Henry of Navarre, the Huguenot bridegroom of the 1572 massacre, survived to inherit the French throne in 1589 as Henry IV, but only after converting to Catholicism in 1593, reportedly remarking that Paris was worth a Mass. As a Protestant-born king now ruling a Catholic-majority country, he was positioned as few others could have been to try to end the fighting on terms both sides might accept, and in 1598 he issued the Edict of Nantes, granting Huguenots freedom to worship in specified locations, full civil rights including access to public office, and control of a number of fortified towns, known as places de surete, as a military guarantee against future persecution.
The edict was not full toleration in a modern sense, worship remained restricted to designated places and excluded from Paris itself, but it was unusually durable for its era, holding through most of the seventeenth century even as royal policy toward Protestants hardened under Louis XIV. That durability ended in 1685, when Louis XIV revoked the edict outright in the Edict of Fontainebleau, outlawing Protestant worship and triggering a wave of Huguenot emigration to England, the Dutch Republic, Prussia and the American colonies that scattered a significant French Protestant population across Europe and the Atlantic world, a diaspora still traced by genealogists and historians of the Reformed tradition today.