This was especially true among Huguenots in France, who aggressively proselytized and who imposed harsh social and, if they could, legal controls of behavior in their areas of influence, which included various towns in southern France, not just Switzerland. While the Catholic Inquisition is an iconic institution in the history of persecution, most Protestants were equally hostile to Catholics. This was not just about Catholic intolerance. Exceptions did exist, especially in the Holy Roman Empire, but beliefs clearly hardened over the course of the sixteenth century: what tolerance had existed in the early decades of the Reformation era tended to fade away.
Simply put, the very notion of tolerance, of “live and let live,” was almost nonexistent in early-modern Europe.
A patchwork of peace treaties across most of Europe had established the principle of princes determining the acceptable religion within their respective territories, but those treaties in no way represented something recognizable today as “tolerance” – in fact, all sides believed they had exclusive access to spiritual truth.
Protestantism was now a permanent feature of the landscape of beliefs and even the most optimistic Catholics had to abandon hopes that they could win many Protestants back over to the Roman Church through propaganda and evangelism. By 1560, Europe was divided by religion as it had never been before.
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