Le secret des finances de France, published in 1581 under the pseudonym Nicolas Froumenteau, estimated that well over one million people had lost their lives in the religious strife that raged almost continuously in France between 1560 and 1580. Included in this total were some twenty thousand Catholic clergy, thirty thousand nobles, eighty thousand victims of massacres and executions, and hundreds of thousands of common soldiers. The material costs of warfare had also been high: since 1550 war-related taxes alone had exceeded 300 million livres while the depredations of armies had cost more than ten times that amount. Over 100,000 individual dwellings and some 600 villages had been destroyed.

Whatever the precise accuracy of these grim figures, Froumenteau's contemporaries could have had few illusions about the tremendous financial, material, and human costs of the wars of religion, costs that were the direct result of their militarily indecisive nature: by 1581 they had been grinding on remorselessly for almost two decades, and no end was in sight. Civil war had become the defining experience for the French people and would remain so until the end of the sixteenth century.

During the reign of Charles IX (1560–74) there were five successive general civil wars marked by extensive formal military operations.