The French kingdom dissolved into civil wars, known as the 'wars of religion', for a generation from 1562 to 1598. This book examines the reactions of France's governing groups to that experience. Their major political endeavour was securing peace. They attempted to achieve it through a religious pluralism not envisaged in any other state on this scale in this period. Its achievement would only be fulfilled, however, alongside a reform of the kingdom's institutions and society. Peace Robert May is Professor of Zoology at the University of Oxford and Imperial College London. His research, first at Princeton University and since 1988 at Oxford University, has dealt with the ways in which plant and animal populations - either singly or in interacting communities - change over time, especially in response to natural or human-created disturbance. His work on chaos, on how infectious diseases can influence the numerical abundance or geographical distribution of populations (including applications to humans and HIV/AIDS), on estimating species' numbers and rates of extinction, and more generally on conservation biology have been recognised by several major International Prizes (Crafoord, Balzan, Blue Planet). He has been Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Government (1995-2000), President of the Royal Society (2000-2005), and in 2001 was one of the first appointees to the UK Upper House by the Independent House of Lords Appointment suggesting how Bourbon France could have emerged very differently from the civil wars of the late sixteenth century.