It makes intuitive sense to contrast the militant Catholicism of the 16th and 17th centuries with the militant anti-clericalism that broke out in 1789. But I'd argue that actually gets things exactly backwards: to the degree that there was a relation between the Wars of Religion and the Church's travails during the Revolution, it's not one of reversal but of continuance. That is, in the area where Protestants lived in significant numbers, the Revolution often ignited conflicts between these groups. And the same type of people who were most active in opposing Protestantism during the Wars of Religion — militant Catholics — were often the most opposed to the Revolution.
Around the start of the Revolution, there were around 700,000 Protestants remaining in France out of a population of around 28 million (about 2.5 percent of the population), despite their worship being no longer tolerated since 1685 (McPhee 19). To translate that into modern terms, 2.5 percent of the population is perhaps a little larger than the share of Jews in modern America (there are around 40,000 Jews in 1789 France). These Protestants were concentrated in a few areas, largely a U-shaped crescent running from Strasbourg in the northeast down through the southern Massif Central and up to La Rochelle on the Atlantic. (McPhee, 19) Writes historian Robert Tombs:
Protestantism was also associated with the Left, since the Revolution granted full civil and political equality in 1790, and because (especially in parts of the south of France) the political conflicts of the 1790s followed the lines of much older Protestant-Catholic antagonism. (90)
Granting Protestants full civil rights meant that they could participate in politics. In many areas where Protestants were a significant population, they had wealth beyond their numbers, and were able to parlay this social and economic strength into taking power. Historian Peter McPhee notes that violence was most likely "where denominational loyalties coincided with class tensions," which (again) was especially in the south of France:
In parts of the Midi, a Protestant bourgeoisie had won religious freedom and civil equality, opening the way to political power, and the Assembly's refusal to proclaim Catholicism the state religion in April 1790 provided the pretext for large-scale violence in Montauban and Nîmes. In the latter, popular Catholic hostility to the political and economic role of wealthy Protestants was bloodily crushed when bands of Protestant peasants from the Cévannes and Vaunage marched on the city and killed 300 Catholics. (42)
Catholics gave as good, or better, as they got in this mob violence. In the Midi (southern France) and in the west, "up to 2,000 Jacobins were killed by 'white Terror' gangs: the victims were usually wealthy purchasers of nationalized property, and were often Protestants" (McPhee, 76).
The various legal attacks on the Catholic Church also sometimes enflamed these long-simmering sectarian tensions. For example, the Revolutionary government required all priests to take another to Republic, which was opposed by traditionalist Catholics. In areas with Protestant minorities, this oath-taking "aroused wider fears about attacks on a way of life to which Catholic ritual and charity was pivotal," writes McPhee:
In the small southern towns of Millau and Sommières, milling crowds of poor women and children aimed their anger not so much at local Protestants as at pro-revolutionary Catholic administrators deemed to be destroying established forms of religious life: at Millau, women shouted, "We want to conserve our religion, the religion of Jesus Christ, we want our clergy!" (44)
Many areas of France, of course, had little to no Protestants, and many of these areas saw spontaneous as well as state-directed violence against Catholicism. And the decline of the Church's prestige and popularity had begun to decline well before the Revolution; the 18th Century say a secularization process in many parts of France:
Across the century, the percentage of births outside marriage increased from 2.9 to 4.1 and of pregnant brides from 6.2 to 10.1. Some towns registered an increase in non-attendance at church, paralleled among élites by a trend away from the purchase of religious books and a secularization of their attitudes to death. In Provence, the number of people requesting masses for their souls in their wills declined from 80 to 50 percent in 1750-89 (46 percent of men and 67 percent of women). Nationally, levels of recruitment to the priesthood declined by 23 percent in 1749-89, and of Benedictine, Franciscan and Augustine monks by one-third in the 20 years after 1880; on the other hand, the number of congréganistes (non-cloistered nuns) was increasing. (McPhee, 19)
This decline in church authority (which was also experienced in Protestant areas) was coupled by elite attacks on church abuses — some of which drew on Protestantism (and an older French Catholic tradition of Jansenism) as inspiration:
Republicans (after 1789) ... sought to reconcile Christianity and Revolution, and to develop a new civic morality with its own festivals. Everyone agreed that it was necessary to moralize the masses. Protestants seemed to many to have succeeded in combining individual liberty with faith, and, in spite of being a tiny minority within France, they were prominent in all progressive political and philosophical movements. But Catholic liberals, a small and rather beleaguered elite, were repeatedly forced to choose between their Catholicism and their liberalism. (Tombs, 63. Emphasis added).
So it would be a mistake to say — as many contemporary Catholics did — that the entire Revolution was simply a continuation of the Reformation:
In the minds of Catholic conservatives, it was a further ramification of the great conspiracy: the continuing Revolution was a manifestation of Protestant hatred of Catholicism, a continuation of the Reformation. Protestant powers, they asserted, were behind the catastrophic events that threatened the independence of their papacy and the status of France. (Tombs, 90)
But this conspiracy theory, false as it was, built off of a few truths. The Revolution did disproportionately benefit Protestants, both directly as a religious minority and indirectly as a sect who were often bourgeois. These benefits, in religiously mixed areas, came at the expense of Catholics. And Protestants knew where their bread was buttered. McPhee gives the example of the Provençal village of Lourmain:
One reason for the enthusiasm with which Lourmarinois supported the Revolution... was that some 80 percent of them were Protestants. Though there seems to have been decline in religiosity during the eighteenth century, oral memories of earlier religious atrocities were kept alive within the community. The construction of a Protestant church in 1805 was to be a tangible reminder of the significance of the Revolution for religious minorities. (104)
And long after the Revolution ended, "Protestants tended to support whichever political party opposed clericalism and legitimism" (Tombs, 90) — whether that was Orléanist monarchists, Bonapartists or republicans.
One recurring theme in discussing this sectarian violence is Catholic mob violence targeting both Protestants and "Jacobins" (real or perceived radical republicans). While the presence of violence varied around France, the hostility between militant Catholics and the Revolution was fairly consistent (some areas, such as the Vendée, just had larger numbers of militant Catholics). "In general," McPhee notes, anger at church reform created a large social basis for hostility to the Revolution, and not vice versa." (The fact that the Revolution closed down "surplus" churches in villages who definitely did not consider themselves surplus didn't help. See Alain Corbin, "The Life of an Unknown: The Rediscovered World of a Clog Maker in Nineteenth-Century France, especially pp. 12, 137-9, and 192-3.) (McPhee, 45). Generally speaking it was the same people who were opposing the Revolution and Protestants in the 1790s, and the same people who were supporting the Revolution and supporting attacks on the Catholic Church.
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