Starting in 1562, France plunged into three and a half decades of wars between its majority Catholics and minority Huguenots. Years of military confrontations, street violence, and assassinations made these conflicts the archetype of bloody religious rivalry. Historians have sought explanations for the violence in the kingdom’s weak monarchy, aristocratic feuding, a pervasive sense of apocalyptic doom, and each group’s profound sense that the other was a source of social pollution. However, in recent years historians have revealed that amid the bloodshed, Catholics, Huguenots, and the royal government undertook serious efforts to create peace through religious coexistence. By drawing on extensive research in local and royal archives and the recent work of other scholars, including Jérémie Foa, Olivier Christin, and Michel de Waele, Penny Roberts presents an excellent overview of the peacemaking efforts throughout the war years, which culminated with the Edict of Nantes in 1598. For Roberts, these efforts represented a consistent royal policy. Roberts examines peacemaking through the enforcement of the royal edicts that ended each phase of the fighting. The laws were predicated on the assumption that, eventually, the French would be again united in one faith. Until such time, the Crown sought through the edicts to transcend religious difference and pursue its concern for averting strife and maintaining royal authority. The kings’ laws offered the framework and his representatives provided the mechanism through which local confessional conflicts could be arbitrated.

The peace policy faced considerable obstruction by local power holders. Urban governments wanted peace, but their cities were often riven by confessional hostilities. Kings had to work with nobles to control the country, but their religious differences and bitter feuds made them unreliable partners in peacemaking. The kingdom’s superior courts, the parlements, opposed concessions to Huguenots. Thus kings could not count on their judiciary to support a policy of coexistence.

Hence the monarchy turned to specially appointed commissioners, deputized to travel the provinces settling confessional disputes. They were the kings’ men, chosen for their dedication to royal service, and Roberts pays particular attention to their work. The commissioners’ task was daunting because of the sheer number of disputes they encountered but also because they were few in number and had large territories to cover. One source of support for their endeavor was that French Huguenots and Catholics shared political ideals. They all believed in loyalty to the monarch and in his obligation to ensure justice and peace for all his subjects. Commissioners could insist that everyone, regardless of religion, owed obedience to the monarch. But a shared political discourse also provided another grounds for contestation: each group could claim the political high ground to gain advantage over the other. “The sides … resemble[d] one another in their claims and counter-claims: the arguments used, the defences made, the blame allocated, the righteousness asserted” (116).

As an example of the process at work and of the reasons for its frequent failures, Roberts examines the disputes over finding sites for Protestant services. Catholics would not accept heretical worship within their cities’ walls, and Huguenots resented being excluded. The edicts varied in how they treated the matter, but generally Huguenots had to gather outside towns or on the estates of nobles. Their worship was excluded entirely from Paris and the royal court. To settle the quarrels commissioners had to take into account the law but also the local balance of power. The goal was to avoid conflict, but, instead, negotiating sites for Protestant worship often provoked it. So too did the edicts’ insistence on oubliance, a demand that both sides forget crimes committed during the fighting and not pursue satisfaction for them in the courts. Such traumas could not be legislated away.

Successive edicts did not bring peace to the kingdom, and with each failure the French of both religions became increasingly frustrated with the monarchy’s efforts. The bloodletting of Saint Bartholomew’s Day in 1572 and during the conflict with the Catholic League in subsequent years was a clear indication of the peace policy’s shortcomings. But Roberts is not content with a story of failure. She argues that the process eventually strengthened the monarchy and led to the successful Edict of Nantes. French Catholics and Huguenots learned that peacemaking was better than killing each other in the name of religion.