Religious Wars in France, 1530 to 1610

With the Reformation, what had been Christianity divided into kingdoms was, in some instances, becoming kingdoms divided by religion. In 1540, twenty years after Martin Luther started printing his pamphlets, Protestantism was spreading in France, among lawyers, the urban bourgeoisie and some of the nobility. It spread also to those fervent enough to commit violent attacks against the Catholic church. The Church and fervent laymen moved to defend clergymen from attack and to defend the Church's predominance. In 1541 the Protestant John Calvin was driven from France, to Geneva. In 1542, Pope Paul III launched an Inquisition (Sanctum Officium). Those considered heretics were tried and tortured. Authorities in provincial France had issued the "Decree of Merindol," calling for the extermination of the Waldensian heretics, a heresy still around from the 1100s now making common cause with the movement started by Luther. An expedition against the Waldensians began on April 16, 1545. In two months, twenty-two villages were razed and 3,000 men, women and children are said to have been killed and 700 rounded up for later execution. Fervor was high among the defenders of the faith, and in 1546 a Protestant congregation in Meaux was attacked and fourteen of its members burned to death. That year, Peter Chapot was burned at the stake for bringing into France Bibles that were in French rather than Latin.

In France the Volois Dynasty ruled. The King of France, Francis I, supported the move against Protestants (called Huguenots). He had signed the order for the attack on the Waldensians, but he had been desultory, his delay in signing the order postponing the attack for five years. And he regretted the massacres in the remaining two years of his life. King Francis was France's first renaissance king, a humanist, the Restorer of Letters. He was a major patron of the arts and a close friend of Leonardo da Vinci.

After the death of Francis in 1547, his 28-year-old son was crowned Henry II, and Henry continued the effort to rid France of what he called "Lutheran scum." Under Henry, tribunals and magistrates were invested with inquisitorial powers. The works of Martin Luther, John Calvin and others were prohibited. And more Protestants were burned at the stake.

Henry died from a jousting accident, a long splinter of wood from a lance having pierced his eye and brain. That year, 1559, his sickly fifteen-year-old son was crowned Francis II. Francis had married the year before to Mary, Queen of the Scots. Mary's uncle, François de Guise, a military hero is France, was elevated to Grand Master. He was in effective control of the government and living in the royal palace -- the Louve -- with other members of the Guise family. The mother of King Francis II, Catherine de Medici, was regent for Francis. But she was worried about her power and influence. The Guise family were hardline opponents of toleration. Catherine was a devout Catholic who looked upon Protestantism with at least a little sympathy. She spoke to a couple of Protestant leaders, the Prince of Conde and Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, about liberty and security for all Protestants within France. French Protestants looked with hope to Catherine, and Catherine looked to the Protestants for support.

In 1560 young Francis died. Catherine became regent for her younger son, age eleven, crowned Charles IX. She nominated a moderate chancellor, and in early 1562 an Edict of Toleration was issued. On March 1, a member of the Guise family, François de Guise, stopped to attend a mass in the town of Vassy and in town found Huguenots holding religious ceremonies. Outraged, he ordered led men in setting fire to the Huegenot church, killing over eighty Huguenots and wounding many others. This began what was to be to be called the First French War of Religion.

Another noble family, the Bourbons, was on the side of the Protestants, and they began to garrison strategic towns along the Loire River. While François de Guise was at Orléans leading an offensive against the Protestants, he was assassinated. Catherine negotiated a truce which guaranteed certain liberties to the Protestants. She managed to have her son Charles declared of age, giving him authority to maintain peace.

Fighting erupted again, in September 1568. Another shaky truce was established in 1570, which broke down in 1571, when enraged Catholics killed more Protestants, at Paris, Rouen and Orange. Charles IX, now 21, drew closer to Protestant leaders while his mother drew closer to her Catholic faith. Catherine feared that Charles would make an alliance with Protestant England and the Protestant Dutch rebels fighting the Habsburg monarch, Philip II of Spain. In France, the Guise family had the support of Philip II, and Catherine went over to the side of the House of Guise. Leaders of the war against the Protestants entertained the notion that the best way to curtail the danger of the Protestant movement was to eliminate its leaders. In Paris, the Protestant leader, Gaspard de Coligny was wounded, and two days later he died. That was August 24, St. Bartholomew's Day. Protestants in Paris rose up in anger. Those opposed to Protestantism responded. In what became known as the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, 2,000 Protestants or more were killed. And the killing spread to the provinces. King Philip of Spain and Pope Gregory XIII declared themselves pleased by the new attack on Protestantism, and, outside France, Protestants responded with horror.

While in his early twenties, Charles IX already looked like an old man. He was melancholy, quiet, hesitating and, it is said, haunted by nightmares. He died in 1574, a month short of twenty-four. He was succeeded by his 22-year-old brother, who was crowned Henry III, under whom the religious warring continued. Henry III vacillated between pleasure seeking, including male lovers, wearing women's clothing, repentance and devotion to his Catholic faith. Under Henry III many nobles attempted independence -- while about half of France's nobility were Calvinist. In 1576 King Henry granted minor concessions to the Protestants (the Edict of Beaulieu), and this upset the Catholic hardliners around Henry the Duke of Guise. The Duke of Guise created the "Catholic League" and continued to enjoy the support of Spain, while the Protestants remained a power in France's southwest, with moral support from Protestant England and other Protestant states.

During the wars of religion the transport of goods ceased. There were attempts to rob enemies of foodstuffs. There had been crop failures and epidemics. Towns were set on fire. Agricultural production in Auvergne, Lyon, Burgundy and Languedoc declined around 40 percent. The banking houses in Lyon declined in number to less than half what they had been. Purchasing power and manufacturing were in decline. A Catholic faction had held Protestants to be traitors and heretics in league with the devil and clamored for the state to have them exterminated as enemies of humanity. But moderate Catholics dominated the courts and the extremists extermination program failed to win state support.

Henry III had no children, and his younger brother and heir to the throne died. According to the traditional rules of succession, called Salic Law, the throne was to pass to the King Henry of Navarre, the descendant of the eldest surviving male line of the Capetian Dynasty (which had ruled in France to 1328) and the ninth cousin of the late King Henry II. Henry of Navarre was the leading member of the Bourbon family and had been fighting on the side of France's Protestants. Henry the Duke of Guise pressured Henry III, King of France, to annul the right of King Henry of Navarre to France's throne. A war was fought between 1585 and 1589 called the "War of the Three Henries." The Duke of Guise and his archbishop brother were invited to consult with Henry III, whose guards murdered the two. And in 1589 an outraged Catholic assassinated Henry III. Of the three Henries, only Henry of Navarre was left, and nominally king of France. Henry won military victories at Ivry and Arques but failed to take Paris.

Henry needed more support if he were to be recognized as king, as Henry's opponents were in conflict declaring an alternative king. In the eyes of many people in France, the Guises were trainted by their association with Spain. Henry won his needed support by converting to Catholicism, encouraged by the woman he loved, Gabrielle d'Estrée. Still wanting to control Paris, he said that Paris was worth a Mass. He was crowned King Henry IV on February 27, 1594.

Henry had long favored tolerance, having denounced Catholic extremists as follows:

We believe in one God, we recognize Jesus Christ, and we draw on the same Gospel... I believe that the war which you so ardently pursue in unworthy of Christians.

In 1598 Henry IV issued the Edict of Nantes. It proclaimed that "everything done by one party or the other" during "the preceding period of troubles" was to remain "obliterated and forgotten, as if no such things ever happened." Catholic establishments were to be restored wherever they had been interrupted. And Protestants were to have rights equal to those of Catholics.

King Henry, to be called Henry the Great, the first Bourbon king of France, reigned until 1610. Peace made a new prosperity possible, with Henry announcing that if God allowed him to live long enough he would see to it that every laborer had a chicken in his pot on Sunday. Henry encouraged education and undertook many public works, including canal building and the planting of pines, elms and fruit trees. He renewed Paris as a great city. Wikipedia describes him as "a man of kindness, compassion, and good humor, and much loved by his people." But highly religious fanatics were still around, and, in 1610, one of them, François Ravaillac, a disturbed man, believed that Henry was about to make war against the pope. Ravaillac stabbed Henry to death. Ravaillac was quickly seized, preventing a mob lynching. He received what today is considered harsh punishment: he was scalded with burning sulphur, molten lead and boiling oil and resin. His flesh was torn apart by pincers and his body pulled apart. His parents were forced into exile and other members of his family ordered never to use the name Ravaillac.

The French remembered Henry IV as the best of their monarchs.