AH Challenge: Make France Protestant!

Since when? Change begets Change. A small change will over time lead to huge changes, and a protestant France is a huge change to begin with, and over the coruse of centuries the alteration will only widen. And that is NOT even yet considering the butterfly effect!


Okay, okay, there is a huge difference. I just wanted to point out that the "wait until 2010" was not going to work, or at least throw that in as an important footnote. I knew people wouldn't like me downsizing it, just realize that you have to realize how wars affected the French culturally: pretty extremely.

On the note about the butterfly effect, I just don't like it all that much-it's fine most of the time, but it seems to me that too many people use it to get rid of certain people they don't want to deal with, and even when culturally someone else could have easily taken up their place, they just skip it.
 

Susano

Banned
On the note about the butterfly effect, I just don't like it all that much-it's fine most of the time, but it seems to me that too many people use it to get rid of certain people they don't want to deal with, and even when culturally someone else could have easily taken up their place, they just skip it.

Yeah, so? The thing about it the buitterfly effect is that its random. This of course would be best approximated by dice rolls etc., but that would be cumbersome. The randomness can as well be emulated by arbitrariness of the TL author, and then why shouldnt the author make changes convinient for his writing?

And as said, this isnt even the realm of the true butterfly effect yet, just accumulating change...
 
And as said, this isnt even the realm of the true butterfly effect yet, just accumulating change...
Indeed; the butterfly effect only comes into play with things that are not directly related to the PoD. To wit:

1: France's new religion causes social/cultural and foreign policy changes = Accumulating change.

2: Because most the 17th and 18th centuries are substantially changed, Napoleon is never born = Butterfly Effect.
 
Interesting discussion on the butterfly effect, but back to my point-how can we make the Protestants do better in the early Wars of Religion?

Alternatively, how can we wank Gallicanism? Say France does a little worse a little earlier in the Italian wars, and the Pope doesn't feel the need to agree to the Concordat of Bologna? Does that sound like a start?
 
When it comes changing the Wars of Religion, your best bet would be a Bourbon-Valois alliance against the Ultra-Catholic Guises. It was something the French crown seriously considered several times; the Guises were enough of a threat to the Valois dynasty for an alliance of convenience to be worthwhile.

Also, the Battle of Moncontour seems like a nice point for a PoD; it was a fairly important Huguenot defeat, but it was one of those battles that remained a fairly close-run thing until the very end. It would not take too much of a change to turn it into a major protestant victory.

Another good choice would be to prevent or significantly mitigate the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre; it cost the Huguenots a lot of their best leaders, and by the time new ones like Henry of Navarre took their place, the Huguenots had taken too much damage to win the war outright.
 
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