Protestantism, vanquished but not destroyed, broke up into provincial and municipal associations without recognized and dominant heads, without discipline or combination in respect of either their present management or their ultimate end.

Catholicism, though victorious, likewise underwent a break-up; men of mark, towns and provinces, would not accept the St.Bartholomew and its consequences; a new party, the party of the policists, sprang up, opposed to the principle and abjuring the practice of persecution, having no mind to follow either the Catholics in their outrages or royalty in its tergiversations, and striving to maintain in the provinces and the towns, where it had the upper hand, enough of order and of justice to at least keep at a distance the civil war which was elsewhere raging.

Languedoc owed to Marshal de Damville, second son of the Constable Anne de Montmorency, this comparatively bearable position.
But the degree of security and of local peace which it offered the people was so imperfect, so uncertain, that the break-up of the country and of the state went still farther.

In a part of Languedoc, in the Vivarais, the inhabitants, in order to put their habitations and their property in safety, resolved to make a league amongst themselves, without consulting any authority, not even Marshal de Damville, the peace-seeking governor of their province.

Their treaty of alliance ran, that arms should be laid down throughout the whole of the Vivarais; that none, foreigner or native, should be liable to trouble for the past; that tillers of the soil and traders should suffer no detriment in person or property; that all hostilities should cease in the towns and all forays in the country; that there should everywhere be entire freedom for commerce; that cattle which had been lifted should be immediately restored gratis; that concerted action should be taken to get rid of the garrisons out of the country and to raze the fortresses, according as the public weal might require; and finally that whosoever should dare to violate these regulations should be regarded as a traitor and punished as a disturber of the public peace.