The French Wars of Religion

My dissertation and first book, Rouen During the Wars of Religion (Cambridge University Press, 1981), was initially conceived as a local study of the Catholic League, the regicidal insurrectionary movement of the last phase of France’s sixteenth-century civil wars. It expanded into a study of the full course of the religious wars in a major provincial metropolis upon investigating Rouen’s rich archives, which drew my attention to the agitated years between 1561 and 1572 and yielded the surprising discovery that the size of the city’s important Huguenot minority shrank by more than four fifths between the mid-1560s and the years 1578-1584, chiefly because of flight and defection in the wake of the local Saint Bartholomew’s Massacre. Methodologically, the dissertation and book drew heavily on the quantitative methods and “total history” ambitions of the Annales school, which it sought to combine with a sensitivity to the importance of events as well as structures. The pioneering social historical study of the Catholic League by Henri Drouot, Natalie Zemon Davis’s work on the sociology of the French Protestant movement, and the studies of crowd action by both English and French historians also shaped the questions it asked and the topics it examined. 

Where the previously dominant interpretation of the Wars of Religion depicted the civil wars as driven chiefly by aristocratic rivalries, Rouen revealed violence that welled up from within localities suddenly riven between two radically antithetical understandings of the sacred. It then sought to trace the course, shifting nature, and consequences of this violence, situated within its social and political contexts, in one of France’s largest cities at the time. Although chiefly a local study, it also reconstructed the movement of the Protestant population of other French cities and villages for which good sets of Reformed baptismal records from the 1560s through the 1590s survive. A concluding chapter, “the Wars of Religion and the people of France,” widened the focus to propose a new interpretation of the nature and phases of the conflict at the national level. Thanks to the advent of on-demand publishing, the book is still available from Cambridge University Press.

After completing Rouen, I thought I had said all I had to say about the Wars of Religion. Having traced the sequence of conflicts touched off in a major provincial city by the sudden emergence around 1560 of an important Protestant minority, I next focused my archival research on seeking to understand the longer-term consequences of attachment to the Reformed faith for the smaller, more chastened Huguenot minority that emerged from the crucible of the Wars of Religion after 1598. (See the Research and Publications Section: The Huguenots Under the Edict of Nantes and In Diaspora.) I also accepted a commission to write a broad history of European Calvinism that required me to read widely in the literature about the Reformed churches from the British Isles to Eastern Europe. (See the Research and Publications Section: Calvinism in Transnational Perspective.) The encounter with other national historiographies of Calvinism, most notably with the Dutch literature about the Calvinist “revolutionary Reformation” in the Netherlands, led me to see the extent to which the historiography of French Protestantism had always downplayed the ambition and aggressiveness of the movement in its years of dramatic growth between c. 1555 and 1562. The co-organization with colleagues from the Netherlands, Belgium, and France of a 1996 conference comparing Reformation, Revolt and Civil War in France and the Netherlands 1555-1585  provided me with a first occasion to articulate what I now observed about “The Dynamics of Protestant Militancy: France, 1555-1563.” Not long thereafter I decided that I would return to the subject of the Wars of Religion and more specifically to the dramatic and eventful years between c. 1555 and 1563, marked by the foundation and rapid multiplication of organized Reformed churches. The explosive growth of these churches awakened high hopes among their members that the Roman Antichrist was about to topple from his throne. Instead, a tragic course of events and decisions brought a bloody civil war. These years have been at the center of my research ever since.

Related Publications

1. Dissertation-related research published in article form

“Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth-Century Rouen:  The Demographic Effects of the Religious Wars,” French Historical Studies 9 (1975), 209-234.

“Heurs et malheurs d’un gros bourg drapant:  note sur la population de Darnétal aux 16e et 17e siècles,” Annales de Normandie 28 (1978), 195-205.

“The Saint Bartholomew’s Massacres in the Provinces,” The Historical Journal 21 (1978), 205-225.

“The Catholic Response to Protestantism:  Church Activity and Popular Piety in Rouen, 1560-1600” in J. Obelkevich, ed., Religion and the People, 800-1700 (University of North Carolina Press, 1979), p. 168-190. 

Rouen During the Wars of Religion (Cambridge University Press, 1981).

“Rouen’s Foreign Trade in the Age of the Religious Wars (1560-1600),” The Journal of European Economic History 13 (1984), 29-74. 

2. Reinterpretations of events and aspects of the years 1555-1563

“The Dynamics of Protestant Militancy: France, 1555-1563” in Philip Benedict, Guido Marnef, Henk van Nierop and Marc Venard eds., Reformation, Revolt and Civil War in France and the Netherlands (Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1999), p. 35-50.

“From Polemics to Wars: The Curious Case of the House of Guise and the Outbreak of the French Wars of Religion,” Historein 6 (2006), 97-105.

“Claude Haton face aux Etats Généraux” in Actes du colloque Claude Haton en son temps, Bulletin de la Société Historique et Archéologique de l’Arrondissement de Provins 163 (2009), 43-50.

“The Massacre of Vassy” (English text of “1^er mars 1562: le massacre de Wassy,” published in translation in L’histoire de France vue d’ailleurs. Du siège d’Alésia à l’élection de François Mitterrand, 50 événements racontés par des historiens étrangers eds. Jean-Noel Jeanneney and Jeanne Guérout (Paris: Editions des Arènes, 2016).  

Season of Conspiracy: Calvin, the French Reformed Churches, and Protestant Plotting in the Reign of Francis II (1559-60) Transactions of the American Philosophical Society Vol. 108, Part 5 (Philadelphia, American Philosophical Society Press, 2020). To purchase hard copy from North America. To purchase hard copy from Europe. J-Stor link. Post-publication Addenda, Errata, and Notes: New Information about the Amboise conspirator Châteauneuf, a.k.a. “Velours Nose.”

“Condé, ses contacts avec les Églises réformées jusqu’en 1562, son rôle dans les conspirations sous François II,” pre-publication version of a paper presented at the conference “Louis 1er de Condé, prince du sang et huguenot, 1530-1569,” Château de Chantilly, October 3, 2019, revised for promised publication October 2020, posted August 2024.

“Une stratégie de conquête (1559-1562),” in La France huguenote. Histoire institutionnelle d’une minorité religieuse (XVIe-XVIIIe siècle) eds. Philippe Chareyre and Hugues Daussy (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2024), p. 39-60. Note: the version posted here contains only my original text and illustrations. It omits illustrations and accompanying text inserted during the editorial process without my approval.

3. Polemics, Persuasion, and Peacemaking

“Of Marmites and Martyrs:  Images and Polemics in the Wars of Religion” in The French Renaissance in Prints/La gravure française à la Renaissance (exhibition catalogue, Los Angeles and Paris, 1994).

“Securing Pluralism amid Intolerance: The Edict of Nantes and its Antecedents” in Quatercentenary Celebration of the Promulgation of the Edict of Nantes (New York: The Huguenot Society of America, 2002), 49-65.

“Propaganda, Print and Persuasion in the French Reformation. A Review Article,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 69 (2007), 447-472.

4. Putting religion back into the Wars of Religion — but just how? On the relationship between religion and politics in sixteenth-century France and in early modern Europe more generally.

“Were the French Wars of Religion Really Wars of Religion?” in Wolfgang Palaver, Dietmar Regensburger, and Harriet Rudolph eds., The European Wars of Religion. An Interdisciplinary Reassessment of Sources, Myths, and Interpretations (Farnham: Ashgate, 2016), p. 61-86.

“Pour quoi luttaient les protestants en 1562? Sur la dissémination et réception des déclarations du prince de Condé” in Gabriele Haug-Moritz and Lothar Schilling eds., Médialité et interprétation contemporaine des premières guerres de Religion (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2014), p. 24-36.

“Religion and Politics in Europe, 1500-1700” in K. von Greyerz and K. Siebenhuener eds., Religion und Gewalt in der Frühen Neuzeit (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2005), p. 155-174, also published in a slightly different version as “Religion and Politics in the European Struggle for Stability, 1500-1700” in Philip Benedict and Myron Gutmann eds., Early Modern Europe: From Crisis to Stability (University of Delaware Press, 2005) and in French translation as “Religion et politique en Europe (1500-1700),” Annales de l’Est, 6th ser., 59 (2009), 11-30.

“Prophets in Arms? Ministers in War, Ministers on War: France, 1562-1574”, in Graeme Murdock, Penny Roberts and Andrew Spicer eds., Ritual and Violence: Natalie Davis and Early Modern France, Past & Present Supplement no. 7 (Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 163-196.

Still more publications pertinent to the history of the French Wars of Religion may be found under the Research and Publication Sections The Memory of the Wars of Religion and The French Reformed Churches, 1557-1600.