This paper examines the question of the rights recognized to Protestants in France during the Wars of Religion. It tries to hold together two contradictory but constitutive moments of the Huguenot experience: the obtaining of rights and their sudden revocation in the last decades of the 16th century. It ponders the effects of these two sequences of the granting and deprivation of rights. A first step is devoted to the study of how the Huguenots obtained their rights and incorporated their belonging and submission to the royal State through the drafting of numerous complaints whose content, far from being confessional, was very secularized. At the heart of the 16th century, this article analyses the quest carried out by the Huguenots who are not demanding any material goods but are engaged in a “struggle for recognition”, which leads them to place themselves in the hands of the royal State to whom they owe their anointing as “subjects” and the recognition of their confessional rights as a minority. The second period of the article focuses on the sudden revocation of the rights of Protestants in 1562, 1568 and especially 1585: what are the effects, not only on the practices but also on the representations (of power, of time), of this sudden loss of “right to have rights”? How to deprive a minority group of its rights but also of its property?