The French Wars of Religion, 1562–1629

As Pierre de l’Estoile noted in his diary on Mardi Gras (14 February) 1589, just after the murder of the Guises at Blois: ‘Throughout the day there were in Paris fine and devout processions instead of the dissolution and trash of mascarades and Shrove Tuesday revelries with which people besotted themselves during previous years.’34 These religious processions were truly popular in that soldiers and priests marched together as ‘godly warriors’ along with women and children. The same was true throughout other League towns: creation of new confraternities and an upsurge of penitential piety.35 Despite all its political machinations and its emphasis on social mobility, the League blazed the trail of the Catholic Counter-Reformation in France and introduced the basic tenets of Tridentine spirituality in a systematic way.

All the surviving evidence suggests that the popular massacre that broke out in Paris on St Bartholomew’s night was neither planned nor condoned by the king’s council. The king himself issued orders as soon as the popular violence broke out for everyone in the city to return to their homes. And apart from the radical fringe of the city militia who did encourage and even led the populace in many of the attacks, the bulk of the king’s and the city’s forces seem to have been trying to maintain order rather than participating in the murders. Even Henry, duke of Guise, who personally took charge of the murder of Coligny, made efforts to prevent the unnecessary deaths of other Protestants in the capital.

Finally, it ought to be noted that the fate of the defeated Protestant leaders of La Rochelle in 1629 paralleled the leaders of the League when they were forced to surrender to Henry IV in 1594–95. That is, Louis XIII and Richelieu, far from being the bigots and bogeymen of traditional Protestant historians, practised the same politics of appeasement that worked so successfully for Louis’s father in the 1590s. Soubise and Rohan were both pardoned and entered service in the royal army and fought admirably for Louis XIII and Richelieu in the Thirty Years War.

So, Henry IV decided to deal with all remaining strongholds and military garrisons that resisted his authority in the same way he dealt with the Croquants: he offered them the carrot of appeasement rather than the stick of suppression. Any chance Henry had of persuading the large number of moderate Catholics who populated every League stronghold to support him depended entirely on his ability to convince them of his sincerity as well as his willingness to offer them an olive branch rather than a sword. In this sense, Henry’s politics of transition from war to peace should not be viewed cynically as a process of the king’s buying off his opponents, as historians have long maintained, but rather as a very traditional way any patron might try to guarantee and assure the fidelity of his clients.

In sum, then, the final defeat of the Huguenot militants was the result of neither Machiavellian machinations of Louis XIII and Richelieu nor any abandonment of the policies of Henry IV; ultimately, it was three decades of living under the Edict of Nantes and its goal of ‘one faith, one king, one law’ that ultimately brought about the Huguenots’ defeat. One is forced to agree with Professor N. M. Sutherland’s conclusion that ‘for thirty years they [the Huguenot rebels] had flouted the Edict [of Nantes], claiming more than it accorded. Now their corporate existence was extinguished and their defences destroyed, but quite as much by time and their own failings as by any action of the crown.