The 16th century in France is mostly remembered for the civil wars that racked the country from 1562 to 1629.

These wars, often collectively known as the wars of religion, were ostensibly fought between the forces of the Catholic majority, often, but not always, in the name of the King, and the new reformed Protestant minority, mostly Calvinists.

These wars have sometimes been framed as an

interruption to the natural state-making of France into the absolutist monarchy that fell during

the 1789 French Revolution. The series of episodes draws instead on the historiographical trends

that have emerged since the 1960s, which do not view the absolutism of the 1700s as inevitable

in 1500. For sure, during the long

French 16th century in the wars of religion, as we're framing this, there were events and currents

that prefigured absolutist rule, and even some that look eerily like the stirrings of republicanism

and laicite or of secularism. But what also emerges is a picture of absolutism developing as a

response to the problems of these civil wars and not as something interrupted in its course by them.

The thing about the French wars of religion is that they were both French and about religion,

but equally, they grew out of entanglements and developments between France and its neighbors

and gave outlets any number of France and its neighbors, and

gave outlets any number of various political, social, and regional tensions that had built up

around Ancien regime France, both before and during the process of nation-state making of the

early modern era. Religious zeal, opposition, and conflict were real, and yet, as Judith

Pullman demonstrated in the case of the 16th

century Netherlands, and as Stuart Carroll applied to 1560s, France, it takes more than the existence

of religious division for people to start lynching each other. This is likewise the case of social

and political divisions. Quote, both religious division and social antagonism require instrumentalizing, unquote.

The French Wars of Religion were a particularly complicated web of antagonism and instrumentalization.

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