The Edict of Fontainebleau
the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (18 October 1685)
Louis XIV, King of France
More about Louis XIV of France →
Ninety years of toleration, undone in one afternoon at Fontainebleau, and never once arguing the doctrine it was actually afraid of.
- Catch rate
- Not found in the wild
- Base research
- 344
- Stat total
- 358
Base stats
Every stat is a checkable fact about the actual book, not a designer's mood. Bars are drawn against the highest value any book reaches.
Why these numbers
The game's own explanation, as a reader sees it in the backpack.
It undid ninety years of the Edict of Nantes in a single afternoon at Fontainebleau.
Article I alone orders every Reformed temple in France demolished. It never engages a single point of Reformed doctrine, because it was never written to.
Very high. It was properly drawn up and registered by the Parlement of Paris. Its fault is not its drafting but what it did.
Published 22 October 1685; the fortnight it gave every Reformed pastor to leave the kingdom started running the same week.
Cited for this book
King Louis XIV signed this edict on 18 October 1685. It ordered every Reformed church in France torn down and banned Reformed worship. Every pastor who would not convert had two weeks to leave France, on pain of the galleys. About two hundred thousand Huguenots fled rather than give up their faith.
Moves learned
This book learns nothing new by levelling — everything it knows, it knew from the start or brought with it through development.
What answers it
The specific move or chapter of Scripture that cuts through this one, and why. The number is how much harder it hits than usual — ×4 is four times the normal force.
A forced signature is not a conversion. It is a lie the state has taught a whole kingdom to tell, on top of whatever it was trying to correct.
Fontainebleau never quotes Scripture. Augustine’s Letter 93 had already done that work a thousand years earlier, turning compel them to come in into a policy against the Donatists. Bayle answered that letter directly from Rotterdam, in the years after his brother Jacob died in a French prison in his place. A signature taken at sword point is not a conversion. It teaches a whole province to lie.
Pierre Bayle, A Philosophical Commentary on These Words of the Gospel, Luke 14:23, Part III; Edict of Fontainebleau (1685), Article I.