If the landscape of the Ile de Ré attracts curiosity today, it is for its beaches and salt marshes rather than for the marks left by the last Wars of Religion (1620-1629). The clashes that pitted the Protestant troops of Soubise and Charles I of England against those of Louis XIII remain largely ignored. Yet they were part of the chain of events that led to the restoration of civil peace and monarchical sovereignty in France, and to the crisis into which the English monarchy sank at the beginning of the 1630s. Their outcome was also not unconnected with the official entry of the kingdom of France into the Thirty Years’ War (1635), from which England, on the contrary, was moving away as it slowly sank into civil war.

This article looks back at these events, placing them in the local, ‘national’ and European context of the religious conflicts, before proposing a reconstruction of the events and analysing the causes of the rout of the Duke of Buckingham’s armies, and then proposing a precise identification of the site of the massacre of the English soldiers in the marshes between Ars and Loix. The cross-referencing of sources of various kinds and origins with the traces left on the ground by the confrontations, as well as the methods of history, art history and archaeology, now make it possible to restore to these events their historical, material and European dimensions. This is the aim of the scientific and heritage project, ‘400 years/The siege of the Île de Ré (1625-1627)’, initiated by the Île de Ré Patrimoine association in 2021 and supported, from 2023, by an international and interdisciplinary academic team.