Christianity in the 16th century intermittent conflicts, known as the Wars of Religion. The civil wars were helped along by the sudden death of Henry II in 1559, which saw the beginning of a prolonged period of weakness for the French crown. and outrage became the defining characteristic of the time, illustrated at its most intense in the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre of August 1572, when the Catholic Church annihilated between 30,000 and 100,000 Huguenots across France. The wars only concluded when Henry IV, a former Huguenot, issued the Edict of Nantes, promising official toleration of the Protestant minority but under highly restricted conditions. Catholicism
Paris in the 16th century religious conflicts between Catholics and the new Protestant sects grew over the course of the century, culminating in the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre and the wars of religion. The College of Sorbonne of the University of Paris, the city's major school of theology, took the lead in condemning heresies and Protestantism. In 1534 a Spanish student at the University, Ignatius of Loyola, gathered together five other students, who were Spanish, French and Portuguese, at the chapel of Saint-Pierre de Montmartre and formed a new society, the Society of Jesus, which became known as the Jesuits. His order became one of