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This chapter examines the challenges arising from the shift of political ideology caused by religious divisions. By 1600, many religious groups claimed discrimination and unequal treatment under the law. The Catholics regrouped under a Bourbon monarchy and the Protestants threatened to obey a new leadership. These French wars of religion ended with the Edict of Nantes. Some historians, however, claim that the French Catholic regions accepted Henri IV only because of his conversion to Catholicism, his coronation, and the papal absolution given. This also left the Protestants with little option except to support Henri IV. This settlement with the Catholics and Henri IV's marriage to a Catholic and papal subject strengthened the new Bourbon Monarchy in France.

This chapter examines French Protestant churches and the country's population amidst conflicts between religion and state in the early seventeenth century. In the controversies between Catholic and Protestant propagandists, the Protestants had been clearly at a disadvantage since France was decidedly moving toward a stronger Catholic identity. Then, the Edict of Nantes gave the Huguenot Protestants more rights, making Catholics despise the edict. In 1629, both sides had agreed to a general settlement upon the signing of the Peace of Ales. This was a treaty for general pacification, while the edict, in a different format, was really a document for the future calling for religious unity.

Explores the reasons why this remote, mountainous region converted so thoroughly to Protestantism in the sixteenth century. It argues that there were many causes, including the earlier conversion of the major trading cities of Nîmes and Montpellier, the weakness of the local Church, the influence of converted notables, and regional antagonisms. It also notes the conversion of women, arguing that they converted for as many different reasons as did men. It notes that the region remained steadfast in its confession even as Protestantism declined elsewhere, then charts the events leading up to the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 and the aborted rebellion against that action in 1683. It notes that years of pressure, the conversion of some notables to Catholicism, and the decision of the monarchy to use military force led to failure, forcing Protestantism back into the confines of family life, where women played a major role.

An examination of the semantic field of the term ‘oubliance’ in 16th-century France that contextualizes the 1598 Edict of Nantes’s call to erase memories of the wars of Religion in France. André de Nesmond’s 1600 parlementary address on amnesty reveals the complexity of cultural discourses surrounding memory and forgetting in the period, and introduces tragedy and tragic affect as key points of reference for the politics and the historiography of the civil wars.

This chapter focuses on Europe itself, in order to chronicle the creation of the Huguenot diaspora. Starting with the example of the theologian Pierre Jurieu, it shows how the coming of persecution led Huguenots to define themselves as a godly remnant of the once great French Protestant church. Thousands of refugees scattered around Europe, where they sought aid from Protestant rulers even as they promoted themselves as people with a particular role in cosmic history. Jurieu was the leading promoter of this specialness, which he took from a close reading of Revelation, but which had political implications. Jurieu and other Huguenot leaders especially sought to create “colonies,” self-contained Huguenot communities around Europe that could preserve the refugees’ faith for an eventual return to France. Over the course of the 1680s and 1690s these colonies appeared around Europe, from Germany to Ireland, and set the stage for the Huguenots’ global expansion.

This chapter explores the migrant journeys of Huguenot refugees escaping French persecution in the last quarter of the seventeenth century. It discusses published memoirs and escape accounts of Huguenot refugees who suffered religious persecution in France. One example is Reverend Jacques Fontaine's autobiography, A Tale of the Huguenots, which details the intense persecution in 1685 and his journey of escape following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

This chapter deals with events after the Edict of Nantes. In 1640, “Augustinnus” written by Cornelius Jansen was published, stirring different groups in French society. The idea of Jansenism had become entrenched in society and defied authority. Whether politically or religiously motivated, this defiance had been due to past and current antagonisms in ecclesiological and political ideologies. In 1657, Jansenism spread to a wider circle beyond that of academics and clerics, resulting in a new cooperation between the papacy and the monarchy to contain such spread. Rome had totally condemned Jansenism though the French monarchy took a little longer to follow the same. In the early 1700s, however, Jansenism would resurface in a different guise and historical context.