The French Wars of Religion and the Peace That Followed

There is a grim phrase associated with the man who finally ended France’s religious wars: “Paris is well worth a Mass.” Whether King Henry IV actually said it or not, the words capture something essential about how a country that had been tearing itself to pieces over religion for more than thirty years finally found its way to peace. The story of the French Wars of Religion is one of the darkest chapters in the nation’s history — and its resolution, in the Edict of Nantes of 1598, was one of the most remarkable acts of tolerance the early modern world produced.

The trouble began, as it did across much of Europe in the sixteenth century, with the Reformation. The new Protestant ideas spreading out of Germany and Switzerland found fertile ground in France, and a substantial minority of the population — including a large slice of the nobility — converted to a Calvinist form of Protestantism. In France these Protestants were known as Huguenots. They were never a majority, but they were numerous, wealthy, well organised and concentrated enough in certain regions to be a serious force, and Catholic France regarded them with deepening alarm and hatred.

An old French church — The spread of Calvinist ideas split France into hostile Catholic and Protestant camps.

From around 1562, the tension exploded into open warfare, and what followed was not one war but a series of them — historians count as many as eight separate conflicts over the following decades. It was a vicious, intimate kind of violence, neighbour against neighbour, with massacres, sieges and assassinations on both sides. The monarchy, weakened by a succession of young or ineffective kings and dominated for years by the formidable queen mother Catherine de’ Medici, struggled to control the chaos and at times actively made it worse.

The single most notorious episode came in August 1572, an event so shocking it still casts a shadow over French history: the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. What began as a targeted assassination of Huguenot leaders gathered in Paris for a royal wedding spiralled into a frenzy of mob killing. Thousands of Protestants were slaughtered in the capital over a few days, and the violence then spread to other cities across France. The death toll has never been established with certainty, but it ran well into the thousands, and the massacre became a byword for religious atrocity throughout Europe.

Renaissance era Paris — The St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre turned the streets of Paris into a scene of slaughter.

The wars dragged on, and matters came to a head in a particularly tangled crisis at the end of the century. Through a series of deaths, the man with the strongest claim to the French throne turned out to be Henry of Navarre — who was, awkwardly for a country that was overwhelmingly Catholic, the leader of the Huguenots. Catholic France was horrified at the prospect of a Protestant king, and a hardline Catholic faction fought ferociously to keep him off the throne, even at the cost of inviting in foreign Spanish intervention.

A Renaissance French king — Henry of Navarre, a Protestant, found himself heir to the throne of a fiercely Catholic nation.

Henry’s solution was pragmatic to the point of ruthlessness, and it is where that famous line about Paris comes in. Recognising that he could never rule a Catholic country as a Protestant, and that the bloodshed would otherwise never end, he converted to Catholicism. It was, by most accounts, a political calculation rather than a spiritual conversion, and it worked: with his conversion the Catholic resistance crumbled, and Henry IV was finally able to enter Paris and rule as the undisputed king. He proved to be one of France’s most capable and popular monarchs, remembered with genuine affection for rebuilding the war-shattered country.

But Henry did not forget the Protestants he had once led, and in 1598 he issued the document that crowned his reign: the Edict of Nantes. It was an extraordinary thing for its time. While confirming Catholicism as the official religion of France, the edict granted the Huguenots a substantial and clearly defined set of rights — freedom of conscience, the right to worship in specified places, equal eligibility for public office, and even control of a number of fortified towns where they could defend themselves. In an age when most rulers believed a kingdom could have only one faith, it was a bold experiment in coexistence.

An old sealed document — The Edict of Nantes granted France’s Protestants protected rights in a fiercely Catholic kingdom.

The edict did not solve everything, and it was always resented by hardliners. Henry IV himself was eventually assassinated by a Catholic fanatic in 1610, a reminder of how raw the wounds remained. And the tolerance it established proved fragile in the longer run: decades later, Henry’s grandson Louis XIV would revoke the Edict of Nantes entirely, stripping the Huguenots of their rights and driving tens of thousands of them — many of them skilled and productive citizens — into exile abroad, to the lasting benefit of the countries that took them in and the lasting cost of France.

Still, for a generation the Edict of Nantes gave a war-weary country something precious: peace, and a working model of how people of different faiths might live side by side under one crown. From this hard-won and ultimately fragile tolerance we’ll turn next to the king who undid it — and who, more than any other, came to embody the very idea of absolute royal power: Louis XIV, the Sun King, and his glittering palace at Versailles.