Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Saints and sinners
SAINT-DENIS, FRANCE, 1567
France during the late 16th century was a nation rocked by religious conflict. The majority of
its population were Roman Catholics, but a substantial minority - around two million people,
drawn from all levels of society - had embraced Calvinist Protestantism. The Huguenots (as
the Calvinists became known) felt that intolerance from the Catholic establishment denied
them the freedom to practise their faith. Many Catholics, particularly among the upper
classes, saw Protestantism as a threat to the nation's cohesion and stability. A sequence of
civil wars and attacks, punctuated by uneasy truces, lasted from 1562 to 1598. Under the
Edict of Nantes, King Henri IV, himself a former Protestant who had converted to Catholi-
cism, brought about a more lasting peace by granting the Huguenot community a degree of
officially-sanctioned religious liberty.
