French Wars of Religion

On the horrific night of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, thousands of French Protestants, known as Huguenots, were slaughtered in the streets of Paris. Up to that moment, the Huguenot movement had been steadily gaining momentum and civil rights. But overnight, that mob violence plunged France into decades of brutal religious warfare. Young Sully was a close companion to Henry of Navarre, the sovereign of a small realm tucked into the Pyrenees along France’s southwestern border. Raised a strict Calvinist by his mother, Henry would grow up to become the undisputed political and military commander of the Protestant cause. At the start of the 1500s, French Protestantism was a fringe movement. Yet within a century, a nation fractured by holy war would ultimately surrender its crown to a Huguenot king. In today’s episode, we trace the story of Protestantism in France — from its quiet origins through nearly a century of sectarian violence, to the moment Henry of Navarre enters Paris to claim the throne of France.