The Huguenots were the Calvinists in France in the 16th to 18th centuries. They constituted the main protestant group that broke away from the Catholic Church in this country in the 16th century during the Protestant Reformation, when John Calvin and Martin Luther founded their own Christian churches, breaking away from the Vatican. The social composition of the Huguenots was mixed. It included the urban popular masses, who were opposed to feudal and incipient capitalist exploitation, part of the hereditary nobility and feudal aristocracy, and the urban upper strata (mainly from cities in the outlying southern and western provinces) that resisted the centralization caused by absolutism.
The Huguenots’ struggle with the Catholics took the form of the so-called French Wars of Religions in the 16th century, with the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre in 1572 being the main event. At the end of this armed struggle the Huguenots received religious liberty. Catholicism, however, remained the dominant religion in France. Huguenot rebellions in the 1620s resulted in the abolition of their political and military privileges that had been granted to them. They retained the religious provisions of the Edict of Nantes until the rule of Louis XIV, who gradually increased persecution of Protestantism until he signed the Edict of Fontainebleau in 1685. This edict ended legal recognition of Protestantism in France as the Huguenots were forced to convert to Catholicism. However, many of them fled the country as refugees, migrating to Switzerland or North America.
The attitude of the state toward the Huguenots changed several times in the 17th and 18th centuries. However, it was only the aftermath of the Great French Revolution that accorded the Huguenots equal rights with Catholics as equality before the law was a fundamental principle of this civil war in France and in any republican system.
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| This painting by Francois Dubois depicts a scene of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, during the French Religious War, when a large number of Huguenots were killed by the Catholics. |
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