French History to the Revolution

French History To the Revolution

Through the Wars of Religion to the Absolute Monarchy

A growing urban-based Protestant minority (later dubbed Huguenots) faced ever harsher repression under the rule of King Henri II.

Renewed Catholic reaction, headed by the powerful Dukes of Guise, culminated in a massacre of Huguenots (1562), starting the first of the French Wars of Religion, during which English, Scottish, German and Spanish forces intervened on the side of rival Protestant and Catholic forces.

Bourbon Dynasty

The conflict was ended by the assassination of both Henry of Guise (1588) and King Henri III (1589), the accession of the Protestant king of Navarre as Henri IV (first king of the Bourbon dynasty) and his subsequent abandonment of Protestantism (1593), his acceptance by most of the Catholic establishment (1594) and by the Pope (1595), and his issue of the toleration decree known as the Edict of Nantes (1598), which guaranteed freedom of private worship and civil equality.

France's pacification under Henri III laid much of the ground for the beginnings after his assassination (1610) of France's rise to European hegemony under Louis XIII and his minister (1624-1642) Cardinal Richelieu, architect of France's policy against Spain and the German emperor during the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) which had broken out among the lands of Germany's Holy Roman Empire.

An English-backed Huguenot rebellion (1625-1628) defeated, France intervened directly (1635) in the wider European conflict following her ally (Protestant) Sweden's failure to build upon initial success.

After the death of both king and cardinal, the Peace of Westphalia (1648) secured universal acceptance of Germany's political and religious fragmentation, and the Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659) formalised France's seizure (1642) of the Spanish territory of Roussillon after the crushing of the ephemerous Catalan Republic.

During the reign of Louis XIV (1643-1715), France was the dominant power in Europe, aided by the diplomacy of Richelieu's successor (1642-1661) Cardinal Mazarin and the economic policies (1661-1683) of Colbert.

Renewed war (1667-1668 and 1672-1678) brought further territorial gains (Artois and western Flanders and the free county of Burgundy, left to the Empire in 1482), but at the cost of the increasingly concerted opposition of rival powers.

Following the seizure of the (then separate) English, Irish and Scottish thrones by the Dutch Prince William of Orange in 1688, the anti-French "Grand Alliance" of 1689 inaugurated more than a century of intermittent European conflict in which Britain would play an ever more important role, seeking in particular to keep France out of the Netherlands (the Dutch provinces and the future Belgium, then under Spanish rule).

After the war of 1689-1697 gained France only Haiti (lost to a slave revolt a century later), the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1713) ended with the undoing of Louis's dreams of a Franco-Spanish Bourbon empire: the two conflicts strained French resources already weakened by disastrous harvests in the 1690s and in 1709, as well as by the revocation (1685) of the Edict of Nantes and the consequent loss of Huguenot support and manpower.

The reign (1715-1774) of Louis XV saw an initial return to peace and prosperity under the regency (1715-1723) of Philippe II, Duke of Orl�ans, whose policies were largely continued (1726-1743) by Cardinal Fleury, prime minister in all but name, renewed war with the Empire (1733-1735 and 1740-1748) being fought largely in the East.

But, alliance with the traditional Habsburg enemy (the "Diplomatic Revolution" of 1756) against the rising power of Britain and Prussia led to costly failure in the Seven Years War (1756-1763).

On the eve of the French Revolution of 1789, France was a predominantly rural country ruled by an absolute monarch and the aristocracy under the now-called Ancien R�gime, very backwards in many ways. For instance, torture was considered an appropriate means of extracting confessions in criminal trials; there was no freedom of religion, except that Protestantism was tolerated.

The ideas of the Enlightenment had however begun to permeate the educated classes of society. The seeds of The French Revolution had long since been sown.

French Revolution and the Rise of Napoleon Bonaparte

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