The growth of toleration in a cosmopolitan society: Protestants in eighteenth-century Paris.

This project asks how religious toleration came about in eighteenth-century Paris and how new religious attitudes contributed to Enlightenment thought. Throughout the seventeenth century Protestants faced intense hostility from the Catholic inhabitants of Paris, yet by the 1780s they could practise their religion openly. This required a huge change from a world view in which Protestants threatened the very existence of Catholic cities, to one in which coexistence was a reality. To understand this we must examine both everyday relationships between Catholics and Protestants and evolving religious belief in a rapidly changing city.