France also experienced a prolonged period of religious upheaval. During the French Wars of Religion (1562-1598), the nobility and great families divided over religion and political control. Many of the French nobles had become strict, radical Calvinist Protestants, known in France as "Huguenots" (named after the Swiss political leader Besançon Hugues). As elsewhere, Calvinism's stress on discipline, literacy, and individual sobriety appealed not only to well-to-do urban professionals but also to large numbers of the cultivated aristocracy. Not only in France, but also in Poland, reform Calvinism attracted a significant minority of the nobility.
Catholic French kings, such as Francis I and Henry II, opposed this spread of Calvinism and persecuted the Huguenots. (The king's Catholic sympathies only went so far, however: Francis and other monarchs in Europe were willing to ally with the Muslim Turks for political advantage against their fellow Catholics, the Hapsburgs.) But they and their advisors also saw an opportunity to increase royal power by playing Catholic and Protestant factions within the aristocracy against each other. During the reign of Henry II (1547-1559) aristocrats' opposition to the centralization of monarchical authority in France came to a head. Many nobles found in Calvinism a useful doctrine that justified opposition to royal power. Henry II's successors tried to court these dissident Huguenot nobles in an ill-advised attempt to counter the Catholic faction. This policy backfired and France descended into civil war. French Protestants and Catholics, both fearing the other would gain the French crown, indiscriminately and enthusiastically slaughtered each other.
Catholic Spain duly aided the Catholic cause in France with troops and money, invading France a number of times and even relieving Paris when Protestant forces were poised to take it. On the other side, the French Protestants received aid from the English and Dutch, themselves subject to Spanish attack.
After 10 years of civil war, widespread anarchy, and religious massacres (including the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in 1572 and an ultra-Catholic bid for power at the end of the 1580s; in both cases thousands of Huguenots were butchered), the royal succession passed to the King of Navarre (a kingdom in the far south of France, in the Pyrenees Mountains), a Protestant of the Bourbon family line who was willing to reconvert to Catholicism for the sake of ruling France. As for his religious convictions, he allegedly declared, "Paris is worth a mass," meaning that he would give up his Protestant faith to rule France. As King Henry IV, he helped restore peace and ceded Protestants a protected minority status with the Edict of Nantes in 1598, as well as finally driving out the Spanish the same year. Henry was assassinated by a Catholic fanatic in 1610, but not before he had laid the basis for France's rise to greater power and influence in Europe.
The Edict of Nantes granted far-ranging privileges to Protestants. It:
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permitted Protestantism in towns where the majority of worshipers were Protestant affirmed that Protestants should enjoy the same civil rights as Catholics promised that Protestants should have the same opportunities to hold public office, gain access to Catholic universities, and maintain representation in the superior law courts gave Protestants the right to defend themselves, granting them 100 fortified towns under Protestant command and protected by Protestant garrisons. |
Like the Peace of Augsburg, the Edict of Nantes sought religious pacification by territorial partition (the creation of protected enclaves, or havens), and not the full establishment of toleration for individual belief and practice. However, the Edict of Nantes would prove only a temporary settlement to the religious issue. Furthermore, it did nothing to resolve the tensions between the French monarchy and aristocracy.
VIEW A SERIES OF MAPS DEPICTING RELIGIOUS DIVISION IN EUROPE BETWEEN 1519 AND 1721