France
As early as 1532, King François I, and (in 1551), King Henri II, had intervened politically and militarily in support of the Protestant German princes against the Habsburgs. However both kings firmly repressed attempts to spread Lutheran ideas within France. An organised influx of Calvinist preachers from Geneva and elsewhere during the 1550s, succeeded in setting up hundreds of underground Calvinist congregations in France.
Read more about this topic: European Wars Of Religion
Famous quotes containing the word france:
“America was too big to have been discovered all at one time. It would have been better for the graces if it had been discovered in pieces of about the size of France or Germany at a time.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)
“The anarchy, assassination, and sacrilege by which the Kingdom of France has been disgraced, desolated, and polluted for some years past cannot but have excited the strongest emotions of horror in every virtuous Briton. But within these days our hearts have been pierced by the recital of proceedings in that country more brutal than any recorded in the annals of the world.”
—James Boswell (1740–1795)