THE DIMENSIONS OF CIVIL WAR

At first glance, the convulsions of violence that move across France during the Wars of Religion seem to deny the historian's compulsive need to impose patterns of order and meaning. Notwithstanding the title usually given to this period, much of its religious and civil conflict did not take the form of wars waged between conventionally operating military forces, nor were the wars fought exclusively over religious issues. The popular violence associated with persecution, repression, and massacres often did not wait for official declarations of war nor necessarily depend upon the presence or absence of formally organized armies. Even that most spectacular outbreak of violence, the 1572 Saint-Bartholomew's Day massacre, owed almost nothing to the formal military apparatus of the crown beyond the involvement of the king's French and Swiss guards in the killing in Paris.

This said, however, the fact remains that during these years of religious conflict formal warfare did come to dominate, both directly and indirectly, much of French life. During Charles IX's reign alone there were five openly declared periods of civil war in which the royal army fought a series of conventional military campaigns against the Huguenots. During those years much of the crown's attention and most of its resources were devoted to waging war.