Background: Edict of Nantes

The Edict of Nantes was issued in 1598 by Henry IV of France. It granted the Calvinist Protestants of France, known as Huguenots, substantial rights in a predominately Catholic nation. Through the Edict, Henry aimed to promote civil unity. The Edict treated some, although not all, Protestants with tolerance and opened a path for secularism. It offered general freedom of conscience to individuals and many specific concessions to the Protestants, such as amnesty and the reinstatement of their civil rights, including the right to work in any field or for the state and to bring grievances directly to the king. It marked the end of the religious wars that had afflicted France during the second half of the 16th century. The Edict gained a new significance when Louis XIV, known as the Sun King, broke the post-Nantes tradition of relative religious tolerance in France and, in his efforts to fully centralize the royal power, began to persecute the Protestants.

Louis XIV by Hyacinthe Rigaud (1701). Louis XIV (1638–1715), known as Louis the Great or the Sun King, was a monarch of the House of Bourbon who ruled as King of France from 1643 until his death in 1715. His reign of seventy-two years and 110 days is the longest of any monarch of a major country in European history. In this age of absolutism in Europe, Louis XIV’s France was a leader in the growing centralization of power.

Religious Persecution

Louis initially supported traditional Gallicanism, which limited papal authority in France, and convened an Assembly of the French clergy in November 1681. Before its dissolution eight months later, the assembly had accepted the Declaration of the Clergy of France, which increased royal authority at the expense of papal power. Without royal approval, bishops could not leave France and appeals could not be made to the pope. Additionally, government officials could not be excommunicated for acts committed in pursuance of their duties. Although the king could not make ecclesiastical law, all papal regulations without royal assent were invalid in France. Unsurprisingly, the pope repudiated the declaration.

Louis saw the persistence of Protestantism as a disgraceful reminder of royal powerlessness. After all, the Edict of Nantes was the pragmatic concession of his grandfather Henry IV to end the longstanding French Wars of Religion. An additional factor in Louis’s thinking was the prevailing contemporary European principle to assure socio-political stability, cuius regio, eius religio (“whose realm, his religion”), the idea that the religion of the ruler should be the religion of the realm (the principle originally confirmed in central Europe in the Peace of Augsburg of 1555).

Responding to petitions, Louis initially excluded Protestants from office, constrained the meeting of synods, closed churches outside Edict-stipulated areas, banned Protestant outdoor preachers, and prohibited domestic Protestant migration. He also disallowed Protestant-Catholic intermarriages where third parties objected, encouraged missions to the Protestants, and rewarded converts to Catholicism. An enforced yet steady conversion of Protestants followed, especially among the noble elites.

In 1681, Louis dramatically increased the persecution of Protestants. The principle of cuius regio, eius religio had usually meant that subjects who refused to convert could emigrate, but Louis banned emigration and effectively insisted that all Protestants must be converted. Secondly, following the proposal of René de Marillac and the Marquis of Louvois, he began quartering dragoons (mounted infantry) in Protestant homes. Although this was within his legal rights, the policy (known as dragonnades) inflicted severe financial strain and atrocious abuse on Protestants. Between 300,000 and 400,000 Huguenots converted, as this entailed financial rewards and exemption from the dragonnades.

Edict of Fontainebleau

In 1685, Louis issued the Edict of Fontainebleau, which cited the redundancy of privileges for Protestants given their scarcity after the extensive conversions. The Edict of Fontainebleau revoked the Edict of Nantes, and repealed all the privileges that arose therefrom. By this edict, Louis no longer tolerated Protestant groups, pastors, or churches to exist in France. No further Protestant churches were to be constructed, and those already existing were to be demolished. Pastors could choose either exile or a secular life. Those Protestants who had resisted conversion were to be baptized forcibly into the established church.

The Edict of Fontainebleau is compared by historians with the 1492 Alhambra Decree, ordering the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain, and with Expulsion of the Moriscos during 1609–1614. The three are similar both as outbursts of religious intolerance ending periods of relative tolerance and in their social and economic effects. In practice, the revocation caused France to suffer a kind of early brain drain, as it lost a large number of skilled craftsmen. Some rulers, such as Frederick Wilhelm, Duke of Prussia and Elector of Brandenburg, encouraged the Protestants to seek refuge in their nations. Historians cite the emigration of about 200,000 Huguenots (roughly one-fourth of the Protestant population, or 1% of the French population) who defied royal decrees. However, others view this as an exaggeration. They argue that most of France’s preeminent Protestant businessmen and industrialists converted to Catholicism and remained. Protestants across Europe were horrified at the treatment of their fellow believers,  and Louis’s public image in most of Europe, especially in Protestant regions, suffered greatly. Most Catholics in France, however, applauded the move.

The revocation of the Edict of Nantes created a state of affairs in France similar to that of nearly every other European country of the period (with the brief exception of Great Britain and possibly the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth), where only the majority state religion was legally tolerated. The experiment of religious toleration in Europe was effectively ended for the time being. However, French society would sufficiently change by the time of Louis’s descendant Louis XVI to welcome toleration in the form of the 1787 Edict of Versailles, also known as the Edict of Tolerance. This restored to non-Catholics their civil rights and the freedom to worship openly.

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