The French Wars of Religion, 1562-1629

In the kingdom of France, unlike anywhere else in all of Europe, the religious division of the Reformation resulted in a decades-long series of civil wars that pitted not just Protestant and Catholic armies against each other on the battlefield, but civilians against each other and neighbor against neighbor in a number of cities and towns throughout the kingdom. Indeed, the French Wars of Religion have become known more for the religious violence perpetrated during the conflict than for anything else. In many narratives, the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of August 24, 1572 in the French capital, Paris, seems to have become the synthesis of the entire conflict.

But French men and women were no more violent or fanatical in their beliefs than other Christians, and it was a perfect storm of specific historical circumstances that best explains why no other nation suffered thirty-five years of civil war with such popular violence. These circumstances include not only a series of young and inexperienced kings following the death of Henry II in 1559, but also the fact that Calvinism emerged suddenly and grew exponentially in southern France in the 1540s and 1550s, largely because of the Reformation in neighboring Geneva, whereby Calvin sent hundreds of pastors across the French border to found Reformed congregations. By 1562, over 800 such Reformed churches had been founded in France in less than two decades, and by that time Protestants made up nearly 10 percent of the population of the kingdom. All the monarchy’s efforts to blunt and counter this growth proved ineffective. The religious wars that emerged starting in 1562 were hardly inevitable, but they were a product of a significant number of French nobles converting to the new religion. Without these noble converts, there would never have been a substantial Huguenot military force, which not only protected the minority faith but also necessitated a substantial royal military presence for the long duration of the wars. And it was the noble leadership of first the Prince of Condé, then Admiral Coligny, and finally Henry of Navarre that enabled the Huguenots to survive as long as they did in the hope of gaining complete freedom of conscience and practice of their faith.