This article analyses the reception in France of the Warsaw Confederation (1573) which established religious tolerance in Poland as Henry of Valois ascended the throne, leaving behind the Kingdom of France rent by civil war. In France, some contemporary accounts prefer not to mention such tolerance and cast a veil of silence over confessional diversity in this part of Christendom. Other writers, equally Catholic but more intransigent, assert that this tolerance is illegal, effectively constituting an oath against the king. Protestants, for their part, are unwilling to promote this model of religious peace, which they do not seek, favouring negotiations between the Valois and the Polish Diet to obtain concessions for French Protestants. Finally, for the crown, what is key in Poland is not so much religious tolerance as the goodwill of the nobility and fidelity to the king.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Gall, J. L., (2025), "La tolérance polonaise à travers le prisme de l'intolérance française au XVIe siècle", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Renaissance and Reformation

Original publication: Gall, Jean-Marie Le. "La tolérance polonaise à travers le prisme de l'intolérance française au XVIe siècle." Renaissance and Reformation 39 (4): 2020. 53-84. DOI: 10.33137/rr.v39i4.8919. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Renaissance and Reformation. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Renaissance and Reformation under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.