WORLD HISTORY

Detailed explanation-1: -Huguenots were French Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries who followed the teachings of theologian John Calvin . Persecuted by the French Catholic government during a violent period, Huguenots fled the country in the 17th century, creating Huguenot settlements all over Europe, in the United States and Africa.

Detailed explanation-2: -Roughly 3% of the French are Protestant, and though a small minority, they are well represented in business and politics, particularly on the left. France’s history of Protestantism is best known for the emergence of the Huguenots in the 1520s, followers of the Protestant thinker John Calvin (d.

Detailed explanation-3: -Today, the Huguenots number about one million, or about two percent of the population; They are most concentrated in southeastern France and the Cévennes region in the south. The Calvinist congregations in Alsace and Moselle are organised as the Protestant Reformed Church of Alsace and Lorraine (EPRAL).

Detailed explanation-4: -French Protestantism itself had changed, reinforced from the mid-1530s by the spread among the poorer classes of Languedoc and the seaboard towns of Normandy and Brittany of the ideas of John Calvin, a French exile in Geneva.

Detailed explanation-5: -The Reformation movement then gained rapidly in France until 1562, when a long series of civil wars began in France and the Huguenots (French Protestants) alternately gained and lost. During this period of strife the Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day occurred (1572), and several thousand Huguenots were murdered.