Small French town in Département Gard in the Cévennes / center of Protestant resistance during the Wars of Religion in 16th and 17th-century France / 1629 Cardinal Richelieu presided over the Peace of Alès for the Protestants / 1702-1704 popular uprising and Camisard War (camiso was the Occitan word for commoners’ shirts) to restore the right of Protestants to exist in France after the 1685 revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which had provided for religious peace in 1598