France’s economic wound: how the Huguenot exodus-shaped regional development

Abstract In 1685, Louis XIV’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes expelled some 200,000 Huguenots–one of the most skill-selective forced migrations in early modern Europe. While their contributions to England, Prussia, and the Dutch Republic are well documented, the economic losses borne by the French regions they left behind have remained surprisingly unmeasured, despite the Huguenots’ disproportionate role in textiles, luxury crafts, finance, and international trade. This paper provides the first economy-wide, micro-quantitative estimate of the long-run cost of this exodus for France. Using a newly assembled parish-level panel of Protestant baptism registers (1570–1700) linked to the industrial censuses of 1839 and 1860, we trace how a seventeenth-century demographic shock-shaped regional development nearly two centuries later. We uncover three core results. (1) A one-standard-deviation decline in Huguenot baptisms ( $$\approx$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mo>≈</mml:mo> </mml:math> –20%) led to enduring losses: –5.8% industrial employment, –4.4% establishments, and –5.1% wages in 1839, with output deficits still visible in 1860. (2) These effects persisted remarkably: by 1860, industrial production remained 2.8% lower–about 480,000 francs per arrondissement. (3) The impact hinged on institutional and intellectual complementarities: regions distant from universities, printing presses, commercial hubs, or Parliaments suffered the deepest scars. Together, these findings show how the removal of a highly skilled minority durably reshaped France’s economic geography, leaving an imprint that lasted for nearly two centuries.