The French Wars of Religion, 1562–1629

"Absolutely. For a newcomer to the field, I would start with Holt because he gives you the whole background to Henri’s life story, the world in which Henri grew up. When the first civil war broke out, Henri was about nine or ten years old, and conflict marked his entire life until he became king, and thereafter, for another nine or ten years. Holt is very strong in seeing that the so-called civil wars are really one civil war. If you’re a very pedantic historian, you can divide them up into nine or ten, but it’s really one civil war that runs on and on, punctuated by brief truces for a number of months, all the way from 1562 or so, until the Edict of Nantes in 1598. It’s the perfect storm. You have court politics and dynastic failures, social tensions, economic distress, demographic shifts, and a bitter religious divide. Where Holt has made his ​mark is that a lot of 20th-century historians—under the influence of one school of thinking or another—have tried to make everything except religion the key element. It’s always something else: demography, the rivalry of noble houses, regional differences—all of which have a part to play. But the critical thing here is religion. If you don’t focus on that, you don’t understand the mentality of the people of that age. The idea of separating secular and religious didn’t exist in the minds of 16th-century people, which is a problem for historians of that period who like to separate those two out. Holt has this concept, which I agree with, that religious identity can be as much about a community of believers as it is about a belief system, and so a breakdown of religious consensus in a religiously homogenous society means a breakdown of that society. “These quarrels of the 16th century were international” In the context of 16th century France, Holt demonstrates that you not only have a dynamic, vigorous Calvinist movement in France, but you also have a Catholic religious renewal in France at the same that takes place by mid-century, some of which is influenced by the Council of Trent and some of which is an indigenous reaction to the spread of Calvinism. Holt recognizes what you find everywhere in that period in Western Europe, the irresistible force meeting the immovable object—i.e. a resurgent Catholicism rising to meet the dynamic Protestant movement and thereby setting off this gigantic explosion all over Europe. Holt also argues that Henri believed in the old formula: one king, one law, one faith. Henri concluded that his state, and ultimately the​ monarchy, rested on the alliance with the traditional Church, to which the majority of the population would continue to adhere. He saw the Edict of Nantes (1598) as buying time to persuade Calvinists to return to the older, still predominant Catholicism. Once he himself converted, he was baffled that not everybody was coming along with him. In after years, Henri made it very clear that those who did convert would bask in the royal sunshine: a pension or a new post or position would materialise as a reward. Holt sees a straight line between what Henri was trying to do and what Richelieu and Louis XIV did, with the latter bringing the whole thing to an end with the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. In the 1620s, a number of short wars were waged by Louis XIII and Richelieu against the Protestants. At the end of it, in 1629, they stripped the Protestants of all the military garrisons and fortresses granted by the Edict of Nantes. Huguenots were still tolerated religiously, but effectively they were disarmed and defenseless against further encroachments, paving the way for the revocation in 1685."