HUGUENOTS. - This name designates the French Protestants, to whose theology and ecclesiastical constitutions Calvinism above all contributed, so much so that the various French Protestant confessions came together inspired by the synodal and consistorial organization of Calvin's Geneva; the first Synod of the French Reformed churches was held in 1559 at St-Germain.
From the point of view of dogma the creed of the Huguenots presents no marked interest, but rather in its relations with the State: both in the theorists, who against royal centralization came to champion a democratic political thought (where the sovereign is conceived only as first magistrate, obliged to respect the contractualism between God and 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 base (the stages of this organization are at Milhau with the assembly of 1573 and at La Rochelle with the meetings of 1588). The primitive ethico-religious superiority of the Synod, however, declined as the political and military organization was more and more decisively taken over by the more powerful nobility in struggle against the French monarchy. To retrace the history of the Huguenots means to retrace the history of more than a century of French life, precisely because the strengthening of royal absolutism is brought about in the relentless struggle against the Huguenots, who came to form a veritable State within the State. Stages of this struggle are the opposition of the Guises and the Condé; the apogee of Huguenot power, which in 1570 obtained from the monarchy, with the peace of St-Germain-en-Laye, the autonomy of the strongholds of La Rochelle, Cognac, Montauban and La Charité; the policy of Catherine de' Medici (v.), which led to the night of St. Bartholomew (v. BARTOLOMEO, notte di san); the clash between the Navarres and the Guises; the assassination of Henry III; the pro-Huguenot policy of Henry IV (v.), who with the Edict of Nantes (v.) of 1598 granted the Huguenots freedom of worship and several places de sûreté; the relentless war of Richelieu, which culminates in the fall of the last Huguenot stronghold of La Rochelle (1628); the subsequent political decline of the Huguenots; the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, carried out by Louis XIV in 1685; the last flickers of the Huguenots, who in the years 1702-1705 took up arms against Louis XIV (v. CAMISARDI). Of particular importance in European economic history was the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, because it caused skilled artisans of the textile industries to emigrate from France, who gave notable impetus to manufactures outside France (Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, North America).
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Massimo Petrocchi