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Article: Huguenots
- Article from:
- Europe, 1450 to 1789: Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World
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HUGUENOTS
HUGUENOTS.
"Huguenot" was the pejorative name given to Calvinist French Protestants by their Catholic opponents in the sixteenth century. The etymology of the word is obscure and contested. Henri Estienne (Latin Stephanus) was among several contemporaries to attribute it to the name given around 1560 to Protestants in Tours, after the neighborhood and city gate in which they held their religious services. Estienne may well have been correct, but an alternative derivation from
Eidgenossen
('Confederates') that had become
Eigenotz,
or the supporters of the Swiss Protestant canton of Bern against the supporters of Catholic Savoy in the factional politics of Geneva in the 1530s, ...