Siege of La Rochelle

La Rochelle was the last Huguenot stronghold that could defy the French crown, and what made it defiant was the sea: as long as ships could reach it, no siege would work. Richelieu's answer, begun in the autumn of 1627, was to build a stone dyke more than a kilometre long across the mouth of the harbour, with a gap left for the tide and blockships and chains across that. English relief expeditions arrived twice and could not get past it. Inside, the town ate its horses and then its leather and held out for fourteen months before surrendering in October 1628 with perhaps a fifth of its people left alive. The Peace of Alais the following year stripped the Huguenots of their fortified towns and their armies while leaving their freedom of worship intact, which held until 1685.

The siege is the hinge of the French wars of religion's long ending, and historians argue about which half of the Alais settlement mattered more: the destruction of the Huguenots as an armed political estate, or the deliberate preservation of their worship for another two generations, which suggests Richelieu was pursuing sovereignty rather than confession. Dumas is the reason most people have heard of it at all, and The Three Musketeers has fixed a version of the siege in popular memory that is roughly accurate on the dyke and fanciful on almost everything else. Demographic historians have revisited the death toll using parish and tax records and generally support the scale of the collapse while treating the round figures with caution. The dyke's remains are surveyed periodically and stretches of its stonework still break the surface at low water.