Samuel Smiles, best known for Self-Help, brought his talent for accessible popular history to the story of France’s Protestant minority. He traces the Huguenots from their origins in the Reformation through the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, the wars of religion, the brief toleration under the Edict of Nantes, and Louis XIV’s revocation of that edict in 1685 — which sent hundreds of thousands of skilled Huguenot craftsmen and merchants fleeing into exile across Protestant Europe.
Smiles writes with Protestant sympathy and considerable narrative energy, making this an engaging introduction to one of early modern Europe’s great religious tragedies and its far-reaching economic and cultural consequences.