Blurb:

Explaining the history of peace and tolerance through moderate thinkers, jurists, magistrates, and clergy also implies understanding the coexistence of different religious communities during the second half of the sixteenth century in France and the Netherlands, as well as knowing how this reality conceived these discourses. In addition, it was these discourses of peace and tolerance and its practices that were essential in determining the future of religious wars. Comparative history allows us to reflect on two situations that begin as different but merge into three convergent scenarios of confessionalism: France (successive edicts of pacification until the toleration Edict of Nantes in 1598), United Provinces of the Netherlands (freedom of conscience, but not of worship), and the Spanish Netherlands (minimal religious tolerance and social reconciliation).