page_title: French Wars of Religion
section_title: Conversion
hierarchical_section_title: French Wars of Religion / Toward peace (1593–1598) / Conversion
caption_attribution_description: English: Entrance of Henry IV in Paris 22 March 1594. Français&#160;: Entrée du roi Henri IV dans Paris le 22 mars 1594 par la porte Neuve près du Louvre, au pied de la fr:tour du Bois. Revêtu d'une cuirasse et coiffé d'un chapeau à panache, le roi et ses soldats chassent les Espagnols qui occupaient la ville. Gravure (burin et eau forte) extraite du tome V des Monuments de la monarchie françoise de Bernard de Montfaucon (1733).
context_page_description: The French Wars of Religion were a prolonged period of war and popular unrest between Catholics and Huguenots in the Kingdom of France between 1562 and 1598. It is estimated that three million people perished in this period from violence, famine, or disease in what is considered the second deadliest religious war in European history.
  Much of the conflict took place during the long regency of Queen Catherine de' Medici, widow of Henry II of France, for her minor sons. It also involved a dynastic power struggle between powerful noble families in the line for succession to the French throne: the wealthy, ambitious, and fervently Catholic ducal House of Guise and their ally Anne de Montmorency, Constable of France versus the less wealthy House of Condé, princes of the blood in the line of succession to the throne who were sympathetic to Calvinism. Foreign allies provided financing and other assistance to both sides, with Habsburg Spain and the Duchy of Savoy supporting the Guises, and England supporting the Protestant side led by the Condés and by the Protestant Jeanne d'Albret, wife of Antoine de Bourbon, King of Navarre, and her son, Henry of Navarre.
context_section_description: Despite the campaigns between 1590 and 1592, Henry IV was "no closer to capturing Paris". Realising that Henry III had been right and that there was no prospect of a Protestant king succeeding in resolutely Catholic Paris, Henry agreed to convert, reputedly stating "Paris vaut bien une messe" ("Paris is well worth a Mass"). He was formally received into the Catholic Church in 1593, and was crowned at Chartres in 1594 as League members maintained control of the Cathedral of Reims, and, sceptical of Henry's sincerity, continued to oppose him. He was finally received into Paris in March 1594, and 120 League members in the city who refused to submit were banished from the capital. Paris' capitulation encouraged the same of many other towns, while others returned to support the crown after Pope Clement VIII absolved Henry, revoking his excommunication in return for the publishing of the Tridentine Decrees, the restoration of Catholicism in Béarn, and appointing only Catholics to high office. Evidently Henry's conversion worried Protestant nobles, many of whom had, until then, hoped to win not just concessions but a complete reformation of the French Church, and their acceptance of Henry was by no means a foregone conclusion.
caption: Entrance of Henry IV in Paris, 22 March 1594, with 1,500 cuirassiers.
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