The Edict of Fontainebleau or the Revocation (1685)

Abstract

The article deals with the edict of Fontainebleau, signed by Louis XIV on October 17, 1685 and registered five days later by the Paris Parliament, which drew a line under the policy of religious tolerance in France at that time. The text of the edict is published in Russian for the first time (Annex № 1). Thanks to Henry IV and his edict of Nantes (1598), France became the only country that legally recognized religious dissociation, which allowed to complete the religious war that exhausted the state. The edict of Nantes was called "eternal" and "irrevocable". Edict Fontainebleau, who abolished it, initiated a gradual transfer of leadership from France to the UK and, more broadly, to the Anglo-Saxon world. This transition was accompanied by a change in the model of governance in France: the decline of the absolute monarchy and attempts to establish a constitutional monarchy.