The Huguenots
hey 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.
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.
