The explanation of the exodus which ushered in the new century leads us back, for a moment, to certain events which, until now, we have not had occasion to mention. A great blessing to Grenoble in the past had been the Edict of Nantes, by which Henry IV., in 1598, had put an end to the religious wars. It had paved the way for the uninterrupted peace of the seventeenth century, and thus for the efflorescence of Grenoble’s crafts and industries. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV., in 1685, really marks the turning point in that city’s prosperity. The testimony of contemporaries confirms this opinion, and the verdict of those living twenty years later in the famous glove town, assigns to the same cause the steady shrinking of the population during the second decade after the Revocation. The sudden withdrawal of religious liberty cost France three hundred thousand of her people who emigrated to Germany, Holland, and other Protestant countries. A large element in these emigrations were the skilled artisans. Grenoble alone was deprived of nearly three thousand persons, among them the family of the Lèsdiguieres, many others of the nobility and the gentlefolk, and a large body of masters and apprentices. In 1705 the city lost five hundred individuals of the religious profession and seventy-three families of “gentilhommes,” whose disappearance was no trifling matter, as these personages had been liberal patrons of the glovers, and it was their wealth which, in great part, had made business move. Industry in Grenoble, on every hand, was in a grievous state—but especially glove-making, the home demand being suddenly removed, and foreign trade little developed at that period. Such was the deplorable effect of the Revocation. The glovers, however, proved themselves possessed of almost unbelievable powers of recuperation. In 1729 we find the sale of Grenoble gloves spreading rapidly in Germany, Switzerland, Savoy and Piedmont. Foreign trade steadily increased, despite the fact that the population of Grenoble remained, virtually, at a standstill. But trade abroad brought also foreign competition. While the Revocation had actually served Grenoble, indirectly, by causing the ruin of her rivals in France—Blois and Vendome, which could not support the drain of their emigrations; and especially Grasse, which was seriously crippled by loss of its master glovers and the departure of most of its families of wealth—these selfsame emigrations doubtless stimulated the manufacture of gloves outside France. Many of those who had served their apprenticeship in Grenoble, and master glovers holding the secrets of her arts, probably became rivals, in other lands, of the city they once had called their own.