HUGUENOTS. - This name designates the French Protestants, whose theology and church constitutions were chiefly shaped by Calvinism, so much so that the various French Protestant confessions united under the synodal and consistorial organization of Calvin’s Geneva; the first Synod of the Reformed churches in France was held in 1559 at Saint-Germain.
From the dogmatic standpoint, the creed of the Huguenots is not of particular interest; rather, it is their relationship with the State that is significant. This relationship manifested itself both in the theorists, who, opposing royal centralization, advocated a democratic political thought (in which the sovereign is conceived only as a first magistrate, bound to respect the contractualism between God and the people, which precedes that between God and king), and in the men of action, who succeeded in giving the Huguenot union a very solid military and political-administrative foundation (the stages of this organization are at Millau with the assembly of 1573 and at La Rochelle with the meetings of 1588). The original moral and religious superiority of the Synod, however, gradually declined as the political and military organization was increasingly taken over by the more powerful nobility in their struggle against the French monarchy.
To recount the history of the Huguenots is to recount more than a century of French life, precisely because the strengthening of royal absolutism was achieved through a fierce struggle against the Huguenots, who came to form a veritable state within a state. Key moments in this struggle include the opposition of the Guise and the Condé; the apogee of Huguenot power, which in 1570 obtained from the monarchy, through the Peace of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, the autonomy of the strongholds of La Rochelle, Cognac, Montauban, and La Charité; the policy of Catherine de’ Medici (q.v.), which led to the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (q.V. Bartolomeo, notte di san); the clash between the Navarrese and the Guise; the assassination of Henry III; the pro-Huguenot policy of Henry IV (q.v.), who, with the Edict of Nantes (q.v.) in 1598, granted the Huguenots freedom of worship and several *places de sûreté*; the relentless war of Richelieu, culminating in the fall of the last Huguenot stronghold at La Rochelle (1628); the subsequent political decline of the Huguenots; the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV in 1685; and the final flickers of Huguenot resistance, when in the years 1702–1705 they took up arms against Louis XIV (q.V. CAMISARDS). The revocation of the Edict of Nantes also held particular importance in European economic history, as it caused skilled textile artisans to flee France, thereby giving a notable boost to manufacturing outside the country (Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, North America).