User:Historygirl31/sandbox

this is my first wiki page. history this is a little weird. --Historygirl31 (talk) 19:56, 11 October 2014 (UTC)

sources for enlightenment edits: basic information Virtual Museum of Protestantism direct source in french French Protestant History text of RoEoN Rev. of Edict of Nantes

Okay here goes:

In October of 1685 Louis XIV of France signed the Edict of Fontainebleu, or the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. This act was the culmination of his undoing of all that Henry IV had done to assimilate the Protestants into the Catholic country of France. The edict "forbids" all instances of practicing the Protestant religion and "enjoin[s] all ministers of said [religion], who do not choose to become converts and to embrace the Catholic, apostolic, and Roman religion, to leave our kingdom and the territories subject to us within a fortnight". Because of this, many French Protestants, or Huguenots, fled the country for others that were more accepting. They established colonies in Germany, England, the Dutch Republic, Switzerland, and other countries that allowed them to stay. The Huguenots contributed to their adopted countries in the fields of agriculture, commerce, literature, and industry, making them a valued part of said countries' population. They still had some bad feelings towards Louis XIV and the French government, so they began producing anti-French and anti-papal propaganda that spread back into France. Most of this propaganda originated in the Dutch Republic, where printing presses were more readily available than they were in France, and where the Huguenots had free license to publish their propaganda. The routes by which the publications got into France was the start of the underground book trade. The presses in the Dutch Republic would print works the French guilds would either not allow or censor, and then they would be smuggled into France to be spread among the philosophes. The Huguenot presence in the Dutch Republic allowed this to happen; if they had not been there, the book trade would not have been able to start so easily and we might not have all of the works of the figures of the Enlightenment that we do today. The exile of the Huguenots also allowed for the spread of ideas from French philosophes to other persons in other European countries. The extent of the Enlightenment would not have been possible without this spread, so the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the emigration of the Huguenots were extremely important to the beginning of the time period known as the Enlightenment.