Edict of Compiègne

The Edict of Compiègne (French: Édit de Compiègne), issued from his Château de Compiègne by Henry II of France, 24 July 1557, applied the death penalty for all convictions of relapsed and obstinate "sacramentarians", for those who went to Geneva or published books there, for iconoclast blasphemers against images, and even for illegal preaching or participation in religious gatherings, whether public or private. It was the third in a series of increasingly severe punishments for expressions of Protestantism in France, which had for an aim the extirpation of the Reformation. By raising the stakes, which now literally became matters of life and death, the Edict had the result of precipitating the long religious crisis in France and hastening the onset of armed civil war between armies mustered on the basis of religion, the series of French Wars of Religion, which were not settled until Henri IV's edict of toleration, the Edict of Nantes (1598).

The source of the "contagion", as court pamphleteers put it, was Geneva, where the French-born John Calvin achieved undisputed religious supremacy in 1555, the same year that the French Reformed Church organized itself at a synod in Paris, not far from the royal residence at the Louvre. At the Peace of Augsburg signed that same year in Germany, the essential concept was cuius regio eius religio, "Whose region, his religion". In other words, the religion of the king or other ruler would be the religion of the people. The petty princes of Germany were enabled to dictate the religion of their subjects, and it came to be sensed as a mark of weakness that the King of France could not do so: "One King, One Faith" would become the rallying cry of the ultra-Catholic party of the Guise faction.

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