve the monarchy's independence from competing nobles, each commanding what amounted to a private army. To offset the Guise, she let Antoine of Navarre renounce any claim to the regency in return for Condé's release and the post of Lieutenant-General of France.
Catherine weighed several options for dealing with heresy: continuing Henry II's failed eradication, converting the monarchy to Calvinism as de Bèze preferred, or a middle path of allowing both religions. She enacted conciliatory measures, including the Edict of the 19th of April 1561, which recognised Catholicism as the state religion while reducing penalties for so-called heresy.
The Colloquy of Poissy opened on the 8th of September 1561, with Protestants led by de Bèze and Catholics by Charles, Cardinal of Lorraine, brother of the Duke of Guise. By the time it ended on the 8th of October, the divide between the two theologies proved too wide to bridge. Catherine's government then passed the Edict of Saint-Germain, which let Protestants worship in public outside towns and in private inside them.
On the 1st of March, Guise family retainers attacked a Calvinist service in Champagne, the massacre of Vassy, widely seen as the spark of open hostilities. In response, a group of nobles led by Condé proclaimed their intention of liberating the king from evil councillors and seized Orléans on the 2nd of April 1562. Protestant groups across France quickly followed, garrisoning Angers, Blois, and Tours, and after capturing Lyon on the 30th of April they demolished its Catholic institutions.
At Toulouse, Huguenots seizing the Hôtel de ville met Catholic mobs in street battles that left over 3,000 dead, mostly Huguenots. The major engagements came at Rouen, Dreux, and Orléans. At the Siege of Rouen, Antoine of Navarre died of his wounds. At Dreux in December 1562, Condé was captured by royalists while the constable Montmorency was captured by Huguenots.
In February 1563, at the Siege of Orléans, Francis, Duke of Guise, was shot and killed by the Huguenot Jean de Poltrot de Méré. Because he was killed outside direct combat, the Guise treated it as an assassination ordered by Admiral Coligny. The resulting unrest pushed Catherine to mediate the Edict of Amboise on the 19th of March 1563.
Nearly a decade later, the crown sought reconciliation through a marriage between Henry of Navarre and Margaret of Valois, the king's sister, held in August 1572. A few days after the wedding, Admiral Coligny was shot on his way home from council. The court, alarmed at the prospect of Protestant forces marching on the capital, decided to strike pre-emptively at the Huguenot leadership.
On the morning of the 24th of August, St Bartholomew's Day, kill squads formed. One under Guise killed Coligny around 4am, leaving his mutilated body to be thrown into the Seine. By dawn the plan had collapsed into general slaughter, as militant Parisians killed their Huguenot neighbours under the claim that the king willed it. King Charles IX proclaimed a day of jubilee even as the killing continued. Historians estimate 2,000 were killed in Paris and perhaps 10,000 across France. Henry of Navarre and the young Prince of Condé survived by agreeing to convert to Catholicism, then repudiated the conversions once they escaped Paris.
The fragile compromise ended in 1584 when the Duke of Anjou, the king's youngest brother and heir presumptive, died. Under Salic Law the next heir was the Calvinist Henry of Navarre, a descendant of Louis IX. When it became clear he would not renounce his faith, the Duke of Guise signed the Treaty of Joinville on the 31st of December 1584 with Philip II of Spain, who supplied an annual grant to the Catholic League to keep the civil war going.
The solidly Catholic people of Paris, under the Committee of Sixteen, grew dissatisfied with Henry III. On the 12th of May 1588, the Day of the Barricades, a popular uprising raised barricades to defend the Duke of Guise, and Henry III fled the city. The mediation of Catherine de' Medici led to the Edict of Union, in which the crown conceded almost everything the League demanded.
Viewing the House of Guise as a threat to the crown, Henry III decided to strike first. On the 23rd of December 1588, at the Château de Blois, Henry of Guise and his brother the Cardinal de Guise were lured into a trap. Guardsmen seized the duke and stabbed him in the heart, while the Cardinal later died on the pikes of his escort. The Catholic League declared open war, and the Sorbonne declared Henri deposed.
Henry III now joined his cousin Henry of Navarre against the League. In July 1589, in the royal camp at Saint-Cloud, a Dominican friar named Jacques Clément gained an audience with the king and drove a long knife into his spleen. On his deathbed Henry III named Henry of Navarre his heir under Salic Law, begging him to become a Catholic to avoid the brutal warfare that would otherwise follow.
Henry of Navarre, now styling himself Henry IV of France, held the south and west in 1589, while the Catholic League held the north and east under the Duke de Mayenne. In September 1589 he defeated Mayenne at the Battle of Arques, then swept through Normandy taking town after town. The Battle of Ivry, fought on the 14th of March 1590, was another key victory.
Henry knew he had to take Paris to rule all of France, and that was no easy task. His siege of the city was lifted by a Spanish army under the Duke of Parma. The same pattern repeated at Rouen. Parma was wounded in the arm at the Siege of Caudebec and died at Arras on the 3rd of December 1593 from that wound.
Despite the campaigns between 1590 and 1592, Henry was no closer to capturing Paris. Realising no Protestant king could win over resolutely Catholic Paris, he agreed to convert, reputedly saying Paris vaut bien une messe, Paris is well worth a mass. His abjuration of the Protestant faith on the 25th of July 1593 at the Abbey of Saint-Denis won over many opponents, and he was crowned at Chartres Cathedral on the 27th of February 1594. Paris received him in March 1594.
Henry and his advisor the Duke of Sully made the Edict of Nantes the first step in rebuilding a shattered kingdom. Rather than genuine toleration, it was a grudging truce with guarantees for both sides. The Edict marks the end of the Wars of Religion, and the Peace of Vervins in May 1598 closed the war with Spain. Yet religious tension persisted, and Henry IV faced many attempts on his life. The last succeeded in May 1610, and decades later, in October 1685, his grandson Louis XIV revoked the Edict entirely with the Edict of Fontainebleau.
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Common questions
What were the French Wars of Religion?
The French Wars of Religion were a series of civil wars between French Catholics and Protestants, called Huguenots, from 1562 to 1598. Between two and four million people died from violence, famine, or disease caused by the conflict, and it severely damaged the power of the French monarchy.
When did the French Wars of Religion start and end?
The agreed beginning of the French Wars of Religion is the Massacre of Vassy in 1562. The fighting ended in 1598 with the Edict of Nantes and the Peace of Vervins, signed on the 2nd of May 1598, though the 1620s Huguenot rebellions lead some historians to date the conclusion to the Peace of Alès in 1629.
What was the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre in the French Wars of Religion?
The St. Bartholomew's Day massacre began on the morning of the 24th of August 1572, when kill squads struck at the Huguenot leadership in Paris and Admiral Coligny was killed around 4am. The violence spread for five days and across more than a dozen cities, and historians estimate that 2,000 Huguenots were killed in Paris and perhaps 10,000 in all of France.
How did Henry IV end the French Wars of Religion?
Henry of Navarre, proclaimed Henry IV, ended the French Wars of Religion by converting to Catholicism on the 25th of July 1593, reputedly saying Paris vaut bien une messe, Paris is well worth a mass. In 1598 he issued the Edict of Nantes, granting the Huguenots substantial rights as a grudging truce between the religions.
Who was Catherine de' Medici in the French Wars of Religion?
Catherine de' Medici was the widow of Henry II of France who became regent after the death of her son Francis II on the 5th of December 1560, ruling on behalf of the nine year old Charles IX. She tried to balance competing Catholic and Protestant factions and her January 1562 Edict of Saint-Germain was strongly opposed by the Guise faction.
What happened to the Edict of Nantes after the French Wars of Religion?
The Edict of Nantes granted the Huguenots substantial rights but was later weakened during the 17th century. In October 1685, Henry IV's grandson Louis XIV issued the Edict of Fontainebleau, which formally revoked the Edict of Nantes and made the practice of Protestantism illegal in France.
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