5 - French Religious Politics

Summary

John Calvin converted to evangelical doctrines in his homeland, France, where Protestantism was officially proscribed. In 1535, during a spike in heresy persecution, like scores of evangelicals before him and thousands afterward, he fled as a religious refugee. By the time of his death in 1564, though ever an exile in Geneva, he had done more than any other person to transform the religious politics of France, which had plunged into the beginning of a long “war of religion” (1562–1598). That civil war’s chief protagonists, French Reformed Protestants, “Huguenots,” were his disciples. In attempting to put Calvin in proper context, one must describe both the political environment that shaped his and other French people’s response to Protestantism as well as his role, among all the other major actors, in reshaping it.