Siege of La Rochelle
La Rochelle was the principal fortified town of France's Huguenot minority, one of the security guarantees of the Edict of Nantes (1598) that allowed Protestants to maintain garrisoned towns functioning as a state within a state. Cardinal Richelieu, chief minister to Louis XIII, regarded this armed autonomy as incompatible with royal absolutism and the unitary fiscal-military state he was constructing. In 1627, after renewed Huguenot revolt under the Duke of Rohan and English intervention under Buckingham at the Île de Ré, Richelieu laid siege to La Rochelle. A vast sea wall was built to close the harbour and starve the city. After fourteen months, with the population reduced from roughly 27,000 to 5,000 by famine, the city surrendered in October 1628. The Peace of Alès (1629) that followed stripped the Huguenots of their fortified places and military privileges while preserving freedom of worship. Confessional identity was thereby subordinated to dynastic and state-building imperatives — the same logic by which France would soon intervene on the Protestant side in the Thirty Years' War against the Catholic Habsburgs.
- Year: 1627 CE
- Category: Political
