Religious reforms
Louis XIV is a supporter of Gallicanism, a unified Christian France but independent of the pope. On December 13, 1660, the King informed Parliament that he had decided to eradicate Jansenism, which did not prevent him from choosing Simon Arnauld de Pomponne as Secretary of State in 1671, after the Peace of Church. For the same reasons, he also fought against Protestantism and the Company of the Blessed Sacrament. If at the beginning of his reign, Louis XIV experienced some disagreements with the papacy (Alexander VII was even threatened with war in 1662), the reign of the Sun King experienced a more religious orientation from 1684. Queen Marie-Thérèse and Colbert died in 1683 and the austere Madame de Maintenon became the monarch's secret wife. It is said that she was one of the fierce supporters of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Today, this argument is increasingly challenged by historians.
Revocation of the Edict of Nantes
The Edict, signed in Nantes on April 13, 1598 by the King of France Henri IV, authorized freedom of worship for Protestants within certain limits, and granted them the possession of certain military strongholds. The military side of the Edict of Nantes, namely the possibility for Protestants to keep military strongholds, had been revoked during the reign of Louis XIII during the Peace of Alès in 1629. The religious side of the Edict of Nantes was revoked by Louis XIV in October 1685 (Edict of Fontainebleau, countersigned by Chancellor Michel Le Tellier). Protestantism therefore becomes prohibited on French territory. This revocation will lead to the exile of many Huguenots to Protestant countries:England, the Protestant States of Germany, the Protestant cantons of Switzerland, the United Provinces and its colonies, such as that of Cape Town. The number of exiles is estimated at around 200,000, many of them artisans or members of the bourgeoisie. The poorest Protestants had been subjected since 1679 to dragonnades. Thus, Catholicism was restored, the temples transformed into churches; but with many of them, adherence to Catholicism remained superficial. Recent work by Michel Morrineau and Jannine Garrisson has greatly nuanced the economic consequences of revocation. Thus, we see that in 1686 the French economy was particularly prosperous. The formation of French diasporas in Europe made it possible to create new export markets, but also to establish the European development of the French language in the following century. The revocation of the Edict of Nantes also had the indirect consequences of Protestant uprisings in Languedoc, of which the Camisard war was the climax. Protestantism was a minority in France at the time of Louis XIV, and never constituted more than 10% of the French population, including during the wars of religion in the 16th century. This revocation thus allowed, in France, a limitation of the Protestant religion and a progressive conversion to Catholicism. By "domesticating" the nobility, the king also "domesticated" religion. If many nobles declared themselves Protestants in the 16th century, it was more a matter of politics than of faith, although some adhered fully to the religion of Calvin. Louis XIV, by creating a court based on the balance of power between noble factions, succeeded in converting a good number of Protestant nobles, who, to acquire a position at the Court, had to convert to the religion of the king:Catholicism. Protestantism in France on the symbolic level contradicted what Elisabeth Labrousse formulated well on her work on the revocation:the kingdom of France was to be only under the reign of the Unique "one king, one faith, one law". . On the death of Mazarin, Louis XIV, with the support of his ministers, gradually restricted the privileges granted to Protestants by the Monarchy in 1598, until the text was emptied of its substance. The revocation is not a sudden whim of the monarch, but a slow and sweet agony of the Protestant party in France which, without leaders and charismatic polemicists, could not compete with the propaganda and the means put in place by the Catholics, that whether they are devotees, Gallicans or even Jansenists.