The Edict of Fontainebleau
the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (18 October 1685)
Louis XIV, King 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.
Properly drawn, properly registered by the Parlement of Paris — the most carefully legal document in this room, and the most lawless thing in it.
Published 22 October 1685; the fortnight it gave every Reformed pastor to leave the kingdom started running the same week.
Cited for this book
Signed 18 October 1685 and published four days later. It declared the Reformed religion never to have been legally tolerated at all, ordered every Reformed church demolished, forbade all Reformed worship on pain of imprisonment, and gave every pastor who would not convert a fortnight to leave France for good — on pain of the galleys if he stayed to preach even once more on his way out. An estimated two hundred thousand Huguenots fled the kingdom rather than sign.
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 argument, and why.
Fontainebleau does not quote Scripture and does not need to — the theology was already done for it, a thousand years earlier, in Augustine’s Letter 93 to Vincentius, the letter that first turned "compel them to come in" into policy against the Donatists. Bayle read that letter and answered it directly, from safety in Rotterdam — while his own brother Jacob, a Reformed pastor, was arrested in France that same year because the authorities could not reach Pierre himself, and died in his cell before the year was out. A signature taken at the point of a dragoon’s billet is not a conversion. It is a lie the state has taught a whole province to tell, and Bayle’s whole book says so — plainly, sentence by sentence — six generations after Augustine and three centuries before anyone in this story is done arguing about it.
Pierre Bayle, A Philosophical Commentary on These Words of the Gospel, Luke 14:23, Part III; Edict of Fontainebleau (1685), Article I.