Poitou was a province of west-central France, with Poitiers serving as its capital. Poitou was once a part of England's "Angevin Empire", but King Henry III of England acknowledged its loss to France in the 1259 Treaty of Paris. During the late 16th and early 17th centuries, Poitou was home to a large number of Huguenots (French Calvinists), and it was severely impacted by the French Wars of Religion (1562-1598). After the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, the Huguenots were repressed and the Catholic Church mounted a Counter-Reformation in the region. The strongly-Catholic people of Poitou sided with the French Royalists during the War in the Vendee in 1793, as they feared the power of the "godless" revolutionary government. In 1815, another royalist revolt broke out against Napoelon I during his Hundred Days, and this uprising was also suppressed. In 2006, Poitou had a population of 1,375,356 people.
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