Reformation: Politics/Religion:  

Reformation: The End of Papal Hegemony and the Advent of Protestantism: 

Also known as the "Protestant Revolution". Generally speaking, the Reformation begins when in 1517 the German, Catholic priest Martin Luther nails his famous "95 Theses" to the Castle Church door, in Wittenberg Germany.  The "Theses" generally condemned priests for acting immorally and, most importantly, for selling indulgences; that is, for a price, forgiving people's sins.

In short, Luther challenged the theology  of the Papacy, and although he initially only meant to reform its theology, he helped spark (and in Germany led) a complete revolution against its religious and political authority.

This challenge was amplified when, in England, Henry VIII fought the Catholic Church for the right to divorce and remarry.  Although the Church granted him this right the first time around, when it refused the second time, he created the Anglican Church/Church of England (1534) (leading to the English Civil War as Anglicans, Catholics and Puritans all fight for dominance). Note: marital freedom is also a key theme in Tartuffe and Candide. (Henry VIII's wives)

Similar breaks from Catholicism soon occur throughout Northern Europe.

Reformation: Four Levels of Change:

1) Religious: Personal relationship with Biblical word, word of God, Bible translated into vernaculars, beginning with Luther's translation of the bible into German (Note relationship to spread of literacy; technology: printing press; philosophy: individualism and freedom) etc.

2) Political And Social: The rise of the Nation State.  Rise of Absolutist Kings: Freed from Papal control, Kings had vastly more power. Like Catholic kings before them, Protestant monarchs still rooted their power in "Divine Right": a king answers to no one but God.

3) Economic: Freed from Rome, nation-states develop new economic models, competition among countries to control/exploit colonies, death of "money-lender taboo (usury) and growth of capitalism.  Until this time, money lending was the domain of families or the Church (or those outside of the Church: Jews); the Reformation clears the way for what we now call banking.

4) Aesthetic/Cultural: Northern European cultural Revolt Against Papal, Italian, Renaissance Splendor. Move toward Simplicity, Sparseness, Puritanism.

Religious War
As is often the case when a single, strong ruler or ruling system is eliminated, the Reformation leads to a violently swinging Intolerance/Tolerance pendulum: Catholics and Protestants (as well as struggles between Catholic sects, and between Protestant denominations etc.)  denounce each other as  heretics and/or followers of Satan (and of course Jews are routinely burned by both); Europe plunged into a varied series of wars that cost hundreds of thousands of lives, cripples it economically and will greatly influence that colonization of the New World. (This is the chaotic, violent, brutal political and civil landscape upon which Tartuffe and Candide set.)

Consider the Thirty Years War, between Catholics and Protestants, in what is essentially now modern Germany, Austria and Bavaria: killed between 1/5 to 1/3 of the entire population, largely thru direct genocide of unarmed civilians.  This constituted the largest civilian slaughter in Europe, for all time, until WWI and WWII.

How the Conservative Reformation Spawned the Liberal Enlightenment