When, in the course of 2015, Islamist terrorist attacks hit Paris twice, the French immediately contextualized what was happening to them within a century-long history. Historians, soon echoed by the media, started asking whether the country was experiencing a return to the wars of religion that had plagued France in the second half of the 16th century. Voltaire’s Traité sur la Tolérance (1763), which critiques religious fanaticism and advocates for the tolerance of Protestantism, was suddenly propelled to the top of the nation’s best-sellers lists. This course investigates the cultural lens through which the French tried to make sense of the terrorist attacks of 2015-2016, by engaging in the historical exploration of three tightly intertwined concepts in French history: religious fanaticism, toleration, and laicité. To do so, the class focuses on five formative historical moments in French culture: 1) the wars of religion (and in particular the massacre of the Saint-Barthélemy, in 1572), 2) the Edict of Nantes (1598) and its Revocation (1685), 3) the Enlightenment’s embracing of religious toleration (centered on a study of Voltaire’s position), 4) the French Revolution (which gave birth both to Terror and to laicité) and 5) the separation of Church and State (1905). We read literary works, see films and study current essays. We also read journalistic articles, view public television shows (one on l’affaire Calas and the other on the separation of Church and State) and listen to radio programs. All readings, class discussions and course work are done in French.