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A well-known passage of the Histoire ecclesiastique des Eglises reformées au royaume de France recounts how an inquiry organized by the Reformed churches at the behest of Catherine de Medici determined that 2,150 Reformed churches had come into existence by early 1562. For more than four centuries, this claim was accepted by most historians of French Protestantism, but since 1980 historians have sharply reduced their estimates of the number of churches that existed at that date. This article shows that the Reformed did indeed undertake nationwide inquiries in late 1561 and early 1562 to determine their numbers and military strength, but that these were not carried out exactly as stated in the Histoire ecclesiastique . It also seeks to indicate in what way the figure of 2,150 might contain a measure of plausibility, to illuminate the reliability and meaning of the more recent, lower estimates of the number of churches in 1561-1562, and to suggest how the very act of drawing up national estimates of Reformed numbers and military strength could have contributed to the sequence of events leading to the First Civil War.