They did not choose the name. It was flung at them in the streets of Tours and Lyons as a jeer, and in the end they wore it, much as the disciples at Antioch came to bear the name of Christians. For more than two centuries it was the name of the Reformed churches of France: a people gathered by the preaching of the Word, taught from Calvin’s Geneva, singing the Psalms of Marot and Beza from memory, and harried through massacre, civil war, siege, exile, the galleys, and the hidden worship of the hills.

Their story is not a simple one, and this page does not pretend that it is. The Huguenots were martyrs, and many of them were also soldiers. They were loyal subjects who took up arms against the ministers of their king. They suffered the most notorious massacre of the age, and they were not themselves innocent of violence. But through all of it ran a single thread that their persecutors never managed to cut. They believed that the Word of God, and not the edicts of kings or the decrees of councils, must govern the conscience, and very many of them were prepared to lose everything rather than surrender it. When the dragoons were quartered in their homes in 1685 and they were ordered to become Catholics, the common answer, as their most eminent pastor recorded it, was this:

They were ready to sacrifice their Estates and Lives to the King, but their Consciences, being God’s, they could not in that manner dispose of them.¹ Jean ClaudeAn Account of the Persecutions, 1686

That is sola Scriptura confessed not in a lecture hall but in a kitchen with soldiers in it. It is why their history belongs on these pages.

A Name of Reproach

No one knows for certain where the word came from, and the reader should distrust anyone who claims to. M’Clintock and Strong’s Cyclopædia lists the derivations that were current in the nineteenth century: from Huguon, a Touraine word for those who walk the streets at night, since the first French Protestants, like the first Christians, met after dark; from a gate at Tours associated with a King Hugo, near which they gathered in secret; from Hugh Capet, whose descendant Henry IV they later carried to the throne; from a small coin, to mark their poverty. The German philologist Mahn counted fifteen proposals in all.²

The explanation most historians have preferred is Swiss. In Geneva the patriots who allied their city with the confederate cantons against the Duke of Savoy were called Eidgenossen, “confederates,” and a French form of the word, eiguenots, is found there as early as 1530.³ Merle d’Aubigné titled the opening book of his history of Calvin’s Reformation “Geneva and the First Huguenots,” and told how Philibert Berthelier and the syndic Besançon Hugues led the party of liberty against the duke’s faction, whom the citizens called the Mamelukes.⁴

In its historic sense, as a name for the Reformed of France, the word is first found in a letter Theodore Beza wrote to Heinrich Bullinger on June 16, 1561, about the Protestants of Lyons, and the letter shows that it was a term of abuse. It reached English in 1565, again in the mouth of an enemy. Yet unlike most such nicknames it was accepted by those it was meant to insult, and it eventually found its way into the documents of the state.⁵ A royal edict of July 1561 even forbade its use.⁶ More than a century later, preaching in Boston on their sufferings, Increase Mather still listed it among the insults the world reserves for God’s people:

Names of Reproach are commonly given to the Lord’s servants: Huguenots, Fanatics, and what not?⁷ Increase MatherBoston, 1682

Their own name for themselves was plainer: les Églises réformées de France, the Reformed Churches of France.

Seed in Hard Ground

France was the most Catholic of kingdoms. Its king was a quasi-sacred figure, the heir of Clovis, anointed at his coronation and sworn to suppress heresy. The theological faculty of the University of Paris, the Sorbonne, was the most prominent school of theology in Europe and a bastion of the scholastic method.⁸ Few countries could have looked less promising for the gospel of free grace.

Yet the seed was sown early. The humanist Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples wrote biblical commentaries that spoke of justification by faith several years before Luther did, and with his protégé Guillaume Briçonnet, Bishop of Meaux, he gathered a circle for the reform of the diocese. William Farel was among them. Marguerite of Angoulême, the king’s own sister and later Queen of Navarre, sheltered the évangéliques when the Sorbonne and the Parlement of Paris turned on them.⁹ Lefèvre’s French New Testament was carried into the kingdom by the thousand by peddlers from Switzerland.¹⁰ By the 1530s the Parlement had published the names of seventy-three “Lutherans,” and the list tells its own story: a doctor of divinity, a poet, priests and Augustinian friars, teachers and precentors, and alongside them printers, booksellers, book peddlers, engravers, jewelers, painters, cobblers, coopers, innkeepers, and shopkeepers.¹¹

The turning point came on the night of October 17–18, 1534, when placards written by the pastor Antoine Marcourt, denouncing the Mass as idolatry and its sacrifice as blasphemy, were posted in Paris and several other cities — reportedly even on the door of the king’s bedchamber. Francis I, who had been comparatively tolerant, ordered arrests, trials, and burnings, and walked in a solemn procession of the Sacrament through Paris to show the kingdom where he stood.¹² A young scholar from Noyon named John Calvin was among those who left France. From Basel he addressed to the king the preface that stands at the head of the Institutes, and he wrote it as an advocate for a church that could not speak for itself:

The cause which I plead is the common cause of all the godly and therefore the very cause of Christ — a cause which, throughout your realm, now lies, as it were, in despair, torn and trampled upon in all kinds of ways, and that more through the tyranny of certain Pharisees than any sanction from yourself.¹³ John CalvinPrefatory Address to Francis I

He did not plead for pity. He pleaded for a hearing, because the doctrine at issue was not his: “our doctrine must stand sublime above all the glory of the world, and invincible by all its power, because it is not ours, but that of the living God and his Anointed, whom the Father has appointed King.”

Persecution was effective for a generation. Owen Chadwick finds no certain evidence of an organized Protestant congregation in France before 1541, at Meaux, and none in Paris until 1555. It drove the reforming movement over the border, and some 3,300 French men and women asked for refuge at Geneva in the 1550s alone.¹⁴ Those who stayed paid for it. In 1553 Calvin wrote to the prisoners awaiting execution at Lyons, and his letter is a small portrait of the fellowship that bound Geneva to the French churches:

And although we are not at present in your condition, yet we do not on that account leave off fighting together with you by prayer, by anxiety and tender compassion, as fellow-members, seeing that it has pleased our heavenly Father, of his infinite goodness, to unite us into one body, under his Son, our head.¹⁵ John Calvinto the prisoners of Lyons, 1553

One of the prisoners wrote back that the letter had been read to him by a brother in the cell above, since he could see nothing in his dungeon, and he thanked Calvin for it, “for it invites us to weep and to pray.”

The School of Geneva

In the 1540s Calvin began to publish serious theology in French, the first time such works had been available in the language, and the doctrinal center of gravity of French Protestantism moved toward Geneva. In the 1550s Geneva began sending pastors into the kingdom.¹⁶ It is easy to picture this as a campaign directed from Switzerland. Chadwick corrects the picture: the faith spread first among the people, who then begged Geneva for ministers. Villages without a single landlord abolished the Mass, held prayers in French, and wrote for a pastor. In France the elders and deacons of a consistory were often in office before there was any minister to preside over them.¹⁷

The demand outran every supply. A Dominican preaching at Valdrome, near Die, announced in the middle of his sermon that he was of the Reformed faith, came down from the pulpit, and took off his habit; the village elected him its pastor and paid to send him to Geneva for “two or three months.” Berne released more than sixty of its pastors to France and Neuchâtel nineteen, and there was a moment when Lausanne had not a single pastor for its own pulpits. Calvin, at last, wrote that “we are at the end of our resources.” We have the list of one French pastor’s library, ten books besides the Bible. When he was sent to Le Havre, a post of danger, he would not risk them on the road; probably the only book he carried was his Bible.¹⁸

The churches that resulted had a character of their own. Because they began without enough pastors and without public buildings, family prayer and household Bible reading spread faster in France than anywhere else in the Reformed world, the head of the house presiding — as he did in the house of Admiral Coligny. The Psalms of Clément Marot, later completed by Beza, were known and loved and said from memory, and the people’s knowledge of the Bible’s histories was remarkable even among those who could hardly read.¹⁹ Those psalms became so much the mark of the movement that the Huguenots were identified by them.²⁰

A Confession and a Discipline, 1559

In May 1559, meeting in secret in Paris, the first National Synod of the Reformed Churches of France adopted a confession of faith and a church order. The confession had come from Geneva in thirty-five articles, whether from Calvin’s own hand or with the help of Beza and Viret is still disputed; the synod enlarged it to forty. It was presented to Francis II in 1560 and to Charles IX at Poissy in 1561, and the Seventh National Synod at La Rochelle in 1571 reconfirmed it as the standard of the churches.²¹ The Gallican Confession, as it came to be called, served in turn as a model for the Belgic Confession of the Dutch churches.²²

Its fifth article states the principle on which everything else in this story turned:

And for as much as it is the rule of all truth, containing all matters necessarily required for the worship of God and our salvation, it is no wise lawful for men or angels to add unto or to take from this doctrine or to change it. And here upon it follows that it is not lawful to oppose either antiquity or custom or multitude, or human wisdom, judgments, edicts, or any decrees or councils or visions or miracles unto this Holy Scripture: but rather that all things ought to be examined and tried by the rule and square thereof.²³ The French ConfessionArticle 5, 1559

Note the word edicts. Men who wrote that in the reign of Henry II knew what royal edicts were for. And the eighteenth article shows where the confession found its peace:

Wherefore we do utterly reject all other means by which men think they may be justified before God, and casting away all conceits of our virtues and merits we do altogether rest upon the sole obedience of Jesus Christ, which is imputed to us … because we are never at peace with God, till we are persuaded upon good grounds that we are beloved in Jesus Christ.²⁴ The French ConfessionArticle 18, 1559

The Discipline was, if anything, more influential still. The problem it solved was new: how to bind congregations that had grown up independently into one church without placing any of them over the others. Each church was governed by its consistory of pastor, elders, and deacons; churches sent representatives to a regional colloquy, colloquies to a provincial synod, and provincial synods to the national synod. Decisions were kept as local as possible.²⁵ The confession put the principle in one sentence: “it is unlawful for any church to challenge unto itself dominion or sovereignty over another.”²⁶ The Dutch Reformed adopted the system, and so in time did the Presbyterians. Those who value presbyterian church government owe a debt to a few hunted men meeting quietly in Paris.

How large had the movement become? The synod’s delegates claimed some 2,500 congregations. Chadwick calls the figure propaganda, aimed at persuading the crown that toleration was the only sane policy, and puts the probable number nearer 1,400, two-thirds of them in the south. Scott Manetsch estimates perhaps two million Protestants and nearly 1,250 churches by 1562.²⁷ Contemporaries were alarmed either way. “The kingdom is already half Huguenot,” Cardinal de Sainte-Croix wrote to the pope in 1561, and the Venetian ambassador reported that no province of France was free of Protestants.²⁸ In the same year as the synod Henry II made heresy punishable by death and forbade the judges to mitigate the penalty; within weeks he was dead of a lance wound taken in a tournament.²⁹

Nobles, Plots, and the Road to War

The 1550s brought a change that would shape everything after it. Great nobles embraced the Reformed faith, among them princes of the blood: Antoine de Bourbon, King of Navarre by his marriage to Jeanne d’Albret; his brother Louis, Prince of Condé; and the three Châtillon brothers, the greatest of whom was Gaspard de Coligny, Admiral of France. They gave the churches protectors with enough political and military weight to make the crown take them seriously. They also changed the movement’s character. Huguenot piety had been built around submission to the law of God and the magistrate; the nobility brought with it a settled sense of its own rights and privileges, and conversion did not alter it.³⁰

Coligny, born in 1519, was a soldier of the first rank. Taken prisoner after his stubborn defense of Saint-Quentin in 1557, he asked in captivity for a Bible, and a chronicler records that he read it

to ease the griefe and sorrowe of his minde with reading it. And he studied so much upon it, that he began from thensforth to have a taste of the pure religion and trew godliness, and to learne the right maner of calling uppon God.³¹ A sixteenth-century chroniclerquoted by A. W. Whitehead

Calvin’s sermons were his daily food.³² When the young Francis II came under the control of the Guise family, ultra-Catholic and the Admiral’s rivals, Coligny stood before the Assembly of Notables at Fontainebleau in August 1560 and asked, at a time when it could cost a man his life, that the Reformed be allowed to worship.³³

Others were less patient. In March 1560 a group of Protestant noblemen attempted to seize the king at Amboise, to “free” him from his Guise advisers. The conspiracy was betrayed, and the reprisals were savage.³⁴ Calvin had opposed it. “I never approved,” he wrote that October, “of deciding our cause by violence and arms.”³⁵ As late as 1561 he counseled Coligny himself against armed revolt: “It would be better should we all perish a hundred times than expose the gospel to such a disgrace.”³⁶

For a moment it seemed that peace might hold. Francis II died in December 1560; his brother Charles IX was ten, and their mother Catherine de Médicis governed as regent with the moderate chancellor Michel de l’Hôpital, who hoped France might know “neither Huguenots nor papists, but only Frenchmen.”³⁷ At the Colloquy of Poissy in 1561 Beza argued the Reformed faith before the court. By the Edict of January, issued on January 17, 1562, the Huguenots were allowed to assemble for worship by day outside the walled towns. It gave them, Schaff says, “very much less than their rights,” and Beza counseled them to accept it; they obeyed.³⁸

On March 1, 1562, the Duke of Guise and his men came upon a congregation worshiping legally in a barn at Vassy, in Champagne, and fell on them. Some sixty were killed and many more wounded.³⁹ When a local judge pleaded the king’s edict, the duke is said to have struck the hilt of his sword: “The sharp edge of this will soon cut your edict to pieces.”⁴⁰ Beza went to the court as deputy of the Protestants of Paris to demand justice. The King of Navarre, who had by then returned to Rome, answered roughly that the Protestants had provoked the attack by throwing stones. “Well then,” said Beza, “he should have punished only those who did the throwing.” Then he added the words the Huguenots never forgot:

Sire, it is in truth the lot of the Church of God, in whose name I am speaking, to endure blows, and not to strike them. But also may it please you to remember that it is an anvil that has worn out many hammers.⁴¹ Theodore Bezaat Monceaux, 1562

Civil war followed within weeks. The Guise party took the young king and the regent into its own hands, and Calvin’s reluctance gave way, on the ground that a prince of the blood, Condé, now represented lawful authority. The Genevan Company of Pastors was drawn into open support of the Huguenot cause.⁴² At Orléans, Condé’s headquarters, Beza’s psalms were sung in the streets. Beza himself rode with the army for seven months as its almoner and treasurer; at Dreux in December 1562 he rode in the front rank in citizen’s dress, and always denied that he struck a blow.⁴³

In February 1563 the Duke of Guise was shot outside Orléans by a Huguenot gentleman, Jean de Poltrot de Méré, who under examination accused Coligny and Beza of putting him up to it. Coligny published a point-by-point answer, signed with Beza and La Rochefoucauld, and it is worth reading, because it neither whitewashes nor collapses. He denied absolutely that he had induced the deed. He noted drily that the confession had him promising Poltrot a “meritorious work,” and that whoever forged it should first have learned “what the doctrine of the Gospel is, and how much it condemneth [merit] and meritorious works, before he took in hand to counterfeit the talk of a gospeller.” But he also admitted that after he learned that Guise had hired men to murder Condé, his brother, and himself, he had not tried to dissuade those who spoke of killing the duke.⁴⁴ The honest reader will find both things in the document, and should report both.

So began the Wars of Religion, which ran with interruptions from 1562 to 1598. Glenn Sunshine reduces their pattern to five steps: war breaks out; the two sides fight to a standstill; a peace grants the Protestants more or less than before, depending on how they fared in the field; the peace holds a little while; and one side, frequently the Guises, breaks it.⁴⁵ In the third war Condé was captured after the battle of Jarnac on March 13, 1569, and killed in cold blood. The army was disheartened, and Jeanne d’Albret came to the camp at Cognac with her fifteen-year-old son Henry of Navarre and Condé’s son, and gave them to the cause.⁴⁶

Jeanne deserves more than a sentence. Marguerite’s daughter, she declared herself publicly for the Reformed faith in 1560 and made her small kingdom of Béarn, in Chadwick’s words, “a conscientious attempt at a reformed French-speaking state.”⁴⁷ When Catherine de Médicis and her own husband pressed her to go to Mass, she is reported to have answered: “Madam, if I, at this moment, held my son and all the kingdoms of the world in my grasp, I would hurl them into the bottom of the sea, rather than risk the salvation of my soul.” On her arrival at La Rochelle in 1568 she declined, on her son’s behalf, the command of the Huguenot army: “The cause of God is dearer to me than the promotion of my son.” She also paid to have the New Testament translated into Basque for her subjects.⁴⁸ Her name belongs among the women of the Reformation.

The Peace of Saint-Germain on August 8, 1570, gave the Huguenots liberty of worship outside Paris and four security towns, La Rochelle among them.⁴⁹ It lasted two years.

Saint Bartholomew’s Day, 1572

Catherine sought to seal the peace in the traditional way, by a marriage. Her daughter Marguerite of Valois would marry Henry of Navarre, the titular head of the Huguenots. Jeanne d’Albret consented with misgiving and did not live to see it; she died in Paris on June 9, 1572, with her Bible at her side.⁵⁰ The wedding took place on August 18, 1572, at Notre Dame, and the Huguenot nobility came to Paris in force for the week of celebrations. Coligny was at court and in favor, urging Charles IX to unite Catholic and Protestant France in a war against Spain in the Netherlands. The Guises hated him, and much of Catholic Paris, stirred by its preachers, regarded the marriage as an abomination.⁵¹

On the morning of Friday, August 22, a gunman named Maurevert fired on Coligny from a window as he walked back from the Louvre, wounding him in the hand and arm. Foxe preserves the words the Admiral is said to have spoken to a minister at his bedside: “O my brother, I do now perceive that I am indeed beloved of my God, since for His most holy sake I am wounded.”⁵² The Huguenot leaders demanded justice and threatened vengeance. On the evening of Saturday, August 23, the king, his brother Anjou, Catherine, and a few trusted advisers met in emergency council and resolved that the Huguenot leaders must die.⁵³

The killing began about four in the morning on Sunday, August 24, the feast of Saint Bartholomew. Soldiers under the young Duke of Guise broke into Coligny’s lodging, killed him, and threw his body from the window into the street, where a crowd later mutilated it. As Guise walked away he was heard to say, “It is the king’s command.” Then the city militia and the mob took up the work, and for almost a week Paris hunted its Protestant neighbors in their houses and shops. Some 3,000 were killed in Paris, and perhaps 8,000 more in the provinces as the violence spread to Orléans, Lyons, Rouen, Bourges, Meaux, Bordeaux, Toulouse, and other towns.⁵⁴ At Orléans the killers mocked their victims by chanting the opening of Psalm 43, “Judge me, O God, and plead my cause against an ungodly nation.” A dispatch from Geneva caught the horror of those weeks:

The whole of France is bathed in the blood of innocent people and covered with dead bodies. The air is filled with the cries and groans of nobles and commoners, women and children, slaughtered by the hundreds without mercy.⁵⁵ Genevan diplomatic dispatch1572

There were deliverances. A boy who would become the Duke of La Force lay for hours feigning death beneath the bodies of his father and brother until a Catholic man found him and hid him. Pierre Merlin, Coligny’s chaplain, who had been with the Admiral moments before he died, hid for three days in a hayloft while soldiers probed the straw with their swords, and was carried out of Paris at last in a noblewoman’s coach. Some Protestants survived only because Catholic neighbors risked their lives to shelter them.⁵⁶

There was also collapse. Navarre and the young Condé were made to abjure, and thousands followed them back to Rome, some under torture and some in the despairing conviction that the massacre was God’s judgment on their cause. “The number of apostates,” Beza lamented, “almost defies counting!” In Rome the pope had a Te Deum sung and a medal struck bearing the words Ugonottorum strages, “the slaughter of the Huguenots.”⁵⁷ Beza, who preached to the mourning refugees at Geneva, held fast to the conviction by which the Huguenots would interpret the rest of their history:

The Church never triumphs except under the cross.⁵⁸ Theodore Beza

The Right of Magistrates

The Huguenots had always insisted that they were the king’s loyal subjects, opposing only his evil counselors. Their confession bound them to obedience, “although the magistrates are infidels; so that the sovereign government of God may be preserved entire.”⁵⁹ After 1572 that fiction could not be maintained, because the king openly acknowledged that he had ordered the killings.⁶⁰ The question was now unavoidable: what may a Christian people do when the king himself turns murderer?

The answer came in a series of treatises: François Hotman’s Francogallia in 1573, Beza’s The Right of Magistrates in 1574, and in 1579 the pseudonymous Vindiciae contra tyrannos, usually assigned to Philippe du Plessis-Mornay or Hubert Languet. They argued that a ruler who commits manifest tyranny forfeits his claim to rule and may be resisted, not by private men, but by the lesser magistrates of the realm.⁶¹ Beza still denied private persons any right to overthrow a ruler, but on the claims of conscience he was perfectly clear:

As often as the Magistrate commands anything that is repugnant either to the worship which we owe unto God, or to the love which we owe unto our neighbor, we cannot yield obedience thereunto with a safe conscience. For as often as the commandment of God and men are directly opposed one against another, this rule is to be perpetually observed; that it is better to obey GOD than men.⁶² Theodore BezaThe Right of Magistrates, 1574

The fourth war began weeks after the massacre with royal sieges of Sancerre and La Rochelle. La Rochelle held, and Anjou withdrew when he was elected King of Poland. In the south, Huguenot assemblies began to govern themselves as a “state within a state.”⁶³ The long road from these arguments to the American founding is traced on our page on civics.

Henry of Navarre and the Edict of Nantes

Henry of Navarre escaped the court in 1576, renounced his forced conversion, and took his place at the head of the Huguenots. When the king’s last brother died in 1584, Navarre became heir presumptive to the throne, and the ultra-Catholic Holy League, allied with Spain, rose to prevent it. The “War of the Three Henrys” followed. Navarre won at Coutras in October 1587. Henry III had the Duke of Guise and his brother the cardinal murdered at Blois in December 1588, was driven into alliance with Navarre, and on August 1, 1589, was himself stabbed by the Dominican friar Jacques Clément in the camp before Paris. The Valois line was extinct, and the Huguenot prince was King of France.⁶⁴

Catholic France would not have him. After years of fighting, unable to take Paris, Henry abjured the Reformed faith at Saint-Denis on July 25, 1593. The saying “Paris is worth a Mass” is attached to the occasion, though he probably never said it.⁶⁵ For the Huguenots it was a bitter thing: the prince for whom they had bled, and whose mother had made him promise to remain true to the Scriptures, became a Catholic king.

Yet he did not forget them. The Edict of Nantes, signed on April 13, 1598, and registered by the Parlement of Paris in February 1599, ended the wars.⁶⁶ It granted public worship in specified places throughout the kingdom, though not in Paris; set up courts with both Catholic and Protestant judges for cases between the two communities; and by secret articles left the Huguenots a number of fortified towns as pledges of the crown’s good faith.⁶⁷ At the end of the wars Henry’s officials counted 694 public churches, 257 private chapels, about 800 ministers, and some 274,000 Protestant families, perhaps a million and a quarter souls.⁶⁸

It was the first time a major kingdom had allowed two confessions to live side by side under one jurisdiction. It was not, however, toleration as we understand it. The edict looked forward to the day when religious unity might be restored, and its purpose was to settle the quarrel by words instead of swords.⁶⁹ On the Reformation Wall in Geneva, Coligny stands among the heroes of the Reformed cause, and the relief beside him shows Henry IV signing the edict, with its preamble inscribed.⁷⁰ On May 14, 1610, Henry was assassinated by François Ravaillac.⁷¹

La Rochelle and the Long Erosion

Under Louis XIII the edict’s guarantees began to be worn away. In 1620 Catholicism was restored as the official religion of Béarn, Jeanne’s old kingdom. The Huguenot grandees, the Duke of Rohan and his brother Soubise, took up arms in 1621 and again in 1625, and even a Protestant encyclopedia of the nineteenth century judged that in 1625 they “very unwisely refused” the terms Richelieu offered.⁷² When the Synod of Dort met in 1618, the French churches had been invited, but Louis XIII forbade their delegates to travel.⁷³

Cardinal Richelieu, the king’s chief minister from 1624, was determined that no body of subjects should hold privileges against the crown, and La Rochelle was the political capital of French Protestantism.⁷⁴ He laid siege to it in 1627. An English fleet under the Duke of Buckingham came to the city’s relief and was beaten off at the Île de Ré. The Rochelais held out for more than a year through the greatest privations, and surrendered at the end of October 1628. The Peace of Alès in June 1629 demolished the Huguenot fortresses and ended their existence as a political power, but it preserved their freedom of worship.⁷⁵

For half a century afterward they gave the crown no cause for complaint. During the civil wars of the Fronde they stood so firmly by the young Louis XIV that a royal declaration of 1652 acknowledged their loyalty, and the queen mother said openly that they had preserved the state. Jean Claude, pastor of the great church at Charenton outside Paris, later explained with some bitterness how that loyalty was turned against them. The king’s advisers were persuaded,

that if in this occasion, this party could conserve the State; this showed, they could likewise overthrow it, should they have ranked themselves on the other side; and might still do it, when such alike occasion should offer itself.⁷⁶ Jean Claude

The Revocation, 1685

After the death of Cardinal Mazarin in 1661, Louis XIV began to dismantle the Edict of Nantes by legal process, one clause at a time. An edict of 1662 allowed Protestants to bury their dead only at daybreak or nightfall. In 1665 their children were permitted to declare themselves Catholics, boys at fourteen and girls at twelve. Protestants were driven from offices and professions — officers of every kind, notaries, attorneys, even midwives — and in 1680 marriages between Protestants and Catholics were forbidden. In 1681 a royal declaration allowed Protestant children to convert at the age of seven, and the kidnapping of children began in earnest. Churches were pulled down, eighty in a single diocese, and Protestants were forbidden to sing psalms on land or water, in workshops or homes.⁷⁷

The news crossed the Atlantic. In 1682 Increase Mather published a sermon preached at a public fast in Boston, on the text of Acts 8:1, occasioned by “the Tidings of a great Persecution Raised against the Protestants in France”:

And there is an Edict come forth concerning them, more bloody than what came from the Court of Pharaoh: Pharaoh’s Edict was to destroy only the Bodies of Israelitish Infants: But now there’s an Edict that reacheth further: An Edict for the destruction of the Souls of the Children of Protestants. An Edict to make Idolaters of them. Behold! Our Neighbors House is on Fire! It behooves us to look about us!⁷⁸ Increase MatherBoston, 1682

He wanted the answer known abroad, if anyone should ask what New England was doing: “Tell them, that in New-England, they did no sooner hear of the persecuted Condition of the Protestants in France, but they set themselves, to Fast, & Pray to the God of Heaven, for them.”

The worst was still to come. From 1681, and generally in 1685, cavalry were quartered on Protestant households until the family signed an abjuration. The dragonnades began in Béarn and swept the kingdom. Claude describes troops entering towns “crying, Kill, Kill, or else be Catholics,” the intendants and bishops riding at their head with a company of missionaries, houses stripped and their goods sold, men and women hung by the hair or feet and smoked with wet hay, and signatures obtained by exhaustion and terror.⁷⁹ Abjurations were counted by the thousand, and the revoking edict itself would claim that “the best and greatest part” of the Reformed had embraced the Catholic religion.

On October 18, 1685, Louis XIV signed at Fontainebleau the edict revoking the Edict of Nantes, and it was registered on the 22nd.⁸⁰ It ordered the demolition of every remaining Protestant church, forbade Reformed worship even in private, gave the pastors fifteen days to leave the kingdom, closed the Protestant schools, required that children be baptized by the parish priest and raised as Catholics, and condemned men caught fleeing to the galleys for life and women to perpetual imprisonment.⁸¹ The demolition of the church at Charenton began the day the edict was registered. Claude, its senior minister, writes of himself in the third person:

The eldest Minister thereof was commanded to leave Paris within twenty four Hours, and immediately to depart the Kingdom. For this end they put him into the Hands of one of the Kings Footmen, with orders not to leave him till he was out of his Dominions.⁸² Jean Claude

Departing ministers were refused their children over the age of seven, and some younger, even infants at the breast.⁸³ Those caught on the roads went to the galleys, chained to the oar beside common criminals, and those who refused to hear Mass were beaten nearly to death.⁸⁴ In Rome a Te Deum was sung, and the pope sent the king his congratulations.⁸⁵

It should be recorded that some of the most admired churchmen of France approved. Fénelon, later celebrated for his charity, was sent into the provinces to convert the remaining Huguenots, and when his “loving persuasion” failed he recommended “salutary pressure” by the state.⁸⁶ In the last years of the reign he wrote of the kingdom: “France has become as but a huge hospital without provisions.”⁸⁷

The Refuge

The edict forbade emigration, and the frontiers and ports were watched. They went anyway, in every disguise ingenuity could suggest, by every outlet that could be found. No one knows how many. Sismondi reckoned between 300,000 and 400,000, and Weiss, the historian of the refugees, no fewer than 300,000; Kurtz speaks of half a million.⁸⁸ They went to the Netherlands, England, Switzerland, Denmark, and the German states. The Great Elector, Frederick William of Brandenburg, answered the revocation within weeks with the Edict of Potsdam, offering them safe passage and a home; he too stands on the Reformation Wall, and the relief beneath him shows him welcoming the exiles.⁸⁹

They took with them their skills, and France lost a great part of its industry. They also took their faith. Increase Mather had preached it from Acts 8 three years before: when the church at Jerusalem was scattered, “they that were scattered abroad went every where preaching the word.” Over a generation or two the refugees were absorbed into the nations that received them. In England, Weiss observed, “the Lemaîtres called themselves Master; the Leroys, King; the Tonneliers, Cooper; the Lejeunes, Young; the Leblancs, White, the Lenoirs, Black; the Loiseaus, Bird.”⁹⁰

America had known Huguenots long before. Coligny himself had planned a refuge in the New World. A colony went to Brazil in 1555, and Geneva sent two ministers to it; Jean Ribault planted a settlement at Port Royal in what is now South Carolina in 1562; René de Laudonnière built Fort Caroline on the St. Johns River in Florida in 1564. In 1565 a Spanish force under Pedro Menéndez destroyed Fort Caroline and massacred Ribault’s shipwrecked company. The old accounts say the Spaniards hanged some of their victims under the words, “Not as Frenchmen, but as Lutherans.”⁹¹

Later Huguenots came in a steady stream: perhaps 5,000 before 1685, and about 15,000 more in the following sixty-five years, most of them to Charleston, others to New York, New Paltz, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. They were merchants, craftsmen, lawyers, and physicians, and they assimilated with astonishing speed, partly because their primary identity was not French but Reformed.⁹² Three presidents of the Continental Congress, Henry Laurens, John Jay, and Elias Boudinot, were of Huguenot descent.⁹³

The Church of the Desert

Not all fled. In the Cévennes, the mountains above Nîmes, thousands refused either to abjure or to leave, and worshiped in secret in what was called le Désert, the wilderness. In 1702 persecution provoked a rising. The Camisards, peasants led by the young Jean Cavalier, fought the royal armies for years with remarkable skill, until Marshal Villars negotiated terms. The movement was marked by ecstatic prophesying that even its nineteenth-century Protestant admirers found troubling, and the war was savage on both sides.⁹⁴

The Reformed churches of the Desert survived without legal existence for a century. A severe ordinance of 1724 renewed the old penalties, and a pastor taken by the authorities could expect the gallows. Marriages and baptisms performed in the Desert had no standing in law, and couples were ordered to repeat them before the priest.⁹⁵ Women were imprisoned too. Marie Durand, the sister of a minister, was arrested for her faith in 1730 at the age of fifteen and shut in the Tower of Constance at Aigues-Mortes. “She needed to say only one word, to abjure her Protestant faith, but this she refused to do,” and she remained in the tower thirty-seven years. The word she carved into its stone, résister, “resist,” was remembered two centuries later by the French Resistance.⁹⁶

Relief came at last from an unlikely quarter. The case of Jean Calas, a Protestant merchant of Toulouse put to death on a false charge, moved Voltaire to write his treatise on toleration in 1763. In 1787 an edict of Louis XVI restored to Protestants a civil existence, with the right to marry lawfully and to bury their dead, though not to hold office, and in 1790 the Revolution restored the rights and property lost since the revocation.⁹⁷ The anvil had outlasted the hammers.

Cautions and Counterarguments

Few chapters of Reformation history have gathered more legend than this one, and a preacher who intends to use it should know where the ground is firm.

The numbers. Estimates of the dead of Saint Bartholomew vary enormously in the literature on this page. The narrative printed in later editions of Foxe gives one hundred thousand in a week; Increase Mather, thirty thousand; David Hall, sixty thousand in a month; Hagstotz, twenty to one hundred thousand.⁹⁸ Glenn Sunshine calls twenty thousand “a reasonable guess.” Scott Manetsch’s more careful figure is about 3,000 in Paris and perhaps 8,000 in the provinces, and that is the figure we have used. It is horror enough. The same caution applies to the emigration after 1685, where the figures in these sources run from 300,000 to half a million and no figure can be fixed with precision.

Premeditation. Protestant writers since Hotman’s De Furoribus Gallicis of 1573 have generally told the massacre as a long-laid plot by Catherine de Médicis, and the wedding as its bait. Most historians now judge that the killings were not premeditated but were a panicked response to the failed attempt on Coligny, and that the council did not foresee the mob violence it unleashed.⁹⁹ Sunshine regards the older portrait of Catherine as a scheming puppet master as a serious distortion; her aim was to preserve the kingdom for her sons.¹⁰⁰ None of this lessens the guilt of a crown that ordered the murder of its guests, or of a Rome that celebrated it. But the evidence should be told as it is.

Coligny and the death of Guise. Older hero-literature says that Coligny was “later proved innocent” of the Duke of Guise’s murder.¹⁰¹ Coligny’s own Answer is more complicated. He denied instigating the killing, but he admitted that he had not dissuaded those who proposed it, and in his covering letter to the queen mother he called the duke’s death “the greatest good turn that ever could happen to this realm, and to the church of God.”¹⁰² Beza, for his part, denied any knowledge of Poltrot but confessed that he had often prayed God either to turn the duke’s heart or to deliver the realm from him. A pulpit should not make the Admiral a plaster saint. He was a brave and godly man who lived in a world of private armies and vendetta, and his own words show it.

Huguenot violence. The Huguenots were not only victims. Protestant crowds pillaged churches, smashed images, and assaulted priests; at the riot of Saint-Médard in 1561 they paraded the streets chanting, “The Gospel, the Gospel; where are the idolatrous priests?” Natalie Zemon Davis observes that in the religious riots Huguenots tended to attack property and Catholics more often attacked people; but both used deadly force.¹⁰³ Calvin opposed the Amboise conspiracy, and a pastor who led his people to smash the statues of a church “shocked” him.¹⁰⁴ The confession itself condemned those who would subvert the course of justice. When Reformed Christians took up the sword they did not always remember what they had confessed.

Doubtful anecdotes. Several stories that circulate in Protestant retellings rest on weak foundations, and some of them appear in sources this page has used. That Charles IX fired on fleeing Huguenots from a palace window, that Coligny’s embalmed head was sent to the pope, and that the governor of Bayonne replied that his city had “many faithful servants and brave soldiers … but not one executioner” are late or contested traditions that careful modern accounts such as Manetsch’s do not repeat.¹⁰⁵ “Paris is worth a Mass” was probably never said. The section of the popular Foxe’s Book of Martyrs on the revocation is not Foxe’s, since he died in 1587; it was added by later editors and depends heavily on Jean Claude. Better to quote Claude directly, as we have.

Errors in the secondary sources. Several sources used here contain slips that should not be repeated. M’Clintock and Strong date the Vassy massacre to Christmas 1562 and March 1563 (it was March 1, 1562), put Henry III’s assassination in 1588 (it was August 1, 1589), and call Henry III the former Duke of Alençon (he had been Duke of Anjou). Beeke and Kleyn date the Navarre wedding to June 4, 1572 (it was August 18), set Beza’s “anvil” saying in a confrontation with the Duke of Guise (Schaff, following Baird, places it before the King of Navarre), and call the La Rochelle synod of 1571 the last French Reformed synod (national synods continued until Louis XIV forbade them in 1660). Hagstotz places the death of Guise “two months after” Vassy; it was nearly a year. The etymology of “Huguenot” as “united together” should be treated as one guess among many.

The Edict of Nantes was not religious liberty. It is tempting to celebrate 1598 as the birth of toleration. It was a truce between two parties, each of which still hoped to win, and it was revoked by the grandson of the king who signed it. Sunshine’s blunt verdict is that no one wanted toleration; both sides wanted to win. Where Jeanne d’Albret had the power, she abolished the Catholic religion in her own kingdom.¹⁰⁶ Their claim on our admiration is not that they were ahead of their age on toleration, but that, when the choice was put to them, very many chose to lose all things rather than deny Christ.

What Scripture Says

The writer to the Hebrews recalled to a persecuted congregation what they had once endured, and the words might have been written for a Huguenot household with dragoons at the table:

But call to remembrance the former days, in which, after ye were illuminated, ye endured a great fight of afflictions; … For ye had compassion of me in my bonds, and took joyfully the spoiling of your goods, knowing in yourselves that ye have in heaven a better and an enduring substance. Hebrews 10:32, 34

The dispersion of 1685 had its pattern in the first persecution of the church, the text Mather chose for his fast:

And at that time there was a great persecution against the church which was at Jerusalem; and they were all scattered abroad throughout the regions of Judaea and Samaria, except the apostles. … Therefore they that were scattered abroad went every where preaching the word. Acts 8:1, 4

And the name of reproach they bore has its answer in the One who bore reproach first:

Wherefore Jesus also, that he might sanctify the people with his own blood, suffered without the gate. Let us go forth therefore unto him without the camp, bearing his reproach. For here have we no continuing city, but we seek one to come. Hebrews 13:12–14

Beza told a king that the church is an anvil that has worn out many hammers. It is true, but the anvil does not endure because it is hard. It endures because of the One who laid it, and who Himself gave His back to the smiters and did not hide His face from shame and spitting. The church is called to endure blows and not to strike them because her Lord endured them first, and rose. The Huguenots did not always live up to Beza’s sentence. But the Christ they confessed in their eighteenth article, whose sole obedience was imputed to them, kept them through the massacre, the galleys, and the Desert, and brought their children to Charleston and Berlin and Spitalfields still singing His psalms. No continuing city: they learned that lesson more thoroughly than most. They sought one to come.

Further Reading

• Henry Martyn Baird, History of the Rise of the Huguenots of France, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1879) — vol. 1 at archive.org; the standard older narrative, continued in The Huguenots and Henry of Navarre (archive.org)
• Henry Martyn Baird, Theodore Beza: The Counsellor of the French Reformation (repr. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2004)
• Scott M. Manetsch, Theodore Beza and the Quest for Peace in France, 1572–1598 (Leiden: Brill, 2000)
• Christian History 71, “The French Huguenots and the Wars of Religion” (2001) — read online
• Robert M. Kingdon, Geneva and the Coming of the Wars of Religion in France, 1555–1563 (Geneva: Droz, 1956)
• Diana Kleyn with Joel R. Beeke, Reformation Heroes, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2009) — for younger readers, with chapters on Jeanne d’Albret and Coligny (Reformation Heritage Books)
• W. Stanford Reid, “The Battle Hymns of the Lord: Calvinist Psalmody of the Sixteenth Century” (1971) — on the Psalter in Huguenot life
• Jean Claude, An Account of the Persecutions and Oppressions of the Protestants in France (London, 1686) — EEBO-TCP text

The Reformation in France   John Calvin   Civics

Sources

1. Jean Claude, An Account of the Persecutions and Oppressions of the Protestants in France (London: J. Norris, 1686), on the opening of the dragonnades. Online at EEBO-TCP. The same sentence appears, unattributed, in the revocation chapter of later editions of Foxe: John Foxe, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (Rapidan, VA: Hartland Publications, 1997), 76–87. ↩
2. J. H. Worman, “Huguenots,” in John M’Clintock and James Strong, Cyclopædia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1891), 391–97, as compiled in “Notes on the Huguenots” (Reformation Stewards teaching materials). ↩
3. Owen Chadwick, The Early Reformation on the Continent, Oxford History of the Christian Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 297–307, section “France.” ↩
4. J. H. Merle d’Aubigné, History of the Reformation in Europe in the Time of Calvin, vol. 1 (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, & Green, 1863), book 1, “Geneva and the First Huguenots,” 1–38 and 176–98. ↩
5. Chadwick, Early Reformation, 297–307, citing Correspondance de Théodore de Bèze, ed. H. Aubert, vol. 3 (Geneva, 1963). ↩
6. Worman, “Huguenots,” 391–97: the edict of July 1561 provided that the Reformed “were no longer to be designated by such nicknames.” ↩
7. Increase Mather, A Sermon Wherein Is Showed That the Church of God Is Sometimes a Subject of Great Persecution; Preached on a Public Fast at Boston in New England: Occasioned by the Tidings of a Great Persecution Raised against the Protestants in France (Boston: Samuel Sewall, 1682). Online at EEBO-TCP. ↩
8. Glenn S. Sunshine, The Reformation for Armchair Theologians (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005), ch. 12, “The Reformation in France,” 197–212. ↩
9. Sunshine, Armchair Theologians, 197–212. Chadwick adds the necessary qualification that Marguerite “was not in a meaningful sense a ‘Protestant’” but a Catholic of Erasmian sympathies who sheltered Protestants: Early Reformation, 297–307. ↩
10. Worman, “Huguenots,” 391–97. ↩
11. Chadwick, Early Reformation, 297–307. ↩
12. Sunshine, Armchair Theologians, 197–212; on the date, “Notes on John Calvin” (Reformation Stewards teaching materials). ↩
13. John Calvin, “Prefatory Address to King Francis I of France,” Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge, as reprinted in “Pleading the Cause of Christ,” Christian History 71 (2001). The full text is online at CCEL. ↩
14. Chadwick, Early Reformation, 297–307. ↩
15. Calvin to the prisoners of Lyons, 1553, in Jules Bonnet, ed., Letters of John Calvin, 2:412–13, quoted in Timothy George, Theology of the Reformers, rev. ed. (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2013), chapter on Calvin, “Providence.” The prisoner’s reply is quoted in the same place from Bonnet, 2:411. ↩
16. Sunshine, Armchair Theologians, 197–212. ↩
17. Chadwick, Early Reformation, 297–307. ↩
18. Chadwick, Early Reformation, 297–307, citing Calvin, Corpus Reformatorum 18:466–67; Robert M. Kingdon, Geneva and the Coming of the Wars of Religion in France (Geneva, 1956), 16; and H. Vuilleumier on Lausanne. ↩
19. Chadwick, Early Reformation, 297–307. ↩
20. Diana Kleyn with Joel R. Beeke, Reformation Heroes, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2009), chapter on Theodore Beza, citing Henry Martyn Baird, Theodore Beza. ↩
21. James T. Dennison Jr., ed., Reformed Confessions of the 16th and 17th Centuries in English Translation, vol. 2 (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2010), introduction to “The French Confession (1559).” Dennison dates the opening of the synod to May 23, 1559. ↩
22. Sunshine, Armchair Theologians, 197–212. ↩
23. The French Confession (1559), article 5, in Dennison, Reformed Confessions, vol. 2, using the translation of William H. Foote, The Huguenots; or, Reformed French Churches (1870). ↩
24. The French Confession (1559), article 18, in Dennison, Reformed Confessions, vol. 2. ↩
25. Sunshine, Armchair Theologians, 197–212. ↩
26. The French Confession (1559), article 30, in Dennison, Reformed Confessions, vol. 2. ↩
27. Chadwick, Early Reformation, 297–307; Scott M. Manetsch, “The Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre,” Christian History 71 (2001). ↩
28. Worman, “Huguenots,” 391–97. ↩
29. Worman, “Huguenots,” 391–97, on the edict of 1559; Chadwick, Early Reformation, 297–307, and Manetsch, “Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre,” on the death of Henry II. ↩
30. Sunshine, Armchair Theologians, 197–212; Worman, “Huguenots,” 391–97. ↩
31. Quoted in A. W. Whitehead, Gaspard de Coligny, 69, as cited in Gideon and Hilda Hagstotz, Heroes of the Reformation, chapter “Gaspard de Coligny: Hero of the Huguenots.” Original spelling retained, except that the transcription’s “leame” is read as “learne.” ↩
32. David W. Hall, The Legacy of John Calvin: His Influence on the Modern World (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2008), quoting Fullerton: “Admiral Coligny, warrior, diplomatist, and saint, was not the only one who made them his daily provender.” ↩
33. Hagstotz, Heroes of the Reformation, “Gaspard de Coligny.” ↩
34. Sunshine, Armchair Theologians, 197–212; Worman, “Huguenots,” 391–97, which gives twelve hundred executed. ↩
35. Calvin, letter of October 1, 1560, quoted in David W. Hall, Calvin in the Public Square: Liberal Democracies, Rights, and Civil Liberties (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2009), in the discussion of Beza. ↩
36. Calvin to Coligny, 1561, in Jules Bonnet, ed., Lettres de Jean Calvin (Paris, 1884), 2:382, quoted in George, Theology of the Reformers, chapter on Calvin. ↩
37. Worman, “Huguenots,” 391–97, paraphrasing l’Hôpital’s address to the Estates in December 1560. ↩
38. Philip Schaff and David S. Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. 8 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1910), §171, “Beza as the Counsellor of the Huguenot Leaders,” 858–62. ↩
39. Manetsch, “Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre”; Schaff, History, 8:858–62, for the date. Worman, “Huguenots,” 391–97, gives sixty dead and more than two hundred wounded. ↩
40. Worman, “Huguenots,” 391–97, citing Samuel Smiles, The Huguenots, 48, and Davila. ↩
41. Schaff, History, 8:858–62, quoting Henry Martyn Baird, Theodore Beza, 2:28; compare J. W. Baum, Theodor Beza, 2:567. ↩
42. George, Theology of the Reformers, chapter on Calvin. ↩
43. Schaff, History, 8:858–62. ↩
44. Gaspard de Coligny, An Answer to the Examination That Is Said to Have Been Made of One Named John de Poltrot, Calling Himself the Lord of Merey, upon the Death of the Late Duke of Guyse (Caen, March 12, 1562 Old Style; English trans., London: Rowland Hall for Edward Sutton, 1563). Online at EEBO-TCP. Spelling modernized; the bracketed word replaces a corrupt phrase in the transcription. ↩
45. Sunshine, Armchair Theologians, 197–212. ↩
46. Worman, “Huguenots,” 391–97. ↩
47. Chadwick, Early Reformation, 297–307, section “Navarre.” ↩
48. Kleyn and Beeke, Reformation Heroes, chapter on Jeanne d’Albret. These sayings come down through nineteenth-century biographies and should be quoted as reported words. ↩
49. Worman, “Huguenots,” 391–97. ↩
50. Kleyn and Beeke, Reformation Heroes, chapter on Jeanne d’Albret. On her misgivings, Worman, “Huguenots,” 391–97. ↩
51. Manetsch, “Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre”; Sunshine, Armchair Theologians, 197–212. ↩
52. Foxe, Book of Martyrs, 76–87. For the circumstances of the shooting, Manetsch, “Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.” ↩
53. Manetsch, “Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.” ↩
54. Manetsch, “Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.” ↩
55. Manetsch, “Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre,” for the Orléans incident and the dispatch. Psalm 43:1 is given here in the King James Version. ↩
56. Manetsch, “Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.” ↩
57. Manetsch, “Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre”; Worman, “Huguenots,” 391–97, for the medal and its legend. ↩
58. Manetsch, “Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.” On Beza’s comforting sermon to the mourners at Geneva, Kleyn and Beeke, Reformation Heroes, chapter on Beza. ↩
59. The French Confession (1559), article 40, in Dennison, Reformed Confessions, vol. 2. ↩
60. Sunshine, Armchair Theologians, 197–212. ↩
61. Manetsch, “Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre”; Hall, Calvin in the Public Square, on Hotman, Beza, and the Vindiciae. ↩
62. Theodore Beza, The Right of Magistrates (1574), quoted in Hall, Calvin in the Public Square. ↩
63. Manetsch, “Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre”; Worman, “Huguenots,” 391–97, on the siege of La Rochelle and the peace of 1573. ↩
64. Sunshine, Armchair Theologians, 197–212; Worman, “Huguenots,” 391–97. On the dates, see the note on errors under “Cautions and Counterarguments.” ↩
65. Worman, “Huguenots,” 391–97, for the date of the abjuration; Sunshine, Armchair Theologians, 197–212, on the saying. ↩
66. For April 13, “Notes on the International Monument to the Reformation, Geneva” (Reformation Stewards teaching materials). Worman, “Huguenots,” 391–97, gives April 15 for the grant and February 25, 1599, for the registration. ↩
67. Sunshine, Armchair Theologians, 197–212. ↩
68. Chadwick, Early Reformation, 297–307. ↩
69. Sunshine, Armchair Theologians, 197–212. ↩
70. “Notes on the International Monument to the Reformation, Geneva.” ↩
71. Worman, “Huguenots,” 391–97; Sunshine, Armchair Theologians, 197–212. ↩
72. Worman, “Huguenots,” 391–97; Johann Heinrich Kurtz, Church History, trans. John Macpherson, ed. W. Robertson Nicoll, vol. 3 (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1889–94), 5–6. ↩
73. See the Reformation Stewards page on the Synod of Dort and the sources cited there. ↩
74. Sunshine, Armchair Theologians, 197–212; H. M. Baird, review of Louis Delmas, The Huguenots of La Rochelle, trans. George L. Catlin, Presbyterian Review 2 (1881): 198. ↩
75. Worman, “Huguenots,” 391–97; Kurtz, Church History, 3:5–6; Dictionary of Christianity in America, s.v. “Huguenots.” ↩
76. Claude, Account of the Persecutions, on the declaration of 1652 and its sequel. ↩
77. Worman, “Huguenots,” 391–97; Claude, Account of the Persecutions, on the exclusion from offices, 1680–84, and the midwives. ↩
78. Mather, A Sermon Wherein Is Showed (Boston, 1682). Mather’s preface is dated “1. M. 28. D. 1682,” the twenty-eighth day of the first month, in the New England reckoning. ↩
79. Claude, Account of the Persecutions, including the preface of the revoking edict as he summarizes it; Kurtz, Church History, 3:5–6, dates the beginning of the dragonnades to 1681. ↩
80. The English text of Claude gives “Thursday, being the 8th of October,” an Old Style date; Thursday, October 18, 1685, is the same day by the new reckoning. Foxe’s later editors give October 18 and registration on the 22nd; H. M. Baird, review of Reginald Lane Poole, A History of the Huguenots of the Dispersion, Presbyterian Review 2 (1881): 415–16, gives October 22; Worman, “Huguenots,” gives October 23. ↩
81. Worman, “Huguenots,” 391–97. ↩
82. Claude, Account of the Persecutions. The transcription’s “Minster” is corrected to “Minister.” ↩
83. Claude, Account of the Persecutions. ↩
84. Foxe, Book of Martyrs, 76–87 (the later editors’ chapter on the revocation). ↩
85. Worman, “Huguenots,” 391–97. ↩
86. J. D. Douglas, “Fénelon, François de Salignac de la Mothe,” in Walter A. Elwell, ed., Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2001), 451. ↩
87. Fénelon, quoted in Worman, “Huguenots,” 391–97. ↩
88. Worman, “Huguenots,” 391–97, citing Sismondi and Charles Weiss, History of the French Protestant Refugees; Kurtz, Church History, 3:5–6. ↩
89. “Notes on the International Monument to the Reformation, Geneva.” ↩
90. Weiss, French Protestant Refugees, 283–84, quoted in Worman, “Huguenots,” 391–97. The verse is Acts 8:4, the text of Mather’s sermon. ↩
91. Benson J. Lossing, ed., Harper’s Encyclopædia of United States History, s.v. “Huguenots,” 4316; R. D. Linder, “Huguenots,” in Daniel G. Reid et al., eds., Dictionary of Christianity in America (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1990). ↩
92. Linder, “Huguenots,” Dictionary of Christianity in America. ↩
93. Lossing, Harper’s Encyclopædia, s.v. “Huguenots,” 4316. ↩
94. Kurtz, Church History, 3:5–6, who speaks of “prophetic fanaticism”; Worman, “Huguenots,” 391–97, who speaks of “a remarkable fanatical enthusiasm.” ↩
95. Worman, “Huguenots,” 391–97. ↩
96. William A. McComish, “Calvin’s Children,” in David W. Hall, ed., Tributes to John Calvin: A Celebration of His Quincentenary (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2010), under “Women.” ↩
97. Worman, “Huguenots,” 391–97, on Calas, Voltaire, the edict of toleration, and the decree of 1790. ↩
98. Foxe, Book of Martyrs, 76–87; Mather, A Sermon Wherein Is Showed; Hall, Calvin in the Public Square; Hagstotz, Heroes of the Reformation, “Gaspard de Coligny”; Sunshine, Armchair Theologians, 197–212; Manetsch, “Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.” For the emigration, compare Foxe (about 150,000 escaped before the revocation) with Kurtz (half a million). ↩
99. Manetsch, “Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.” ↩
100. Sunshine, Armchair Theologians, 197–212. ↩
101. Hagstotz, Heroes of the Reformation, “Gaspard de Coligny.” ↩
102. Coligny, Answer to the Examination, and his letter to Catherine de Médicis from Caen, March 12, 1562 Old Style. Beza’s statement is printed in the same document. ↩
103. Manetsch, “Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre,” citing Natalie Zemon Davis. ↩
104. Chadwick, Early Reformation, 297–307; Hall, Calvin in the Public Square, on Calvin’s letter of October 1, 1560. ↩
105. The window-shooting appears in Foxe, Book of Martyrs, 76–87, and in Kleyn and Beeke, Reformation Heroes; the embalmed head and the Bayonne letter in Kleyn and Beeke; Foxe gives a similar letter from Montmorin, governor of Auvergne. Manetsch’s modern account includes none of them. ↩
106. Sunshine, Armchair Theologians, 197–212; Kleyn and Beeke, Reformation Heroes, chapter on Jeanne d’Albret. Chadwick notes that her advisers persuaded her to proceed “little by little, in places where the people wished for it”: Early Reformation, 297–307. ↩