The situation in France was not altogether unlike that in Germany. Although the decentralization of government was not as great, some French provinces enjoyed considerable autonomy, particularly in the south, and it was in the Midi and French Navarre that the Protestant movement had its initial strength. Then, too, noble houses were continually conspiring to manipulate or eviscerate the monarchy, and, as a result, religious issues came to be intertwined with political ambitions. The ruling houses—first the Valois from Francis I through Henry III and then the Bourbon, beginning with Henry IV—sought to secure the stability of the land and the throne by quelling sectarian strife either by the extermination or toleration of religious minorities.

The ground was better prepared for the reform of the church in France than in Germany because of the efforts of the Catholic scholar Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples and the bishop of Meaux, Guillaume Briçonnet, and others. King Francis I and his sister Margaret of Angoulême not infrequently intervened to save humanist reformers from the menaces of the obscurantists, and Margaret’s daughter, Jeanne d’Albret, the queen of Navarre, a feudatory of France, provided an asylum for the persecuted in her domain, though she did not herself espouse the Huguenot cause until 1560. When Lutheran teaching first began to infiltrate France, Francis I, who would not abet heresy, fluctuated in his policy of repression, depending on whether he desired a political alliance with the pope, the Ottoman Turks, or the German Lutherans. The year 1534 precipitated a crisis when placards were posted in Paris savagely attacking the mass. Severe repression followed. Bishop Briçonnet made his submission. Farel fled to Geneva, Lefèvre to Strasbourg, and Calvin to Basel. Henry II, the son of Francis, intensified repression, particularly when France and Spain made peace in 1559 and thus were free to devote attention to the suppression of heresy at home. The persecution of the Huguenots, as the Protestants came to be called in France, would have been intense save for the death of the king in a tournament.

At this point the rivalry of the noble houses injected itself more overtly into the religious struggle. The crown, with its alternating policy of eradication or recognition, was flanked by two extreme houses, the Catholic House of Guise and the Huguenot family of Admiral Coligny, for whom the religious issue was of intense concern. Under Francis II the Guises were ascendant because the queen, Mary (later queen of Scots) was of that house. Some of the Huguenots, foreseeing the suppression in store, hatched the Conspiracy of Amboise, an attempted assassination of the leaders of the Guise party and transfer of power to the House of Bourbon.

This was plainly rebellion and acutely raised a problem with which Protestants had long been wrestling. The Lutherans had to face it earlier when the Diet of Augsburg in 1530 gave them a year in which to submit on pain of war. The Lutheran princes then formed the Schmalkaldic League to resist arms with arms, but Luther was loath to condone any use of the sword in defense of the Gospel and absolutely forbade any recourse to violence on the part of a private citizen against the magistrates. This had been his reason for opposing the Peasants’ War. But now the jurists pointed out to Luther that the emperor was an elected ruler and that if he transgressed against the true religion he might be held to account by the electors, who also were magistrates. Thus arose the doctrine of the right of resistance of the lower magistrate against the higher. The concept lost its pertinence in Germany after the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, which granted toleration to the Lutherans in the territories where they predominated. Minorities in Lutheran and Catholic lands were granted the right of migration without loss of goods.

But the Calvinists were not included in the peace, which had no legal bearing in France, and the problem of armed resistance again became acute. Calvin would not condone the Conspiracy of Amboise because it was not led by a lower magistrate. The term was now applied to the princes of the blood in line for succession to the throne. This meant the House of Bourbon. The Conspiracy of Amboise failed. Francis II died, and was succeeded by his brother, the young Charles IX. The queen mother, Catherine de Médicis, took the lead and sought to avert religious war by granting the Huguenots limited toleration in restricted areas in the edict of 1562. When François, duc de Guise, discovered the Huguenots worshiping outside the prescribed limits, as he claimed, he opened fire, setting off the Massacre of Vassy and the wars. The Huguenots now were led by a prince of the blood, Louis I, 1st prince de Condé, of the House of Bourbon. Calvin approved. There followed three inconclusive wars. Condé was killed in the first and François, duc de Guise, was assassinated. His son, Henri, who succeeded him as the duke of Guise, believed in the complicity of Coligny, the new leader of the Huguenots. At the end of 10 years of indecisive conflict, Catherine made another effort at a settlement to be cemented by the marriage of Henry of Navarre, a Bourbon, the son of Jeanne d’Albret and the hope of the Huguenots, and her own daughter Margaret (Marguerite de Valois), a Catholic. The leaders of all parties came to Paris for the wedding. The duke of Guise made an attempt on the life of Coligny, which failed. Then the Guise, with the connivance of Catherine and her son Charles, who panicked, tried to wipe out all of the leaders of the Huguenot party in the Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day in August 1572. Other massacres followed in the provinces.

Charles IX was succeeded by his brother, Henry III, two years later (1574). Such was the revulsion against the massacre that the king could rule only by forming an alliance with the Huguenot Henry of Navarre. A fanatical Catholic was thereby so outraged that he assassinated the king. Both sides had abandoned the fiction of the inferior magistrate and had gone in unabashedly for popular revolution. Henry of Navarre became Henry IV, but he was unable to take Paris and rule France so long as he was a Protestant. In order to pacify the land he made his submission to Rome and promulgated an edict of toleration for the Huguenots, the Edict of Nantes, in 1598. It gave them liberty of worship again in limited areas but full rights of participation in public life. The edict remained in force until the revocation in 1685.