This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
On 18 October 1685 Louis XIV signed the Edict of Fontainebleau, revoking the Edict of Nantes that King Henry IV had granted in 1598 permitting France's Calvinist Huguenot minority to worship publicly. The new edict outlawed Protestant worship outright, ordered every Huguenot church destroyed and every Protestant school closed, and gave pastors a fortnight to convert to Catholicism or leave the kingdom. It formalised, rather than began, a campaign of forced conversion, the dragonnades, that had already been underway since 1681, billeting troops in Huguenot households until families converted to be rid of them.
Hundreds of thousands of Huguenots converted under that pressure rather than face it further, but a disputed number, estimated anywhere from 210,000 to 900,000, chose exile instead, fleeing France over the two decades that followed for the Dutch Republic, Prussia, England, Switzerland and other Protestant lands willing to receive them.
What the revocation changed for Calvinism's spread was a permanent rupture inside France itself. Large scale organised Calvinist worship, legal and public since 1598, ended inside the kingdom for generations, while the huge exile population the edict drove outward carried Huguenot congregations, skills and capital into the Protestant states of northern Europe that took them in.