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On September 30, 1567, members of the Protestant majoriry of Nimes, led by many members of the presidial court, overthrew the Catholic town council. They arrested many leading Catholics, both lairy and priests, who they felt perverted the word and will of God, and massacred an estimated one hundred of them; about one-third of the dead can be securely identified. This massacre, called the Michelade, was exceptional because it was a Protestant majoriry that attacked a Catholic minoriry. According to the standard interpretation of religious massacres during this period, Protestants were less interested in killing people than Catholics, but the Michelade suggests that in most cases Protestants were restrained less by their desires than by their minoriry status. In Nimes, they were highly violent. As Catholics did in other locations, Protestants deliberately humiliated their victims, apparently to frighten Nimes's remaining Catholics into submission. Cultural arguments alone cannot explain the Michelade; historians must also attend to issues of power.

Previous studies of the Affiches, a genre of newspaper in late eighteenth-century France, have stressed that they were fundamentally conservative and circumspect. The Affiches ignored the philosophes, and on the rare occasions that they were mentioned, they were generally condemned. In the early years of the Affiches de Bordeaux, however, quite the opposite was true. It regularly covered all sorts of supposedly forbidden subjects, including detailed military and political news, it consistently praised philosophes by name, and it published banned literature. Even anodyne-sounding pieces were sometimes extracts from banned works. The articles in the Affiches de Bordeaux were frequently copied from other newspapers, including illegal foreign ones. Some of its articles were of a relatively conservative cast, but a wide eighteenth-century public in Bordeaux had easy access to Enlightenment ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the French wars of religion and mentions horrifying massacres and assassinations associated with wars. Topics discussed include the religious violence Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre, the wars conducted as state and its revenue-raising apparatus were too weak to repress heresy effectively, political scientists observing war as a form of negotiation or bargaining, and the importance of political science literature to understand conceptual clarity of wars of religion.

The article discusses the Wars of Religion between Catholics and Protestants in France during the latter half of the 16th century, with a particular focus on the massacres committed during this period. The article relies heavily on the book "The Logic of Violence in Civil War," by Stathis N. Kalyvas, including the book's differentiation between discriminate and selective violence. The role that the Catholic commander in the French military François de Lorraine, Duc de Guise played in the massacring of Protestants is discussed.