EVENT
The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes
Louis XIV's 1685 expulsion of French Protestants — Landes's canonical case of cultural intolerance producing economic self-mutilation.
In October 1685, Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, which for eighty-seven years had guaranteed French Protestants the right to practice their faith and pursue their trades. The revocation was a triumph of religious uniformity and an act of economic self-mutilation whose consequences Landes documented across his career. The Huguenots were disproportionately represented in France's most skilled and commercially productive trades: silk weaving, watchmaking, glassblowing, silversmithing, printing, finance. They were not merely skilled workers but nodes in networks of knowledge, trade, and trust extending across Europe. Between two hundred thousand and one million left France — the estimates vary widely, but even the lowest figure represents a staggering loss. They went to England, the Netherlands, Brandenburg-Prussia, Switzerland, the Cape Colony, and the American colonies. Every receiving society was enriched. France was diminished.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The deeper damage was not the loss of skilled labor — which could, in theory, be replaced over time — but the destruction of networks. The Huguenots