The Palatine, or Rheinpfalz experienced considerable redevelopment and population control during the Thirty Years War as well as the War of the League of Aubsburg, or Nine Years War (1688-1697), when France invaded the electoral principality and tried to turn it into a “desert.” One can still see the ruins of castles destroyed by the French at that time, including the one at Heidelberg.
Thousands of people from the region departed in the early 1700’s, most heading for America, but a few going to Britain or Ireland. My own ancestors were from Lorraine, just to the south, but of essentially the same ethnicity, and they left in 1740.
Today, the Rheinpfalz is the home of the Weinstrasse (Wine Highway), a two-lane highway that winds from Bockenheim in the north to the French border through some of Germany’s finest wine country.
One reason the population of the Palatinate was virtually exterminated—by the French— was because they were Calvinists.
The Calvinists were the great losers of the wars of the 18th century.
They all decamped to America.
The German & Dutch reformed churches were Calvinist. As were the English puritans and Scottish Presbyterians. And too the smaller groups of French Huguenots and Swedish Reformed Churches.
Calvinism was the majority theology at the time of the revolution. And the writers of the Constitution in Madison’s group were all Calvinists.
After the Revolution— Calvinism went into decline.