Roughly 3% of the French are Protestant, and though a small minority, they are well represented in business and politics, particularly on the left. France’s history of Protestantism is best known for the emergence of the Huguenots in the 1520s, followers of the Protestant thinker John Calvin (d. 1564). Calvin was born in France but fled to Geneva in 1536, and continued to support the French Protestant community and send trained pastors to France.
Tensions between growing numbers of Protestants and Catholics in the wake of the Protestant Reformation erupted into the Wars of Religion beginning in 1562, and ending in 1598 with Henri IV issuance of the Edict of Nantes, which granted various freedoms and equalities to the Huguenots. The Edict was revoked by Louis XIV in 1685, leading once again to the violent oppression of French Protestants and their exodus from France elsewhere into Europe and the Americas, and the forced conversion to Catholicism of many who remained in France.
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789) affirmed Protestants’ equal citizenship with Catholics in revolutionary France. However, the anti-Christian, secular tendencies of the revolutionaries swept up all forms of Christianity, though Protestants themselves were largely on their side. The growing secularization of the French state over the coming century reduced the tensions between Catholics and Protestants, and hostilities remain a thing of the past.
Sources:
“France’s Protestants: Prim but punchy,” The Economist, April 16, 1998, accessed April 8, 2014.
Alistair E. McGrath, “French Protestantism to the Present Day,” The Blackwell Companion to Protestantism, eds. Alistair E. McGrath and Darren C. Marks (Malden: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2004), pp. 161-162.