The Huguenots maintained the struggle a few months longer in the south of France, but were finally everywhere reduced to submission. The result of the war was the complete destruction of the political power of the French Protestants. A treaty of peace, called the Edict of Grace, negotiated the year after the fall of La Rochelle, left them, however, freedom of worship, according to the provisions of the Edict of Nantes (see p. 578).
The Edict of Grace properly marks the close of the religious wars which had desolated France for two generations (from 1562 to 1629). It is estimated that this series of wars and massacres cost France a million lives, and that between three and four hundred hamlets and towns were destroyed by the contending parties.
Richelieu and the Thirty Years' War.—When Cardinal Richelieu came to the head of affairs in France, there was going on in Germany the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648), of which we shall tell in the following chapter. This was very much such a struggle between the Catholic and Protestant German princes as we have seen waged between the two religious parties in France. Although Richelieu had just crushed French Protestantism, he now gives aid to the Protestant princes of Germany, because their success meant the division of Germany and the humiliation of Austria. Richelieu did not live to see the end either of the Thirty Years' War or of that which he had begun with Spain; but this foreign policy of the great minister, carried out by others, finally resulted, as we shall learn hereafter, in the humiliation of both branches of the House of Hapsburg, and the lifting of France to the first place among the powers of Europe.
