Voices for Tolerance
In an Age of Persecution

Although it comprised only a tiny minority of the population (no more than ten per-cent), the French Huguenot or Calvinist faith, and its rapid spread in France, had the effect of destabilizing the country by the early 1560s. The Huguenot struggle for toleration, for the acceptance of two faiths under one ruler, and the ensuing wars of religion (1562-1598) were the occasion of some of the sixteenth century's worst excesses of religious extremism. Nonetheless, this struggle also gave rise to eloquent pleas for toleration and, with the Edict of Nantes (1598) at the end of the conflict, to state-imposed, if ultimately temporary and limited, religious freedom.