King Henry IV won over most French Catholics and retook most Leaguer cities soon after his abjuration and coronation. The duke of Mercoeur held out in Brittany, but Henry IV eventually defeated him as well. Moreover, he defeated a Spanish army that had supported Mercoeur and the League. In 1598 Henry issued the Edict of Nantes, which offered the Protestants once again freedom of conscience and limited freedom of worship, although that included being able to worship openly in towns they occupied before the peace. Moreover, the Protestants were granted four towns that they could hold as military fortresses for their protection. The Edict of Nantes maintained the peace longer than any of the earlier edicts, as Protestants very reluctantly accepted defeat. Another angry Catholic, however, assassinated Henry IV in 1610, leaving a young minor son, Louis XIII. Civil war threatened to break out all over again.

When the first edition of this book was published in 1995, the state of scholarship on the French Wars of Religion was in flux. For nearly a century the predominant narrative was that religion played only a minor role in the civil wars, and that high politics and socio-economic factors were largely responsible for the wars. To be sure there was some pushback against this narrative, as historians such as Robert Kingdon, Nancy Roelker, Natalie Davis, Nicola Sutherland, Barbara Diefendorf, and Denis Crouzet among others demonstrated that religion did indeed play a major role in the wars.

The St Bartholomew’s massacres that began in Paris in August 1572 and spread to the provinces over the next three months began with an assassination attempt in Paris on the Protestant military leader, Admiral Coligny. It ended with 4,000 Protestant deaths in Paris alone, including the military leadership of the Protestant cause. Murder squads led by the king and the duke of Anjou’s Swiss guards, as well as another squad led by some violent members of the capital’s civic militia, carried out the killings. The violence eventually spread to provincial cities with significant Huguenot populatoins, resulting in a further 3,000 deaths. This led to a further outbreak of civil war.

The death of the duke of Anjou in 1584 made Henry of Navarre the next in line to the throne, which to many Catholics meant being ruled by a heretic king. The Catholic League was formed as a series of urban cells in cities and towns ruled by strong Catholic majorities. The most radical of these Leaguer cells was in Paris, where a group called the Sixteen ruled the capital. The military arm of the League was led by the very popular Henry, duke of Guise, who forced King Henry III out of the city in May 1588. The king got his revenge when he had the duke of Guise and his brother assassinated at Blois during a meeting of the Estates-General in December 1588. The following year the queen mother, Catherine de Medici, died, and Henry III himself was assassinated in August by a militant Catholic. Although Navarre won some military victories over the League forces, now led by the duke of Mayenne, he could not win over the Catholic population until he had abjured Protestantism and converted to Catholicism, which he did in July 1593. He was then crowned as King Henry IV.

When the Reformation first emerged in France in the 1520s, Francis I decided to deal with it by prosecuting Protestants as heretics in the parlements’ courts. This policy proved wholly inadequate in stopping the growth of Protestantism, even though it was continued by his son, Henry II. When Henry died in 1559, and then his son, Francis II, in 1560, Catherine de Medici sought to find some form of religious coexistence, as Protestants had grown to maybe 1.8 million in a population of 18 million. The result was the Edict of January.

Henry IV’s young heir, Louis, was only nine years old at his father’s death, so his mother, Marie de Medici, governed as regent until Louis reached his age of majority in 1614 as King Louis XIII. The peace was maintained, however, until the early 1620s when two ambitious Protestant brothers, the duke of Rohan and the duke of Soubise, mounted a military campaign to overthrow the Edict of Nantes. King Louis XIII led military campaigns to defeat them in 1620, 1621, and 1622 in the south of France. Cardinal Richelieu, appointed to the royal council in 1624, urged the king to remove the last Huguenot stronghold, the city of La Rochelle. La Rochelle fell finally in 1628 after a long siege, and a peace treaty was signed in 1629 ending the last war of religion.

The Edict of Nantes in 1598 and the Peace of Alais in 1629 required all French men and women to forget the conflict and troubles during the previous civil wars. Nevertheless, no one could forget, and the two sides sought to control the narrative of the Wars of Religion by rewriting both national and local histories. In effect, both sides continued the conflict after 1629 – not on the battlefield, but in print. Another means of restutution after the civil wars was through lawsuits. The three generations of civil war had also taken a heavy toll on the material lives of most French men and women in terms of mortality, taxes, loss of property, prices, and agrarian and economic production. Finally, the monarchy had evolved from a crown whose goal was to protect the common good (le bien public) to a crown whose primary goal was to protect the state (le bien de l’état), creating an absolute monarchy.

After the St Bartholomew’s massacres, various Protestants published political treatises advocating resistance to a king who was a tyrant. François Hotman, Theodore Beza, and Philippe Duplessis-Mornay all published monarchomach tracts declaring that French Protestants could resist King Henry III. Jean Bodin, a Catholic politician and jurist, wrote The Six Boks of the Commonwealth, advocating for a stronger monarchy. In the meantime, the religious wars continued, with renewed warfare followed by peace edicts that attempted to keep the peace. The death of Henry III’s younger brother and last Valois heir, Francis, duke of Anjou, in June 1584, meant that the heir presumptive to the throne was Henry, king of Navarre, a Protestant. This restarted Catholic opposition and a renewal of civil war.

Catholic armies defeated Protestant armies in three civil wars between 1562 and 1570, but they had no way of enforcing peace edicts that continued to limit Protestant rights to worship freely. Thus, neither side was able to claim a total victory, as neither was happy with the status quo. As a result, violence continued to break out, including in the capital, Paris, between members of both confessions.