You may be right, but I’ve never seen any evidence that 16th century Protestants were particularly kinder or gentler than their Catholic brethren.
Protestants never committed the mass violence which the Catholic Church did in an effort to hold onto its power. The treatment of Protestants, who included most of the intelligent and progressive (not in the Leftist sense) elements in France, is comparable to that of Jews by National Socialist Germany: those who could not escape with only the clothes on their backs were killed by the thousands. All chance for evolutionary change in France died at that point, leading inevitably to a revolution between corrupt elites and criminal radicals.