The French Wars of Religion, 1562–1629

“For a newcomer to the field, I would start with Holt because he gives you the whole background to Henri’s life story, the world in which Henri grew up. When the first civil war broke out, Henri was about nine or ten years old, and conflict marked his entire life until he became king, and thereafter, for another nine or ten years. Holt is very strong in seeing that the so-called civil wars are really one civil war. If you’re a very pedantic historian, you can divide them up into nine or ten, but it’s really one civil war that runs on and on, punctuated by brief truces for a number of months, all the way from 1562 or so, until the Edict of Nantes in 1598. It’s the perfect storm. You have court politics and dynastic failures, social tensions, economic distress, demographic shifts, and a bitter religious divide…The critical thing here is religion. If you don’t focus on that, you don’t understand the mentality of the people of that age. The idea of separating secular and religious didn’t exist in the minds of 16th-century people, which is a problem for historians of that period who like to separate those two out.” Read more...

The best books on Henri IV of France

Vincent Pitts, Historian