The Edict of Nantes

The edict is not one document but four, and the shape matters. Ninety-two general articles form the public text registered by the parlements. Fifty-six particular articles follow, dealing with named towns and cases. Two royal brevets, issued separately and not registered, carry the parts nobody wanted on the public record: a subsidy for Protestant ministers, and the grant of about a hundred places de surete, fortified towns garrisoned by Huguenots at the king's expense for eight years.

The general articles begin by burying the memory of the war. Everything done on both sides since 1585 is declared extinguished and not to be prosecuted. Liberty of conscience is granted throughout the kingdom without exception. Liberty of public worship is granted much more narrowly: in towns where it was practised in 1596 and 1597, in one place in each bailiwick, and on the estates of nobles with rights of high justice. It is excluded from Paris and from a radius around it, and from the court and the army.

Civil equality is the part that reached furthest. Huguenots are admissible to every office and dignity, may not be excluded from universities, schools or hospitals, and are to have their cases heard in chambers of the parlements composed of both confessions. Henry IV, who had been a Protestant and had accepted Catholicism to take the throne, was uniquely placed to impose it, and the parlements still resisted registration for months.

The edict is often read backwards, as an early statement of religious freedom. It is better read as a peace treaty between two armed parties, one of which was permitted to keep its fortresses. Its own preamble presents the arrangement as provisional, a means of keeping the peace until the kingdom can be reunited in one faith, and it grants nothing to anyone outside the two Christian confessions it names.

The fortified towns are the clearest evidence of that reading, and they were also the settlement's weak point. A minority with garrisons was a state within the state, and after Henry IV was assassinated in 1610 the arrangement began to unwind. The wars of the 1620s ended with the fall of La Rochelle in 1628, and the Peace of Alais in 1629 stripped the Huguenots of their military and political privileges while confirming the religious clauses.

What remained after 1629 was a confessional liberty without power to defend it, and successive royal interpretations narrowed it for half a century: places of worship closed on technical grounds, professions closed one by one, children permitted to convert at seven. By the time Louis XIV revoked the edict in 1685 he could claim, with a certain accuracy, that there was little left to revoke.

The atlas records the edict as repealed rather than spent, because unlike most of its neighbours here it was killed by a named instrument on a known date.