Following the March 1 Massacre of Wassy, tensions between French Catholics and Huguenots escalated rapidly through March 1562, with Huguenot leader Louis, Prince of Condé, mobilizing forces. The resulting French Wars of Religion would grind on intermittently for over three decades, killing an estimated two to four million people.
The spark had come three weeks earlier in the town of Wassy, where troops loyal to the Catholic Duke of Guise attacked a congregation of Huguenots worshipping in a barn, killing dozens. But it was in the following weeks that the incident metastasized from a local atrocity into a national catastrophe.
Louis, Prince of Condé, seized Orléans as a Huguenot stronghold and issued a call to arms, framing the conflict as a defense of Protestant lives and liberties against Guise tyranny. Catholic nobles rallied behind Guise in turn. What followed was not one war but eight, punctuated by fragile edicts of toleration that never held.
The wars would produce the infamous St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre a decade later and only truly end with Henry IV's Edict of Nantes in 1598 — itself revoked generations later by Louis XIV. France's religious wars offer a case study in how a single violent incident, amplified by rival elites with armies at their disposal, can unravel a kingdom's fragile peace for a generation.