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Article: Wars of Religion, French
- Article from:
- Europe, 1450 to 1789: Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World
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WARS OF RELIGION, FRENCH
WARS OF RELIGION, FRENCH.
The rapid growth of Protestantism in France that began in the 1530s reached a climax around 1560, when roughly one in every twenty French men and women had converted to the new faith. This extraordinary growth resulted in a predictable backlash by French Catholics, whose church and monarchy declared all Protestants
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and in France they were overwhelmingly Calvinists, who came to be called Huguenots
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to be heretics. For Catholics, Protestants living in their midst not only threatened their eternal souls, but were believed to threaten their earthly existence as well. In an age when every major outbreak of plague, famine, and ...