At 6 o’clock on the evening of 13 April 1598, Henry IV rode through the Saint-Pierre gate into Nantes. There was no formal royal entry. Henry entered not as a guest but as a general, for after ten years of rebellion, Nantes was the final Catholic League city to capitulate to the crown. The king and his bodyguard passed straight into the old ducal château, where the cathedral chapter and the municipality came to pay their respects. Shops were ordered to be closed and the inhabitants warned not to fire their arquebuses.¹ Two weeks later, the king issued the famous...

The origins of Nantes lay in its location at the confluence of the rivers Erdre and Loire. Here, the Loire divides into several channels around a series of islands, which allow the river to be bridged, making the nearest such crossing point to the sea. The Loire is tidal at Nantes and permitted a relatively deep port at La Fosse. Fifty kilometres to the west lay the Bay of Biscay, giving access to Spain and to northern Europe. To the east, upstream, lay the cities of France, Paris, Orléans and ultimately Lyon, although the Loire was notoriously difficult to navigate....

‘The faith of the people of Brittany has always been so constant and pure that the heresy of the last century, so widespread in all the provinces of the kingdom, was not able to penetrate this one.’¹ Antoine Boschet’s seventeenth-century life of the Jesuit missionary Julien Maunoir echoed the popular belief then current in Brittany that the province was little affected by the Calvinism which emerged in France after 1550. But the reality was different. After 1558, up to thirty Protestant churches were founded at different times, especially in eastern and southern Brittany, with important congregations in Vitré, Rennes, and...

In the work of Bernard Chevalier, the relationship between cities and the royal state in sixteenth-century France is characterised by rise and fall. He argues that during the reigns of Francis I and Henry II royal authority over cities increased. Military affairs were put in the hands of specialists, crown supervision of justice and police was extended with the creation of more officers, and the kings eroded urban fiscal resources. Towns were no longer seen as the indispensable supports of the state as in the later Middle Ages, but as obstacles to its efficient administration, in need of closer tutelage...

In the city of Nantes, a marked feature of the reign of Charles IX after 1563 was the conscious attempt by the crown to resolve conflict and restore order through the use of legislation, judicial enforcement and the careful deployment of royal officers and agents. The creation of a municipality in the city was part of this policy. Relations between the new municipality and the crown were self-consciously traditional; the king governed at least nominally through the use of law, recognising contract and privilege, and royal authority was emphasised through arbitration between competing local parties. Religious policy, taxation and war...

In 1600, with the religious wars over and Brittany once more at peace, a young Bohemian traveller visited Nantes. He admired the fortifications and convents of the city and observed that the Breton towns were ‘more rigorous that any others in their observance of the Catholic faith, such that… everyone, even the sick, is forbidden, and indeed refuses, to eat meat on fast days’.¹ Yet in the 1550s and 1560s there arose a Protestant movement which attracted up to one in twelve of Nantes’ population. The presence of Protestantism and, even more, the sectarian and military conflicts which followed did...

‘The claim of our governor, the Duc de Mercoeur, to the duchy of Brittany is the sole cause and origin of our ills. There cannot be any other because it is well known that there are almost no inhabitants of the so-called Reformed religion in this country, or at least they are so small in number that it is a mockery to claim that they could take up arms.’¹

In his history of the League in Brittany, published in 1856, Louis Grégoire argued that the causes of rebellion were threefold: religion, Breton separatist tendencies and the ambitions of the Duc...

On 30 April 1598 the last edict of pacification of the wars of religion was issued in the château of Nantes.¹ The municipality had little part in its creation.² Of greater concern to the city’s elite was Henry IV’s order for new elections to thebureau de ville, to take place on 1 May. The king dissolved the privilege that allowed Nantes to elect its own mayor andéchevins. Instead, three candidates for mayor and eighteen for theéchevinagewere to be presented to the king, who would choose the officers for the posts. In 1598 Henry chose Charles de...