Iron and Blood will permanently change the way we perceive sixteenth-century French history. Henry Heller shows that mounting social unrest in the first half of the century finally resulted in the French Civil Wars. Challenging the works of Fernand Braudel and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Heller argues that well before the 1560s, in the midst of the apparent prosperity and tranquillity of the French Renaissance, French society was marked by acute social tensions that regularly exploded in uprisings and rebellions. Heller demonstrates that the historical events of sixteenth-century France were unified by an increasing level of social conflict.