For in the aftermath of Rome’s fall, a growing reform movement flourished from the 1530s onward, spurred by homegrown reformers like John Calvin. By mid-century, groups of protestants known as Huguenots began to pose serious problems for the French crown, and tensions eventually erupted in the French Wars of Religion, which were fought from the 1560s until the 1590s, cost tens of thousands of lives, and left religious wounds in French society that were still bleeding in the eighteenth century.
