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572 THE HUGUENOT WARS IN FRANCE.

(1562–1629.)

Beginning of the Reformation in France.—Before Luther posted his ninety-five theses at Wittenberg, there appeared in the University of Paris and elsewhere in France men who, from their study of the Scriptures, had come to entertain opinions very like those of the German reformer. The land which had been the home of the Albigenses was again filled with heretics. The movement thus begun received a fresh impulse from the uprising in Germany under Luther.

The Reformation in France, as elsewhere, brought dissension, persecution, and war. We have already seen how Francis I., the first of the Valois-Orleans dynasty, waged an exterminating crusade against his heretical Waldensian subjects (see p. 533). His son and successor, Henry II., also conceived it to be his duty to uproot heresy; and it was his persecution of his Protestant subjects that sowed the seeds of those long and woful civil and religious wars which he left as a terrible legacy to his three feeble sons, Francis, Charles, and Henry, who followed him in succession upon the throne. At the time these wars began, which was about the middle of the sixteenth century, the confessors of the reformed creed, who later were known as Huguenots, numbered probably 400,000. The new dpctrines found adherents especially among