French Huguenots rebel against their king

At a General Assembly in December 1620, after decades of persecution and discrimination, the Huguenots – French Protestants who followed the teachings of theologian John Calvin – declared their intention to create a ‘state within the state’, in defiance of French king Louis XIII and what they perceived as threats to the Protestant religion. The move sparked a chain of events that would create chaos and violence for decades to come. But trouble for the Huguenots had been brewing long before this rebellious act.

Seventeenth-century France was predominantly Roman Catholic, but since the European Reformation – which had begun in the early-16th century – Protestantism had slowly grown in popularity in France, boasting more than two million followers by the end of the 16th century. These French Protestants were known as Huguenots.

ENDLESS WAR

During the late-16th century, the clash of Catholic and Protestant religious beliefs came to a head with a series of conflicts known collectively as the French Wars of Religion, a period between 1562 and 1598 during which there were eight civil wars. Other European countries such