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.
This is simply false. The violence was roughly equal on both sides and it was part of the process of consolidating absolute royal power. You apparently know nothing of the sadistic violence of the Calvinist “brigands” who savaged northern France and Belgium and southern France, burning, raping, boiling alive, castrating, defecating in church sanctuaries, flaying alive and so forth. Henry VIII and Elizabeth executed just as many as Mary did, but over a longer period of time. And they did it for intimidation, in case you hadn’t noticed. And it worked.
If you tote up the scorecard on both sides, it comes out about as equal as you could ever want it to be. It’s not a pretty picture, but don’t start patting your Protestant behind prematurely. Do some actual research. You’ll have to get beyond the textbooks, though. In Anglo-American textbooks, the Protestant bias is palpable and therefore you are not to blame for having gained the impression that only Catholics used violence. But Freepers ought to know a thing or two about how trustworthy the school textbooks are (not).
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And the violence in France was not committed by the Catholic church any more than the violence againts Catholics in England was committed by the Anglican Church. All over Europe in the 1500s kings were consolidating absolute power. The Protestant-Catholic conflict from 1546-1648 was state conflict in which princes chose sides in a religious dispute and turned it into political war. If the princes had no chosen sides the religious dispute with Luther might well have been resolved.
No where is this more visible than in France where men ambitious for the crown thought nothing of switching from Protestant to Catholic and back if they thought it would benefit their power grab.
Every historian of Spain in this period agrees that the kings took over the church courts to use the Inquisition as an instrument of state power. Popes protested the abuse of power by the kings. The most advanced system of justice in Europe at the time was in the Roman Inquisition in the Papal States where you had better due process protection (knowledge of who your accuser was etc.) than under Henry VIII with his Star Chamber court or where he simply executed people without trial: after failing to intimidate the London Carthusian monks by, after show-trials, disemboweling two batches of their leaders and earning public opprobrium for butchering innocent and highly respected holy men, he gave up and simply shackled the last batch to dungeon walls without trial and left them to starve. Margaret Roper, Thomas More’s daughter, bribed the jailers to be able to feed them—Henry got suspicious because they were taking too long to die and put an end to her ministrations and they eventually died wretchedly.
Are you Protestant-proud of all that yet?