The
History of Protestantism |
Table of Contents
BOOK TWENTY-SECOND
PROTESTANTISM IN FRANCE FROM DEATH OF HENRY IV (1610) TO THE REVOLUTION (1789).
| Chapter 1 | LOUIS XIII. AND THE WARS OF RELIGION. Henry IV – Dies in the Midst of his Great Schemes – Louis XIII – Maria de Medici Regent – Alarm of the Protestants – Character of Maria de Medici – Astrology – Governs her Son – Protestants hold a Political Convocation – Henri de Rohan – Degeneracy of the Huguenots – Synods of the French Protestant Church – New Policy of Louis XIII – The Jesuits – Toleration – Invasion of Bearn – Its Protestantism Suppressed – Jesuit Logic – Shall the Sword be Drawn? – War – Saumur – Death of Duplessis-Mornay – Siege of Montauban – of St. Jean d'Angely – A Scotch Pastor on the Ramparts – Peace – Question of the Distinct Autonomy of the Huguenots. |
| Chapter 2 | FALL OF LA ROCHELLE, AND END OF THE WARS OF RELIGION. Cardinal Richelieu – His Genius – His Schemes – Resolves to Crush the Huguenots – Siege of La Rochelle – Importance of the Town – English Fleet Sent to Succor it – Treachery of Charles I – The Fleet Returns – A Second and Third Fleet – Famine in La Rochelle – Fall of the City – End of the Religious Wars – Despotism Established in France – Fruitless Efforts of Rohan to Rouse the Huguenots – Policy of Richelieu – His Death – Louis XIII Dies. |
| Chapter 3 | INDUSTRIAL AND LITERARY EHINENCE OF THE FRENCH
PROTESTANTS. Liberty Falls with the Huguenots – Louis XIV – Mazarin at the Helm – His Character – The Nobles and the Mob – The Protestants – They Excel in Agriculture – Their Eminence in Trade and Manufactures – Their Superior Probity – Foreign Commerce in their Hands – Their Professional and Literary Eminence – Pulpit Eloquence – French Synods – Mere Shadows of Former Assemblies – French Protestant Seminaries – Montauban – Saumur – Sedan – Nimes – Eminent Protestant Pastors – Chamier – Dumoulin – Petit – Rivet – Basnage – Blondel – Bochart – Drelincourt. |
| Chapter 4 | THE DRAGONNADES. The War of the Fronde – Mazarin adopts the Foreign Policy of Richelieu – Dies at the Height of his Power – Louis XIV now Absolute – "The State, it is I" – His Error as a King – His Error as a Man – Alternate Sinning and Repenting – Extermination of the Huguenots – Confiscation of their Churches – Arrets against Protestants – Fund for the Purchase of Consciences – Father la Chaise – Madame de Maintenon – The Dragonnades – Conversions and Persecutions. |
| Chapter 5 | REVOCATION OF THE EDICT OF NANTES. Edict of Revocation – Summary of its Enactments – The Protestant Churches Demolished – Charenton, etc. – The Pastors Banished – Severe Penalties – No Burial without the Sacrament – Lay Protestants Forbidden to Emigrate – Schomberg and Admiral Duquesne – The Ports and Outlets from France Closed – The Flight of the Huguenots – Their Disguises – Flight of Women – Their Sufferings on the Way – Probable Numbers of the Refugees – Disastrous Influence of the Revocation on Science and Literature – on Trade and Manufactures – on the Army and Navy – France Weakened and Other Countries Enriched – Panegyrics of the Clergy – Approval of the Pope – A Te Deum at Rome – Medals in Commemoration of the Event. |
| Chapter 6 | THE PRISONS AND THE GALLEYS. "New Catholics" – Suspected and Watched – New and Terrible Persecutions – Described by Quick – The Dungeons – Their Horrors – M. de Marolles, and other Prisoners – Other Modes of Punishment – Transportation – Sold into Foreign Slavery – Martyrdom of Fulcran Rey – Claude Brousson – his Preaching – His Martyrdom – Drums round the Scaffold – The Galley Chain – Chateau de la Tournelle – The Galleys. |
| Chapter 7 | THE "CHURCH OF THE DESERT." Secessions – Rise of the "Church of the Desert" – Her Places of Meeting – Her Worship – Pastors – Communion "Tokens" – Night Assemblies – Simplicity yet Sublimity of her Worship – Renewed Persecutions – War of the Camisards – Last Armed Struggle of French Protestantism – No Voice – Bossuet – Antoine Court – The "Restorer of Protestantism" – Death of Louis XIV – Theological Seminary at Lausanne – Paul Rabaut – The Edict of Malesherbes – The Revolution. |
BOOK TWENTY-SECOND
PROTESTANTISM IN FRANCE FROM DEATH OF HENRY IV (1610) TO THE REVOLUTION (1789).
CHAPTER 1 Back to Top
LOUIS XIII. AND THE WARS OF RELIGION.
Henry IV – Dies in the Midst of his Great Schemes – Louis XIII – Maria de
Medici Regent – Alarm of the Protestants – Character of Maria de Medici –
Astrology – Governs her Son – Protestants hold a Political Convocation –
Henri de Rohan – Degeneracy of the Huguenots – Synods of the French Protestant
Church – New Policy of Louis XIII – The Jesuits – Toleration –
Invasion of Bearn – Its Protestantism Suppressed – Jesuit Logic – Shall the
Sword be Drawn? – War – Saumur – Death of Duplessis-Mornay – Siege of
Montauban – of St. Jean d'Angely – A Scotch Pastor on the Ramparts – Peace
– Question of the Distinct Autonomy of the Huguenots.
WE resume our history of Protestantism in France at the
death-bed of Henry IV. The dagger of Ravaillac arrested that monarch in the midst of his
great schemes.[1] Henry
had abjured his mother's faith, in the hope of thereby purchasing from Rome the sure
tenure of his crown and the peaceful possession of his kingdom. He fancied that he had got
what he bargained for; and being, as he supposed, firmly seated on the throne, he was
making prodigious efforts to lift France out of the abyss in which he found her. He was
laboring to re-establish order, to plant confidence, and to get rid of the immense debts
which prodigality and dishonesty had accumulated, and which weighed so heavily upon the
kingdom. He was taking the legitimate means to quicken commerce and agriculture – in
short, to efface all those frightful traces which had been left on the country by what are
known in history as the "civil wars," but which were, in fact, crusades
organized by the Government on a great scale, in violation of sworn treaties and of
natural rights, for the extirpation of its Protestant subjects. Henry, moreover, was
meditating great schemes of foreign policy, and had already dispatched an army to Germany
in order to humble the House of Austria, and reduce the Spanish influence in Europe, so
menacing to 'the liberties and peace of Christendom. It did seem as if the king would
succeed; but his Austrian project too nearly touched the Papal interests. There were eyes
watching Henry which he knew not of. His heretical foreign policy excited a suspicion
that, although he was outwardly a Roman Catholic, he was at heart a Huguenot. In a moment,
a Hand was stretched forth from the darkness, and all was changed. The policy of Henry IV
perished with him.
He was succeeded on the throne by his son, Louis XIII, a youth of eight and a half years.
That same evening, an edict of the Parliament of Paris made his mother, Maria de Medici,
regent. The consternation of the Huguenots was great. Their hands instinctively grasped
their sword-hilts. The court hastened to calm their fears by publishing a decree ratifying
all the former edicts of toleration, and assuring the Protestants that the death of Henry
IV would bring with it no change of the national policy; but with so many torn treaties
and violated oaths, which they could not banish from their memory, what reliance could the
Huguenots place on these assurances? Was it not but a spreading of the old snare around
their feet? In the regent and her son they saw, under a change of names, a second
Catherine de Medici and Charles IX, to be followed, it might be, by a second St.
Bartholomew.
The boy of eight years who wore the crown could do only what his mother, the regent,
counseled, or rather commanded. Maria de Medici was the real sovereign. That ill-fated
marriage with the Pope's niece, alas! of how many wars was it destined to be the prolific
source to France! Maria de Medici lacked the talent of her famous predecessor, Catherine
de Medici, but she possessed all her treachery, bigotry, and baseness. She was a profound
believer in witchcraft, and guided the vessel of the State by her astrological
calculations. When divination failed her she had recourse to the advice of the Pope's
nuncio, of the Spanish ambassador, and of Concini, a man of obscure birth from her native
city of Florence, on whom she heaped high titles, though she could not impart to him noble
qualities. Under such guidance the vessel of the State was drawn farther and farther every
day into the old whirlpool. When Louis XIII grew to be a few years older, he strove to
break the trammels in which he was held, by banishing his mother to Blois, and instigating
men to murder Concini, but he only fell under the influence of a favorite as worthless and
profligate as the man he had employed assassins to rid him of. Intrigue, blood, and
peculation disgraced the court. The great nobles, contemning the power of the sovereign,
retired to their estates, where, at the head of their encampments, they lived like
independent kings, and gave sad presage of the distractions and civil broils yet awaiting
the unhappy land. But it is the Protestant thread, now becoming somewhat obscure, that we
wish to follow.
The year after the king's accession (1611) the Protestant nobles met at Saumur, and held
one of those political assemblies which they had planned for the regulation of religious
interests after the abjuration of Henry IV.
The illustrious Duplessis-Mornay was elected president, and the famous Pastor Chaumier was
made vice-president. The convocation consisted of seventy persons in all – noblemen,
ministers, delegates from the Tiers Etat, and deputies from the town of La Rochelle: in
short, a Huguenot Parliament. The Government, though reluctantly, had granted permission
for their meeting; and their chief business was to elect two deputies-general, to be
accepted by the court as the recognized heads of the Protestant body. The assembly met.
They refused simply to inscribe two names in a bulletin and break up as the court wished;
they sat four months, discussed the matters affecting their interests as Protestants, and
asked of the Government redress of their grievances. They renewed their oath of union,
which consisted in swearing fidelity to the king, always reserving their duty to "the
sovereign empire of God." It was at this assembly that the talents of Henri de Rohan
as a statesman and orator began to display themselves, and to give promise of the
prominent place he was afterwards to fill in the ranks of the Reformed. He strongly urged
union among themselves, he exhorted them to show concern for the welfare of the humblest
as well as of the highest in their body, and to display a firm spirit in dealing with
Government in the way of exacting all the rights which had been guaranteed by treaty.
"We are not come," he said, "to four cross-roads, but to a point where
safety can be found in only one path. Let our object be the glory of God, and the security
of the churches he has so miraculously established in this kingdom, providing eagerly for
each other's benefit by every legitimate means. Let us religiously demand only what is
necessary. Let us be firm in order to get it."
The want of union was painfully manifested at this assembly at Saumur, thanks to their
enemies, who had done all in their power beforehand to sow jealousies among them. The
fervent piety which characterized their fathers no longer distinguished their sons; the
St. Bartholomew had inflicted worse evils than the blood it spilt, great as that was; many
now cleaved to the Huguenots, whose religion was only a pretext for the advancement of
their ambition; others were timid and afraid to urge even the most moderate demands lest
they should be crushed outright. There was, too, a marked difference between the spirit of
the Protestants in the north and in the south of France. The former were not able to shake
off the terror of the turbulent and Popish capital, in the neighborhood of which they
lived; the latter bore about them the free air of the mountains, and the bold spirit of
the Protestant cities of the south, and when they spoke in the assembly it was with their
swords half drawn from the scabbards. Similar political assemblies were held in subsequent
years at Grenoble, at Nimes, at La Rochelle, and at other towns. Meetings of their
National Synod were, too, of frequent occurrence during this period, the Moderator's chair
being occupied not infrequently by men whose names were then, and are still, famous in the
annals of Protestant literature – Chamier and Dumoulin. These Synods sought to
rebuild the French Protestant Church, almost fallen into ruins during the wars of the
foregoing era, by restoring the exercise of piety in congregations, cutting off unworthy
members, and composing differences and strifes among the Protestant nobles. Gathered from
the battle-fields and the deserts of France, bitter memories behind and darkening
prospects before them, these men were weary in heart and broken in spirit, and were
without the love and zeal which had animated their fathers who sat in the Synod of La
Rochelle forty years before, when the French Protestant Church was in the prime and flower
of her days.
The Huguenots were warned by many signs of the sure approach of evil times. One ominous
prognostic was the reversal of the foreign policy of Henry IV. His last years were devoted
to the maturing of a great scheme for humbling the Austrian and Spanish Powers; and for
this end the monarch had allied himself, as we have already related, with the northern
Protestant nations. Louis XIII disconnected himself from his father's allies, and joined
himself to his father's enemies, by the project of a double marriage; for while he
solicited for himself the hand of the Spanish Infanta, he offered his sister in marriage
to the Prince of the Asturias. This boded the ascendency of Spain and of Rome once more in
France – in other words, of persecution and war. Sinister reports were circulated
through the kingdom that the price to be paid for this double alliance was the suppression
of heresy. Soft words continued to come from the court, but the acts of its agents in the
provinces were not in correspondence therewith. These were hard enough. The sword was not
brought forth, it is true, but every other weapon of assault was vigorously plied. The
priests incessantly importuned the king to forbid the Protestants from calling in
question, by voice or by pen, the authority of the Church or of the Pope. He was solicited
not to let them open a school in any city, not to let any of their ministers enter a
hospital, or administer religious consolation to any of their sick; not to let any one
from abroad teach any faith save the Roman; not to let them perform their religious rites;
in short, the monarch was to abrogate one by one all the rights secured by treaty to the
Protestants, and disannul and make void by a process of evacuation the Edict of Nantes.
The poor king did not need any importuning; it was not the will but the power that was
wanting to him to fulfill the oath sworn at his coronation, to expel from the lands under
his sway every man and woman denounced by the Church. At this time (1614) the
States-General, or Supreme Parliament, of France met, the last ever convoked until that
memorable meeting of 1789, the precursor of the Revolution. A deputy of the Tiers, or
Commons, rose in that assembly to plead for toleration. His words sounded like blasphemy
in the ears of the clergy and nobles; he was reminded of the king's oath to exterminate
heretics, and told that the treaties sworn to the Huguenots were only provisional; in
other words, that it was the duty of the Government always to persecute and slay the
Protestants, except in one case – namely, when it was not able to do it.
Of these destructive maxims – destructive to the Huguenots in the first instance, but
still more destructive to France in the long run – two terrible exemplifications were
about to be given. The territory of Lower Navarre and Bearn, in the mountains of the
Pyrenees, was the hereditary kingdom of Jeanne d'Albret, and we have already spoken of her
efforts to plant in it the Protestant faith. She established churches, schools, and
hospitals; she endowed these from the national property, and soon her little kingdom, in
point of intelligence and wealth, became one of the most flourishing spots in all
Christendom. Under her son (Henry IV) this kingdom became virtually a part of the French
monarchy; but now (1617) it was wished more thoroughly to incorporate it with France. Of
its inhabitants, two thirds – some say nine tenths – were Protestants. This
appeared no obstacle whatever to the projected incorporation. The Bearnese had no right to
be of any but the king's religion. A decree was issued, restoring the Roman Catholic faith
in Bearn, and giving back to the Romish clergy the entire ecclesiastical property, which
had for a half-century been in possession of the Protestants. "These estates,"
so reasoned the Jesuit Arnoux, a disciple of the school of Escobar, "belong to God,
who is the Proprietor of them, and may not be lawfully held by any save his priests."[2] Consternation reigned in Bearn;
all classes united in remonstrating against this tyrannical decree, which swept away at
once their consciences and their property. Their remonstrance was unheeded, and the king
put himself at the head of an army to compel the Bearnese to submission. The soldiers led
against this heretical territory, which they burned with zeal to purge and convert, were
not very scrupulous as to the means. They broke open the doors of the churches, they
burned the Protestant books, compelled the citizens to kneel when the Host passed, and
drove them to mass with the cudgel. They dealt the more obstinate a thrust with the saber;
the women dared not show themselves :in the street, dreading worse violences.[3] In this manner was the Popish
religion re-established in Bearn. This was the first of the dragonnades. Louis XIV was
afterwards to repeat on the greater theater of France the bloody tragedy now enacted on
the little stage of Bearn.
This was what even now the Protestants feared. Accordingly, at a political assembly held
in La Rochelle, 1621, they made preparations for the worst. They divided Protestant France
into eight departments or circles; they appointed a governor over each, with power to
impose taxes, raise soldiers, and engage in battle. The supreme military power was lodged
in the Duke de Bouillon, the assembly reserving to itself the power of making war or
concluding peace. The question was put to the several circles, whether they should declare
war, or wait the measures of the court? The majority were averse to hostilities. They felt
the feeble tenure on which hung their rights, and even their lives; but they shuddered
when they remembered the miseries which previous wars had brought in their train.
They counseled, therefore, that the sword should not be drawn till they were compelled to
unsheathe it in sell defense. This necessity had, in fact, already arisen. The king was
advancing against them at the head of his army, his Jesuit confessor, Arnoux, having
removed all moral impediments from his path. "The king's promises," said his
confessor, "are either matters of conscience or matters of State. Those made to the
Huguenots are not promises of conscience, for they are contrary to the precepts of the
Church; and if they are promises of State they ought to be referred to the Privy Council,
which is of opinion they ought not to be kept."[4] The Pope and cardinals united to smooth the king's way
financially, by contributing between them 400,000 crowns, while the other clergy offered
not less than a million of crowns to defray the war expenses.
The royal army crossed the Loire and opened the campaign, which they prosecuted with
various but, on the whole, successful fortune. Some places surrendered, others were taken
by siege, and the inhabitants, men and women, were often put to the sword. The Castle of
Saumur, of which Duplessis-Mornay was governor, and which he held as one of the cautionary
fortresses granted by the edicts, was taken by perfidy. The king pledged his word that, if
Mornay would admit the royal troops, the immunities of the place should be maintained. No
sooner had the king entered than he declared that he took definite possession of the
castle. To give this act of ill-faith the semblance of an amicable arrangement, the king
offered Mornay, in addition to the arrears of his salary, 100,000 crowns and a marshal's
baton. "I cannot," replied the patriot, "in conscience or in honor sell the
liberty and security of others;" adding that, "as to dignities, he had ever been
more desirous to render himself worthy of them, than to obtain them." This great man
died two years afterwards. His end was like his life. "We saw him," says Jean
Daille, his private chaplain, "in the midst of death firmly laying hold on life, and
enjoying full satisfaction where men are generally terrified." He was the last
representative of that noble generation which had been molded by the instructions of
Calvin and the example of Beza.
The next exploit of the king's arms was the taking of St. Jean d'Angely. The besiegers
were in great force around the walls, their shot was falling in an incessant shower upon
the city, and the inhabitants, when not on duty on the ramparts, were forced to seek
refuge in the cellars of their houses. Provisions were beginning to fail, and the citizens
were now worn out by the fatigue of fighting night and day on the walls. In these
circumstances, they sent a deputation to Mr. John Welsh, a Scottish minister, who had been
exiled from his native land, and was now acting as pastor of the Protestant congregation
in St. Jean d'Angely. They told him that one in particular of the enemy's guns, which was
of great size, and moreover was very advantageously placed, being mounted on a rising
ground, was sweeping that entire portion of the walls which was most essential to the
defense, and had silenced their guns. What were they to do? they asked. Welsh exhorted
them to defend the city to the last, and to encourage them he accompanied them through the
streets, "in which the bullets were falling as plentifully as hail,"[5] and mounted the ramparts. Going
up to one of the silent guns, he bade the cannonier resume firing; but the man had no
powder. Welsh, seizing a ladle, hastened to the magazine and filled it with powder. As he
was returning, a shot tore it out of his hand. 'Using his hat instead of a ladle, he
filled it with powder, and going up to the gunner, made him load his piece. "Level
well," said Welsh, "and God will direct the shot." The man fired, and the
first shot dismounted the gun which had inflicted so much damage upon the defenders. The
incident re-rived the courage of the citizens, and they resumed the defense, and continued
it till they had extorted from their besiegers favorable terms of capitulation.[6]
Montauban withstood the royal arms, despite the prophecy of a Carmelite monk, who
had come from Bohemia, with the reputation of working miracles, and who assured the king
that the city would, without doubt, fall on the firing of the four-hundredth gun. The
mystic :number had long since been completed, but Montauban still stood, and at the end of
two months and a half, the king, with tears in his eyes, retired from before its walls. It
is related that the besieged were apprised of the approaching departure of the army by a
soldier of the Reformed religion, who, on the evening before the siege was raised, was
playing on his flute the beginning of the sixty-eighth Psalm, "Let God arise, and let
his enemies be scattered, and let them also that hate him flee before him," etc.[7] The king had better success at
Montpellier, on the taking of which he judged it prudent to close the campaign by signing
terms of peace on the 19th October, 1622. The peace indicated a loss of position on the
part of the Protestants. The Edict of Nantes was confirmed, but of the cautionary towns
which that edict had put into the hands of the Protestants, only two were now left them
– Montauban and La Rochelle.
The French Protestants at this stage of their history are seen withdrawing to a certain
extent from the rest of the nation, constituting themselves into a distinct civil
community, and taking independent political and military action. This was a strong step,
but the attitude of the Government, and its whole procedure towards them for a century
previous, may perhaps be held as justifying it. It appeared to them the only means left
them of defending their natural rights. We are disposed to think, however, that it would
have been well had the French Protestants drawn more strongly the line which separated
their action as citizens from their action as church members – in other words, given
more prominence to their church organization. The theory which they had received from
Calvin, and on which they professed to act, was that while society is one, it is divided
into the two great spheres of Church and State; that as members of the first – that
is, of the Church – they formed an organization distinct from that of the State; that
this organization was constituted upon a distinct basis, that of Revelation; that it was
placed under a distinct Head, namely, Christ; that it had distinct rights and laws given
it by God; and that in the exercise of these rights and laws, for its own proper ends, it
was not dependence upon, or accountable to, the State. This view of the Church's origin
and constitution makes her claims and jurisdiction perfectly intelligible; and gives, as
the French style it, her raison d'etre. It may not be assented to by all, but even where
it is not admitted it can be understood, and the independent jurisdiction of the Church,
whether right or wrong in fact, on which we are here pronouncing no opinion, will be seen
to be in logical consistency with at least this theory of her constitution. This theory
was embraced in Scotland as well as in France, but in the former country it was more
consistently carried out than in the latter. While the French Protestants were" the
Religion," the Scots were "the Church ;" while the former demanded
"freedom of worship," the latter claimed "liberty to administer their
ecclesiastical constitution." The weakness of the French Protestants was that they
failed to put prominently before the nation their rights as a divinely chartered society,
and in their action largely blended things civil and things ecclesiastical. The idea of
"Headship," which is but a summary phrase for their whole conception of a
Church, enabled the Scots to keep the two more completely separate than perhaps anywhere
else in Christendom. In Germany the magistrate has continued to be the chief bishop; in
Geneva the Church tended towards being the supreme magistrate; the Scots have aimed at
keeping in the middle path between Erastianism and a theocracy. Yet, as a proof that the
higher law will always rule, while nowhere has the action of the Church been so little
directly political as in Scotland, nowhere has the Church so deeply molded the genius of
the people, or so strongly influenced the action of the State.
CHAPTER 2 Back to Top
FALL OF LA ROCHELLE, AND END OF THE WARS OF RELIGION.
Cardinal Richelieu – His Genius – His Schemes – Resolves to Crush the
Huguenots – Siege of La Rochelle – Importance of the Town – English Fleet
Sent to Succor it – Treachery of Charles I – The Fleet Returns – A Second
and Third Fleet – Famine in La Rochelle – Fall of the City – End of the
Religious Wars – Despotism Established in France – Fruitless Efforts of Rohan to
Rouse the Huguenots – Policy of Richelieu – His Death – Louis XIII Dies.
THERE was now about to appear on the scene a man who was
destined to act a great part in the affairs of Europe. The Bishop of Lucon was a member of
the States-General which, as we have already said, assembled in 1614; and there he first
showed that aptitude for business which gave him such unrivalled influence and unbounded
fame as Cardinal Richelieu. He was a man of profound penetration, of versatile genius, and
of unconquerable activity. The queen-mother introduced him to the council-table of her son
Louis XIII, and there the force of his character soon raised him to the first place. He
put down every rival, became the master of his sovereign, and governed France as he
pleased. It vas about this time (1624) that his power blossomed. He was continually
revolving great schemes, but, great as they were, his genius and activity were equal to
the execution of them. Although a churchman, the aim of his ambition was rather to
aggrandize France than to serve Rome. The Roman purple was to him a garment, and nothing
more; or, if he valued it in any degree, it was because of the aid it brought him in the
accomplishment of his political projects.
Once and again in the pursuit of these projects he crossed the Pope's path, without paying
much regard to the anger or alarm his policy might awaken in the Vatican. His projects
were mainly three. He found the throne weak – in fact contemned – and he wished
to raise it up, and make it a power in France. he found the nobles turbulent, and all but
ungovernable, and he wished to break their power and curb their pride. In the third place,
he revived the policy of Henry IV, which sought to reduce the power of Austria, in both
the Imperial and Spanish branches, and with this view the cardinal courted alliances with
England and the German States. So far well, as regarded the great cause of Protestantism;
but, unfortunately, Richelieu accounted it a necessary step toward the accomplishment of
these three leading objects of his ambition, that he should first subdue the Huguenots.
They had come to be a powerful' political body in the State, with a government of their
own, thus dividing the kingdom, and weakening the throne, which it was one of his main
objects to strengthen. The Protestants, on the other hand, regarded their political
organization as their only safeguard – the bulwark behind which they fought for their
religious liberties. How feeble a defense were royal promises and oaths, was a matter on
which they had but too ample an experience; and, provided their political combinations
were broken up, and their cautionary towns wrested from them, they would be entirely, they
felt, at the mercy of their enemies. But this was what the powerful cardinal had resolved
upon. The political rights of the Huguenots were an obstacle in his path, which,
postponing every other project, he now turned the whole resources of the crown, and the
whole might of his genius, to sweep away.
About this time all incident happened at court which is worth recording. One day Father
Arnoux, the king's confessor, was preaching before his Majesty and courtiers. The Jesuit
pronounced a strong condemnation on regicide, and affirmed solemnly that the Order of
Jesus allowed no such practice, but, on the contrary, repudiated it. Louis XIII, in whose
memory the murder of his father was still fresh, felt this doctrine to be reassuring, and
expressed his satisfaction with it. A Scottish minister of the name of Primrose chanced on
that day to be among the auditors of Father Arnoux, and easily saw through the sophism
with which he was befooling the king.
Primrose made the Jesuit be asked if Jacques Clement had killed his king, or even a king,
when he stabbed a prince excommunicated by the Pope? And further, in the event of the Pope
excommunicating Louis XIII, would the Jesuits then acknowledge him as tacit king, or even
as a king? And, finally, were they disposed to condemn their disciple Ravaillac as guilty
of high treason? These were embarrassing questions, and the only response which they drew
forth from Arnoux was an order of banishment against the man who had put them.[1]
The Huguenot body at this period had, to use the old classic figure, but one neck
– that neck was their stronghold of La Rochelle, and the cardinal resolved to strike
it through at a blow. La Rochelle was perhaps, after Paris, the most famous of the cities
of France. It enjoyed a charter of civic independence, which dated from the twelfth
century. It was governed by a mayor and council of 100. Its citizens amounted at this time
to 30,000. They were industrious, rich, intelligent, and strongly attached to the
Protestant faith, which they had early embraced. Not once throughout the long struggle had
La Rochelle succumbed to the royal arms, though often besieged.[2] This virgin fortress was the strongest rampart of the Huguenots.
The great chiefs – Conde, Coligny, Henry of Navarre – had often :made it their
head-quarters. Within its gates had assembled the famous Synod of 1571, which comprised so
much that was illustrious in rank, profound in erudition, and venerable in piety, and
which marks the culminating epoch of the French Reformed Church. La Rochelle was the basis
of the Huguenots; it was the symbol of their power, and while it stood their political and
religious existence could not be crushed. On that very account Richelieu, who had resolved
to erect a monarchical despotism in France, was all the more determined to overthrow it.
The first attempt of the cardinal against this redoubtable city was made in 1625. Arising
under the Dukes of Rohan and Soubise, the two military leaders of the Protestants,
disconcerted the plans which Richelieu was carrying out against Austria. He instantly
dropped his schemes abroad to strike a blow at home. Sending the French fleet to La
Rochelle, a great naval battle, in which Richelieu was completely victorious, was fought
off the coast. La Rochelle seemed at the mercy of the victor; but the discovery of a plot
against his life called the cardinal suddenly to court, and the doomed city escaped.
Richelieu crushed his enemies at Paris, grasped power more firmly than ever, and again
turned his thoughts to the reduction of the stronghold of the Protestants. The taking of
La Rochelle was the key of his whole policy, home and foreign, and he made prodigious
efforts to bring the enterprise to a successful issue. He raised vast land and naval
armaments, and opened the siege in October, 1627.
The eyes of all Europe were fixed on the city, now enclosed both by sea and land, by the
French armies. All felt how momentous was the issue of the conflict about to open. The,
spirit of the Rochellois was worthy of the brave men from whom they were sprung, and of
the place their city held in the great cause in which it had embarked. The mayor, Guiton,
to an earnest Protestantism added all iron will and a dauntless courage. With nothing
around them but armed enemies, the ships of the foe covering the sea, and the lines of his
infantry occupying the land, the citizens were of one mind, to resist to the last. The
attitude of the brave city, and the greatness of the issue that hung upon its standing or
falling, as regarded the Protestant cause, awakened the sympathies of the Puritans of
England. They raised a powerful army for the relief of their brethren of La Rochelle; but
their efforts were frustrated by the treachery of the court. Charles I, influenced by his
wife, Henrietta of France, wrote to Pennington, the commander of the fleet, "to
dispose of those ships as he should be directed by the French king, and to sink or fire
such as should refuse to obey these orders." When the sailors discovered that they
were to act not for, but against the Rochellois, they returned to England, declaring that
they "would rather be hanged at home for disobedience, than either desert their
ships, or give themselves up to the French like slaves, to fight against their own
religion."
Next year, after the Duke of Soubise, who commanded in La Rochelle, had visited England,
the king was prevailed upon again to declare himself the protector of the Rochellois, and
an army of about 7,000 marines was raised for that service. The English squadron set sail
under the command of Buckingham, an incompetent and unprincipled man. Its appearance off
La Rochelle, 100 sail strong, gladdened the eyes of the Rochellois; but it was only for a
moment. There now commenced on the part of Buckingham a series of blunders and disasters,
which, whether owing to incompetency or perfidy, tarnished the naval glory of England, and
bitterly mocked the hopes of those to whom it had held out the delusive prospect of
deliverance. Better, in truth, it had never come, for its appearance suggested to
Richelieu the expedient which led inevitably to the fall of the city. La Rochelle might be
victualled by sea, and so long as it was so, its reduction, the cardinal felt, was
impracticable. To prevent this, Richelieu bethought him of the same expedient by which a
conqueror of early times had laid a yet prouder city, Tyre, level with the waters. The
cardinal raised a dyke or mole across the channel of about a mile's breadth, by which La
Rochelle is approached, and so closed the gates of the sea against its succor. The English
fleet assailed this dyke in vain. Baffled in all their attempts, they returned to their
own shores, and left the beleaguered city to its fate. Famine now set in, and soon became
sore in the city; but it 'would be too harrowing to dwell on its horrors. The deaths were
300 daily. The most revolting garbage was cooked and eaten. Specters, rather than men,
clad in armor, moved through the streets. The houses were full of dead, which the living
had not strength to bury. Crowds of old women and children went out at the gate, at times,
in the hope that the sight of their great misery might move their enemies to pity, or that
they might :find something by the way to assuage their hunger; but they were dealt with as
the caprice or cruelty of the besiegers prompted. Sometimes they were strangled on
gibbets, and sometimes they were stripped naked and scourged back into the city. Still no
thought of a surrender was entertained.
For more than a year had the Rochellois waited, if haply from any quarter – the
Protestants of other countries, or their brethren in the provinces – deliverance
might arise. In no quarter could they descry sign or token of help; not a voice was raised
to cheer, not a hand was stretched out to aid. Fifteen terrible months had passed over
them. Two-thirds of the population were dead. Of the fighting men not more than 150
remained. Around their walls was assembled the whole power of France. There seemed no
alternative, and on October 28th, 1628, La Rochelle surrendered at discretion. So fell the
Huguenots as a political power in France. The chief obstacle in the path of Richelieu was
now out of his way. The despotism which he strove to rear went on growing apace. The
throne became stronger every year, gradually drawing to itself all rights, and stretching
its absolute sway over all classes, the nobles as well as the peasants, till at last Louis
XIV could say, "The State, it is I." And so continued matters till the
Revolution of 1789 came to cast down this overgrown autocracy.
But one is curious to know how it came to pass that the great body of the Protestants in
the south of France looked quietly on, while their brethren and their own political rights
were so perilously endangered in the fall of La Rochelle. While the siege was in progress,
the Duke of Rohan, the last great military chief of the Protestants, traversed the whole
of the Cevennes, where the Huguenots were numerous, appealing to their patriotism, to the
memory of their fathers, to their own political and religious privileges – all
suspended upon the issue at La Rochelle – in the hope of rousing them to succor their
brethren. But his words fell on cold hearts. The ancient spirit was dead.
All the ancient privileges of La Rochelle were annulled, and the Roman Catholic religion
was re-established in that city. The first mass was sung by Cardinal Richelieu himself.
One cannot but admire the versatility of his genius. During the siege he had shown himself
the ablest and most resolute soldier in the whole camp. All the operations of the siege
were of his planning; the construction of the mole, the lines of circumvallation, all were
prepared by his instructions, and executed under his superintendence; and now, the bloody
work at an end, he put off his coat of mail, washed his hands, and appearing before the
altar in his priestly robes, he inaugurated the Roman worship in La Rochelle by
celebrating the most solemn service of his Church. A Te Deum, by Pope Urban VIII, for the
fall of the stronghold of the Huguenots, showed how the matter was viewed at Rome.
After this the Protestants could offer no organized resistance, and the king, by way of
setting up a monument to commemorate his triumph, placed the Huguenots under an edict of
grace. This was a virtual revocation of the Edict of Nantes; the father, however, left it
to the son, Louis XIV., to complete formally what he had begun; but henceforward the
French Protestants held their lives, and what of their political and religious rights was
left them, of grace and not of fight. Had the nation of France rest now that the wars of
religion were ended? No; the wars of prerogative immediately opened. The Roman Catholic
nobles had assisted Richelieu to put down the Huguenots, and now they found that they had
cleared the way for the tempest to reach themselves. They were humbled in their turn, and
the throne rose above all classes and interests of the State. The cardinal next gave his
genius and energy to affairs abroad. He took part, as we have seen, in the Thirty Years'
War, uniting his arms with those of the heroic Gustavus Adolphus, not because he wished to
lift up the Protestants, but because he sought to humble the House of Austria and the
Catholic League. Personal enemies the cardinal readily forgave, for, said he, it is a duty
to pardon and forget offenses; but the enemies of his policy, whom he styled the enemies
of Church and State, he did not pardon, "for," said he, "to forget these
offenses is not to forgive them, it is to repeat them."
It was the design of God to humble one class of his enemies by the instrumentality of
another, and so Richelieu prospered in all he undertook, lie weakened the emperor; he
mightily raised the prestige of the French arms, and he made the throne the one power in
the kingdom. But these brilliant successes added little to the personal happiness of
either the king or his minister. Louis XIII was of gloomy temper, of feeble intellect, of
no capacity for business; and his energetic minister, who did all himself, permitted his
sovereign little or no share in the management of affairs.
Louis lived apart, submitting painfully to the control of the man who governed both the
king and the kingdom. As regards the cardinal, while passing from one victory to another
he was constantly followed by a menacing shadow. Ever and anon conspiracies were formed to
take away his life. He triumphed over them all, and held power to the last, but neither he
nor the king lived to enjoy what it took such a vast amount of toil and talent and blood
to achieve. The cardinal first, and six months after, the king, were both stricken, in the
mid-time of their days and in the height of their career. They returned to their dust, and
that day their thoughts perished.
CHAPTER 3 Back to Top
INDUSTRIAL AND LITERARY EHINENCE OF THE FRENCH PROTESTANTS.
Liberty Falls with the Huguenots – Louis XIV – Mazarin at the Helm – His
Character – The Nobles and the Mob – The Protestants – They Excel in
Agriculture – Their Eminence in Trade and Manufactures – Their Superior Probity
– Foreign Commerce in their Hands – Their Professional and Literary Eminence
– Pulpit Eloquence – French Synods – Mere Shadows of Former Assemblies
– French Protestant Seminaries – Montauban – Saumur – Sedan –
Nimes – Eminent Protestant Pastors – Chamier – Dumoulin – Petit –
Rivet – Basnage – Blondel – Bochart – Drelincourt.
THE mob and the nobles took part with the French court in its
efforts to extinguish Protestantism. With their help the court triumphed. The seeds of
Protestantism were still in the soil of France, covered up by a million of corpses, and
these the very men who, had their lives been spared, would have enriched the nation with
their industry, glorified it with their genius, and defended it with their arms. We are
now arrived at the end of the religious wars. What has France gained by her vast
expenditure of blood and treasure? Peace? No; despotism. The close of the reign of Louis
XIII shows us the nobles and the mob crushed in their turn, and the throne rising in
autocratic supremacy above all rights and classes. One class, however, is exempt from the
general serfdom. The Church shares the triumph of the throne. The hand of a priest has
been laid upon the helm of the State, and the king and the clergy together sway the
destinies of a prostrate people. This ill-omened alliance is destined to continue for,
though one cardinal minister is dead, another is about to take his place – and the
tyranny which has grown out of it is destined to go on, adding year by year to its own
prerogatives and the people's burdens, until its existence and exactions shall terminate
together by the arrival of the Revolution, which will mingle all four the throne, the
priesthood, the aristocracy, and the commonalty – in one great ruin.
Louis XIV, now king, was a child of four and a half years. His father on his death-bed had
named a council of regency to assist the queen-mother in governing the kingdom during the
minority of his son. The, first act of Anne of Austria was to cancel the, will of her
husband, and to assume the reins of government as sole regent, calling to her aid as prime
minister Cardinal Mazarin, the disciple of Richelieu. There fell to him an easier task
than that which had taxed the energies and genius of his great predecessor.
Richelieu had fought the battle of the crown, and subjected to it both the nobles and the
people: the work expected of Mazarin was that he should keep what Richelieu had won. This
he found, however, no easy matter. Richelieu had carefully husbanded the revenues of the
State; Mazarin wasted them. Extravagance created debts; debts necessitated new taxes; the
taxes were felt to be grievous burdens by the people. First murmurs were heard; then,
finally, insurrection broke out. The nobles, now that Richelieu was in his grave, were
attempting to throw off the yoke. An oppressed, turbulent, and insurrectionary people were
parading the streets of the capital, and carrying their threats to the very gates of the
palace. Both nobles and mob thought the time favorable for reducing the power of the
throne, and recovering those privileges and that influence of which the great minister of
Louis XIII had stripped them. They did not succeed. The yoke which themselves had so large
a share in fitting upon their own necks they were compelled to wear; but the troubles in
which they plunged the country were a shield for the time over the small remnant of
Protestantism which had been spared in France.
That remnant began again to flourish. Shut out from the honors of the court, and the
offices of the State, the great body of the Protestants transferred their talents and
activity to the pursuits of agriculture, of trade, and of manufactures. In these they
eminently excelled. The districts where they lived were precisely those where the richest
harvests were seen to wave. The farms they owned in Bearn became proverbial for their
fertility and beauty. The Protestant portions of Languedoc were known by their richer
vines, and more luxuriant wheat. The mountains of the Cevennes were covered with noble
forests of chestnuts, which, in harvest-time, let fall their nuts in a rain as plenteous
as that of the manna of the desert, to which the inhabitants compared it. In those forests
wandered numerous herds, which fed on the rich grasses that flourished underneath the
great trees. Era-bosomed :in one of the mountains, the Eperon, was a plain which the
traveler found green and enameled with flowers at all seasons. It abounded in springs, and
when the summer had wasted the neighboring herbage, the sun touched the pastures of this
plain with a brighter green, and tinted its blossoms with a livelier hue. It was not
unworthy of the name given it, the Hort-Dieu, or garden of the Lord. The Vivrais produced
more corn than the inhabitants could consume. The diocese of Uzes overflowed with oil and
wine. The valley of the Vaunage, in the district of Nimes, became famous for the
luxuriance of its fields and the riches of its gardens. The Protestants, to whose skill
and industry it largely owed the exuberance that gave it renown, had more than sixty
churches within its limits, and marked their appreciation of its happy conditions by
calling it the "Little Canaan." Everywhere France boasts a fertile soil and a
sunny air, but wherever the Huguenot had settled, there the earth opened her bosom in a
seven-fold increase, and nature seemed to smile on a faith which the Government had
anathematized, and which it pursued with persecuting edicts.
The Protestants of France were marked by the same superiority in trade which distinguished
them in agriculture. Here their superior intelligence and application were, perhaps, even
more apparent, and were rewarded with a yet greater measure of success. The wine trade of
many districts, especially that of Guienne, was almost entirely in their hands. The goods
of the linen and cloth weavers of Vire, Falaise, and Argentine, in Normandy, they sold to
the English and Dutch merchants, thus nourishing the home industry while they enriched the
foreign market. They were the main carriers between Metz and Germany. The Mimes merchants
were famous all over the south of France, and by their skill and capital they provided
employment and food for innumerable families who otherwise would have been sunk in
idleness and poverty. "If the Nimes merchants," wrote Baville, the Intendant of
the province, in 1699, "are still bad Catholics, at any rate they have not ceased to
be very good traders."[1] In
the center of France, at Tours, on the banks of the Rhone, at Lyons, they worked in silks
and velvets, and bore off the palm from every other country for the quality of their
fabrics and the originality and beauty of their designs. They excelled in the manufacture
of woolen cloths. In the mountainous parts of the Cevennes, families often passed their
summers a-field, and their winters at the loom. They displayed not less skill in the
manufacture of paper. The paper-mills of Ambert were unrivalled in Europe. They produced
the paper on which the best printing of Pads, Amsterdam, and London was executed. They
were workers in iron, and fabricated with skill and elegance weapons of war and implements
of husbandry. In all these industries large and flourishing factories might be seen in all
parts of France. If the mercantile marine flourished along the western and northern sea.
board, and the towns of Bordeaux, La Rochelle, and the Norman ports rapidly grew in
population and wealth, it was mainly owing to the energy and enterprise of the Huguenots.
After the horrid din of battle which had so long shaken France, it was sweet to hear only
the clang of the hammer; and after the fearful conflagration of burning cities which had
so often lit up the midnight skies of that country, it was pleasant to see no more
startling spectacle than the blaze of the forge reflected from the overhanging cloud.
The probity of the French Protestants was not less conspicuous than their intelligence.
This quality could not be hidden from the quick eyes of foreign merchants, and they
selected as their medium of communication with France those in whose honesty they could
thoroughly confide, in preference to those whom they deemed of doubtful integrity. This
tended to their further importance and wealth, by placing the foreign trade of the country
in their hands. The commercial correspondents of the Dutch and English merchants were
almost exclusively Huguenots. Their word was taken where the bond of a Romanist would be
hesitatingly accepted or, it might be, declined. The cause of this superior integrity is
to be found not only in their higher religious code, but also in the fact that, being
continually and malignantly watched by their countrymen, they found their safety to lie in
Unremitting circumspection and unimpeachable integrity. There was, moreover, a flexibility
about their minds which was wanting in their Romanist countrymen. Their religion taught
them to inquire and reason, it awoke them from the torpor and emancipated them from the
stiffness that weighed upon others, and this greater versatility and Power they easily
transferred to the avocations of their daily life. The young Huguenot not infrequently
visited foreign countries, sometimes in the character of a traveler impelled by thirst for
knowledge, and sometimes in the character of an exile whom the storms of persecution had
cast on an alien shore; but in whatever capacity he mingled with foreigners, he always
carried with him a mind keen to observe, and open to :receive new ideas. On his return he
improved or perfected the manufactures of his own land, by grafting upon them the better
methods he had seen abroad. Thus, partly by studying in foreign schools, partly by their
own undoubted inventive powers, the French Protestants carried the arts and manufactures
of France to a pitch of perfection which few countries have reached, perhaps none
excelled, and their numbers, their wealth, and their importance increased despite all the
efforts of the Government to degrade and even to exterminate them. As an additional
element of their prosperity, we must add that the year of the Huguenot contained a good
many more working days than that of the Romanist. The fete-days of the Church abridged the
working year of the latter to 260 days; whereas that of the Protestant contained 50 days
more, or 310 in all.
Agriculture, manufactures, and art did not exclusively engross the French Protestants. Not
a few aspired to a higher sphere, and there their genius shed even a greater glory on
their country, and diffused a brighter luster around their own names. Protestants took a
foremost place among the learned physicians, the great lawyers, and the illustrious
orators of France. Their intellectual achievements largely contributed to the splendor
which irradiated the era of Louis XIV. A Protestant advocate, Henry Basnage, led for fifty
years the Rouen bar.[2] His
friend, Lemery, father of the illustrious chemist, of whose birth within her walls Rouen
is to this day proud, discharged with rare distinction, in the Parliament so hostile to
the Huguenots, the duties of Procureur.[3] The glory of founding the French Academy is clue to a Protestant,
Valentine Conrart, a man of fine literary genius. A little company of illustrious men, who
met at Conrart's house, first suggested the idea of the Academy to Richelieu. The
statesman gave it a charter, but Conrart gave it rules, and continued to be its life and
soul until the day of his death. In this list of Protestants who adorned the country that
knew so in to appreciate their faith, was Guy Pantin. He was distinguished as a man of
letters, and not less distinguished as a philosopher and a physician. Another great name
is that of Pierre Dumoulin, who is entitled to rank with the best of the classical prose
writers of France. "With more respect for the proprieties," says Weiss,
"and less harshness of character, his style reminded the reader of the great
qualities of that of Calvin, whose Institutes of Christianity had supplied France with its
first model of a lucid, ingenious, and vehement prose, such as the author of the
Provincial Letters would not have disowned."[4]
With the Huguenots came the era of pulpit eloquence in France. In the worship of
the Church of Rome, the sermon was but the mere accessory. In the Protestant Church the
sermon became not indeed the essential, but the central part of the service. The
Reformation removed the sacrifice of the mass and restored the Word of God, it banished
the priest and brought back the preacher. Thus the pulpit, which had played a prominent
part in the early Church, but had long been forgotten, was again set up, and men gathered
round it, as being almost solely the font of Divine knowledge so long as the Bible in the
vernacular was scarcely accessible. The preacher had to study that he might teach. His
office was to instruct, to convince, to exhort; and the more than human grandeur of his
topics, and the more than temporary issues of his preaching, tended to beget a sublimity
both of thought and utterance that reached the loftiest oratory. The audiences daily grew:
the preacher excelled more and more in his noble art, and the Protestant pulpit became the
grand pioneer of modern eloquence.
Rome soon saw that she could not with safety to herself despise an instrumentality so
powerful. Hence arose a rivalship between the two Churches, which elevated the pulpits of
both, but in the end the Popish seemed to distance the Protestant pulpit. The Protestant
preacher gave more attention to the truth he delivered than to the words in which he
expressed it, or the gestures with which he set it forth. The preachers who filled the
Roman pulpits brought to their aid the arts of a brilliant rhetoric, and the graces of an
impassioned delivery, and thus it came to pass that, towards the end of the century, the
Church of Rome bore off the palm of pulpit oratory in France. The Protestant preachers of
that day had much to dishearten and depress them; the great orators of the Romish Church
– Bossuet, Massillon, Flechier, Bourdaloue, and Fenelon – had, on the contrary,
everything to awaken and reward their efforts; but it was the preachers formed in the
school of Calvin that paved the way for those who so successfully and so brilliantly
succeeded them. "If France had never had her Saurins," said one of the great
orators of the English pulpit, "her Claudes, her Du Plessis-Mornays, her national
Church had never boasted the genius of Bossuet, and the virtues of Fenelon."[5]
From the pulpit we turn to the Protestant Synods of France. During the wars which
the ambition of Richelieu carried on in the latter end of the reign of Louis XIII, and the
troubles which distracted the nation in the opening years of the reign of Louis XIV,
several National Synods of the Protestant Church were held. These were but mere shadows of
the numerous and majestic assemblies of the better days of the French Church, and the
hearts of the members could not but be sad when they thought how glory and power had
departed from them since the days of the Queen of Navarre and of Admiral Coligny,
illustrious as a warrior and statesman, but not less illustrious as a Christian. The right
of meeting had to be solicited from the court; it was always obtained with difficulty; and
the interval between each successive Synod was longer and longer, preparatory to their
final suppression. The royal commissioner brought with him from court most commonly an
ungrateful message; it was delivered in an imperious tone, and was heard in obsequious
silence. The members of Synod were reminded that if the throne was powerful its authority
was their shield, and that it was their wisdom to uphold, as it was their duty to be
thankful for, a prerogative which in its exercise was so benignant towards them. Men who,
like these French pastors, met under the shadow of a tyrannical king, with the sword of
persecution hanging by a single thread above their heads, could not be expected to show
much life or courage, or devise large and effective measures for the building up of their
ancient Church. They were entirely in the power of their enemy, and any bold step would
have been eagerly laid hold of by the Government as a pretext for crushing them outright.
They were spared because they were weak, but their final extinction was ever kept in view.
Still all glory had not departed from the Protestant Church of France. Among its pastors,
as we have just seen, were men of great genius, of profound erudition, and of decided
piety; and these, finding all corporate action jealously denied them by the Government,
turned their energies into other channels. If Protestantism was decaying and passing from
view, there were individual Protestants who stood nobly out, and whose names and labors
were renowned in foreign countries. French Protestant literature blossomed in the
seventeenth century, which was the age of great theological writers in France, as the
sixteenth had been the age of famous Synods. Of these writers not a few keep their place
after the lapse of two centuries, and their works are accounted, both in our own country
and in Germany, standards on the subjects of which they treat. Their writings are
characterized by the same fine qualities which distinguished the great authors of their
nation in other departments of literature – a penetrating judgment, an acute logic, a
rich illustrative power which makes the lights and shadows of fancy to play across the
page, and a brilliant diction which enriches and purifies the thought that shines through
it. These men occupied the pulpits of some of the most important towns, or they filled the
chairs of the seminaries or colleges which the Protestant Church was permitted to
maintain, and which she richly endowed. The French Church at that time had four such
academies – Montauban, Saumur, Sedan, and Nimes.
The first of these four seminaries, Montauban, was famous for the high tone of its
orthodoxy. It was a well of Calvinism undefiled. It was not less distinguished for the
eminent talents of its teachers. Among others, it boasted Daniel Chamier, a remarkable
man, whose name was famous in his own day, and is not unknown in ours. Combining the
sagacity of the statesman with the erudition of the theologian, he had a chief hand in the
drawing up of the Edict of Nantes. He was a distinguished controversialist, and bore away
the prize in a public discussion at Nimes with the confessor of Henry IV. At the request
of his brethren, he undertook a refutation of Bellarmin, the ablest of the Papal
champions. This work, in four volumes, has received the praise of a modern German
theologian, Staudlin, for the stores of knowledge its author displays, and the searching
criticism which he brings to bear upon the Popish system. The manner of his death was
unusual. During the siege of Montauban (1621) he was sent to preach to the soldiers on the
walls, who had not been able to attend church. As he mounted the ramparts, he was struck
by a cannon-ball, and expired.
Saumur was the symbol of a declining theology. Its professors conducted their labors
chiefly with an eye to smoothing the descent from Calvinism to Arminianism. They were
learned men in the main, and produced works which excited a various interest. A moderate
theology has ever had a tendency to stereotype men in moderate attainments: the professors
of Saumur are no exception. Their names would awaken no recollections now, and it is
unnecessary therefore to mention them.
Sedan had a purer fame, and a more interesting history. It is associated with the name of
Andrew Melville, and of numerous other Scotsmen who here taught with distinction. Pierre
Dumoulin (1658), one of the greatest Protestants of his day, filled one of its chairs. As
minister of Charenton, he had been the head of the Protestants of Paris, where his talents
and influence were of great service to the cause in every part of France; but becoming
obnoxious to the Jesuits, he fled to Sedan, then an independent principality, though under
the King of France. Here the remainder of his most laborious life was passed. No fewer
than seventy three works proceeded from his pen; of these the most popular were the
Buckler of the Faith, and the Anatomy of the Mass. The latter still finds numerous
readers. Dumoulin was a child of four years when the St. Bartholomew Massacre took place,
and would, even at that tender age, have been included among its victims but for the
kindness of a servant. He lived to the age of ninety. When one told him that his
dissolution was near, he thanked him for bringing him such happy tidings, and broke out
into a welcome to death – " that lovely messenger that would bring him to see
his God, after whom he had so long aspired." And so he ceased to be seen of men. It
was in this university that Daniel Tilenius taught. He was the first to introduce into
France those theological controversies touching Grace and Free Will, which the celebrated
Arminius had, as we have seen, begun in Holland a few years before. The progress of
Arminian views gradually weakened the hold of Calvinism on the French Reformed Church.
Of these four seats of Protestant learning, Nimes was the least famous. It numbered among
its professors Samuel Petit (1643). This man, who was a distinguished Oriental scholar,
filled the chair of Greek and Hebrew in this academy. An anecdote is told of him which
attests the familiarity he had acquired with the latter language. One day he entered the
synagogue of Avignon, and found the rabbi delivering a bitter vituperation in Hebrew' upon
Christianity and Christians. Petit waited till the speaker had made an end; and then, to
the no small astonishment of the rabbi, he began a reply in the same tongue, in which he
calmly vindicated the faith the Jew had aspersed, and exhorted its assailant to study
Christianity before again attacking it. The rabbi is said to have offered an apology. A
cardinal, who had so high an esteem of his learning as to court his friendship, offered to
obtain for him admission into the Vatican Library at Rome, with liberty to inspect the
manuscripts. The offer must have been a tempting one to an Orientalist like Petit, but for
reasons which he did not think himself obliged to state to the cardinal, he courteously
declined it.
Besides the men we have mentioned, the Protestant Church of France, in the seventeenth
century, possessed not a few pastors eminent for their piety and labors, whose works have
long preserved their names. Among these we mention Andre Rivet (1651), a distinguished
commentator. He began his career as a pastor in France, and closed it as a professor of
theology in Holland. The principles of criticism which he lays down in his Introduction to
the Study of the Bible he exemplifies in his Commentary on the Psalms, which is one of the
best expositions .of that part of Holy Writ that we possess. Aubertin (1652) was the
author of a work on the Eucharist, which those of the contrary opinion found it much
easier to denounce to the Privy Council than to answer. Benjamin Basnage (1652) was a man
of ability; his grandson, Jacques Basnage, was still more so.
Blondel (1655) was the ecclesiastical historian of his day, and one of the first to expose
the forged decretals of Rome. Bochart (1667), a mail of prodigious learning, and of equal
modesty, has left behind him an imperishable name. Mestrezat (1657) wielded a logic which
was the terror of the Jesuits. Drelincourt (1669) spent his days in visiting his flock,
and his nights in meditation and writing. His Consolations against Death still preserves
his fame, having been translated into nearly all the languages of Europe. One other name
only will we here mention, that of Jean Daille (1670), who was one of Drelincourt's
colleagues in Paris. The work by which the collaborator and friend of the author of the
Consolations against Death is best known is his Apology for the Reformed Churches, in
which he vindicates them from the charge of schism, and establishes, on irrefragable
historic proofs, their claim to apostolicity.
So many were the lights that still shone in the sky of French Protestantism. The whole
power of the Government had for a century been put forth to extinguish it. War had done
its worst. All the great military leaders, and the 7 of the common soldiers, lay rotting
on the battle-field. To war was added massacre. Again and again had the soil of France
been drenched in blood. Violence had so far prevailed that the Synods of the French Church
were now but a name. But the piety and learning of individual Protestants survived all
these disasters; and, like stars appearing after the clouds of tempest have passed away,
they lent a glory to the remnant that was spared, and proclaimed to France how inherently
noble was the cause which it was striving to extinguish, and what a splendor Protestantism
would shed upon the nation, had it been permitted in peace to put forth its mighty
energies, and to diffuse throughout the length and breadth of France its many virtues, and
ripen its precious fruits.
CHAPTER 4 Back to Top
THE DRAGONNADES.
The War of the Fronde – Mazarin adopts the Foreign Policy of Richelieu – Dies at
the Height of his Power – Louis XIV now Absolute – "The State, it is
I" – His Error as a King – His Error as a Man – Alternate Sinning and
Repenting – Extermination of the Huguenots – Confiscation of their Churches
– Arrets against Protestants – Fund for the Purchase of Consciences –
Father la Chaise – Madame de Maintenon – The Dragonnades – Conversions and
Persecutions.
WE now resume our narrative. Louis, a mere youth, was king;
his mother, Anne of Austria, was regent; but Cardinal Mazarin was the master of both, and
the ruler of the kingdom. Mazarin, as we have already said, squandered with prodigal hand
the treasures which Richelieu had husbanded for wars of ambition. The coffers of the State
began to be empty, and had to be replenished by new taxes. This brought on insurrection,
and new commenced the War of the Fronde. This war was an attempt, on the part of the
nation, to raise itself out of the gulf of dependence on the crown into which Richelieu
had sunk it. On the part of the crown, it was a struggle to retain its newly-acquired
prerogatives, and to wield over both nobles and people that despotic away from the path of
which all impediment had been removed, now that the Hugxtenots had been suppressed. The
War of the Fronde divided the aristocracy, some of the nobles taking part with the court,
others with the people. The two great military leaders, Conde and Turenne, brilliant in
arms but uncertain in politics, passed from side to side, now supporting the court, now
betraying it; now fighting for the people, now deserting them, as the caprice of the
moment or the interest of the hour led them. The war extended over the provinces, and even
entered the gates of Paris.
Barricades rose in the streets; the Louvre was besieged, and Mazarin and the court had to
flee. But notwithstanding these successes, the arms of the insurgents did not prosper. The
tide again turned; victory declared in favor of the royalists; and the court returned to
Paris in triumph. The War of the Fronde was at an end. The nobles, with the people and the
municipal corporations, had signally failed to curb the despotism of the crown, and now
these classes were in a worse plight than ever. Nor for 150 years thereafter was there the
least attempt to resuscitate the popular liberties.
From this time forward Mazarin's power continued to grow, and remained unshaken to the
close of his life. Having quieted France within, he set himself to carry out the great
projects of Richelieu, so far as that great statesman had left them incomplete. He made
war with Spain, and his arms were successful; for he brought to a close the protracted
conflict which France had waged with the House of Austria, humbling it in both its
branches, and transferring to France that political and military preponderance in Europe
which its rival, the proud and powerful House of Austria, had held for a century and a
hair. These events it does not concern us to relate, further than to note the very
significant fact that two princes of the Roman Catholic Church were employed in weakening
a Power which was the main support of that Church, and in paving the way for that great
Revolution which was to reverse the position of all the kingdoms of Europe, stripping the
Papal nations of their power, and lifting up the Protestant kingdoms to supremacy.
Mazarin had prospered in all his plans. Abroad he had triumphed over Austria and Spain. At
home he had abased the nobles. The Parliament and the municipal corporations he had
reduced to insignificance. The people he had sunk into vassalage. The throne he had made
supreme. But he did not live to enjoy the fruits of his anxieties and toils. Like
Richelieu, he died just as his fortunes culminated. He climbed to the summit of his glory
to find that he had arrived at the brink of his grave. Smitten with an incurable malady
(1661), he was warned by his physicians that his end drew nigh. He sketched in outline the
policy which he recommended Louis XIV to follow, he named the ministers whom he advised
him to employ in his service; and then, turning his face to the wall:, he took farewell of
all his glory.
Louis XIV had already reigned eighteen years; he now began to govern. He called to him the
men Mazarin had named on his death-bed – Le Tellier and the great Colbert – and
told them that they were to be simply the ministers through whom he was to act. And seldom
has monarch had it more in Ms power than Louis XIV. to do as he pleased throughout the
wide extent of his realms.[1]
Abroad he was Powerful, at home he was absolute. In his person centered all rights
and functions; he was the sole fountain of law. Seldom indeed has there been despotism
more complete or more centralized than that now embodied in Louis XIV. His own well-known
words exactly express it – "The State, it is I." It was a fearfully
responsible position. Sole master of the rights, the liberties, the lives, and we may add
the consciences of the millions who were his subjects, his reign must be a fountain of
untold blessings, or a source of numberless, enduring, and far extending miseries.
Nor did he lack qualities which might have enabled him to make it the former. He had a
sound judgment, a firm will, a princely disposition, and great capacity for affairs. He
liked hard work, and all through his long reign was never less than eight hours a day in
the cabinet. He was not cruel by nature, though he became so by policy. The rock on which
he split as a monarch was ambition. He had tasted of the sweets of conquest under Mazarin,
and ever after he thirsted with an unappeasable desire for the spoils of the battle-field.
In the course of his wars, there was scarcely a country in Europe which he did not water
with French blood. By these long-continued and sanguinary conflicts he still further
humbled the House of Austria, and annexed cities and provinces to his dominions, to be
stripped of them before his reign closed; he crowned himself with laurels, to be torn from
his brow before he died. He got the title of "the Great;" he had two triumphal
arches erected in his honor in Paris; and he contracted an enormous debt, which paved the
way for the Revolution, that came like a whirlwind in his grandson's time to sweep away
that throne which he had surrounded, as he believed, with a power that was impregnable and
a glory that was boundless.
The error of Louis XIV, as a man, was his love of pleasure. He lived in open and
unrestrained licentiousness. This laid him at the feet of his confessor, and sank him into
a viler vassalage than that of the meanest vassal in all his dominions. The
"Great" Louis, the master of a mighty kingdom, whose will was law to the
millions who called him their sovereign, trembled before a man with a shaven crown. From
the feet of his confessor he went straight to the commission of new sins; from these he
came back to the priest, who was ready with fresh penances, which, alas! were but sins in
a more hideous form. A more miserable and dreadful life there never was. Guilt was piled
upon guilt, remorse upon remorse, till at length Fife was passed, and the great reckoning
was in view. But how fared it with the Protestants under Louis XIV? Their condition became
worse from the moment that Mazarin breathed his last and Louis began to govern in person.
One of his first ideas was that Protestantism weakened France, and must be rooted out;
that the Edict of Nantes was an error, and must be revoked. This was the policy on which
he acted as regards the Huguenots – the goal towards which he worked – all
throughout his reign: the extirpation of Huguenotism, the revocation of the Edict of
Nantes. The wars of his early years interfered with the pursuit of this object, but he
never lost sight of it. No sooner had he taken the government into his own hands (1661)
than commissioners were appointed, and sent, two and two – a Roman Catholic and a
Protestant – into all the provinces of France, with authority to hear all complaints
and settle all quarrels which had sprung up between the two communions.
In almost every case the commissioners found that the Roman Catholics were in the right,
and the Protestants in the wrong. The commissioners were further instructed to examine the
title-deeds of churches. In many instances none could be produced; they had gone amissing
in the lapse of time, or had perished during the wars, and the circumstance was in every
case made available for the suppression of the church. It is impossible to tell the number
of churches pulled down, of schools suppressed, and charitable establishments confiscated
for the benefit of Popish institutions.
Next came the decree against "Relapsed Heretics." This ordinance denounced
against such the penalty of banishment for life. If one asked for the priest's blessing at
a mixed marriage, or had been heard to say to one that he should like to enter the Church
of Rome, or had done an act of abjuration twenty years before, or given any occasion in
any way for a suspicion or report of being inclined to Romanism, he was held as having
joined the Church of Rome, and the law against "Relapsed Heretics" was applied
to him; and if ever afterwards he entered a Protestant church, he was seized and carried
before the tribunals. By another ordinance, a priest and a magistrate were authorized to
visit every sick person, and ask if he wished to die in the Roman faith. The scandalous
scenes to which this gave rise can be imagined. The dying were distracted and tortured
with exhortations to abandon their faith and pray to the Virgin. Children were capable of
abjuring Protestantism at the age of fourteen; and by a subsequent decree, at the age of
seven; and their parents were compelled to pay for their maintenance under a Roman
Catholic roof. Spies haunted the sermons of Protestant ministers, and if the pastor spoke:
a disparaging word of the Virgin, or any saint of the Romish calendar, he was indicted for
blasphemy. If one pleaded a suit-at-law, and were doubtful of success, he had only to say
that he was arguing against a heretic, and the magic words were instantly followed by an
award in his favor. Protestants were excluded from all offices under the crown, from all
municipal posts, from the practice of law and medicine, and generally of all the liberal
professions. They were forbidden to sing psalms in their workshops or at the doors of
their houses. They had to suspend their psalmody when a Roman Catholic procession passed
the doors of their churches. They could bury their dead only at break of day or on the
edge of night. Not more than ten mourners could follow the bier; and the statutory number
of a wedding procession was restricted to twelve. This did not satisfy the priesthood,
however. In 1665 they declared that more zeal must be exercised in order "to cause
the formidable monster of heresy to expire completely." From this time the
Protestants began to flee from their native land. It was now, too, that Marshal Turenne
abjured in his old age the faith he had professed through life. His virtue had declined
before his Protestantism was renounced. His example was followed by the great nobles about
court, and it was remarked of all of them, as of Turenne, that they had espoused the
morals of the king before embracing his faith. The names of Count Schomberg, the Duke de
la Force, the Marquis de Ruvigny, and also several descendants of Duplessis-Mornay stand
out in noble relief from this degenerate crowd.[2]
Attempts were next made to unite the two Churches. These came to nothing,
notwithstanding the numerous reforms in the Romish Church promised by the king, all the
more freely, perhaps, that he had no power to fulfill them. Then, after a little space,
the work of persecution was resumed; a new discharge of ordinances and arrets struck the
Protestants.
We can mention only a very few of the new grievances. The Reformed were forbidden to print
religious books without permission of a magistrate of the Romish communion; to celebrate
worship when the bishop was holding a visitation; their domestic privacy was invaded;
their rights as parents violated; their temples demolished; and if they dared to meet
around the ruins and pray beside the sanctuaries in which their fathers had worshipped
they were punished.
But perhaps the most extraordinary means employed was the creation of a fund for the
purchase of consciences. This fund was fed from the resources of vacant bishoprics, which
were the right of the crown, but which the king now made over to this fund. In every case,
when a see became vacant, a year's revenue was thus applied, but sees were often kept
vacant for years that the fund for conversions: might profit thereby.
Pellisson, by birth a Calvinist, but who, having gone over to the king's religion, from a
convert became a zealous converter, presided over this fund. It was, in truth, a great
mercantile establishment, organized according to the rules and wielding the machinery of
other mercantile establishments. It had its head office in Paris, and branch offices in
all the provinces. It had its staff of clerks, its correspondents, its table of prices,
its letters of credit, and its daily published lists of articles purchased, these articles
being the bodies and the souls of men. A curious circular letter (June 12th, 1677) of its
president, Pellisson, has been given by the historian Felice, and is as follows: –
"Although you may go as far as a hundred francs, it is not meant that you are always
to go to this extent, as it is necessary to use the utmost possible economy; in the first
place, to shed this dew on as many persons as possible and, besides, if we give a hundred
francs to people of no consequence, without any family to follow them, those who bring a
number of children after them will demand far larger sums. Tiffs, however, need not hinder
you from furnishing still larger assistance in very important cases, if you advise me of
it beforehand, whenever his Majesty, to whom explanations will be given, thinks it
proper." The daily lists of abjurations amounted to many hundreds; but those who
closely examined the names said that the majority were knaves, or persons who, finding
conversion profitable, thought it not enough to be once, but a dozen times converted. The
king, however, was delighted with his success, and nothing was talked of at court but the
miracles of Pellisson. Every one lauded his golden eloquence – less learned, they
said, but far more efficacious than that of Bossuet.
Louis XIV was now verging on old age, but his bigotry grew with his years. His great
minister Colbert, whose counsels had ever been on the side of moderation, was now in his
grave. There were left him the Chancellor, Le Tellier, and the Minister of War, Louvois,
both stern haters of the Huguenots. His confessor was the well-known Father la Chaise. No
fitter tool than Louis XIV could the Jesuit have found. His Spanish mother had educated
him not to hesitate at scruples, but to go forward without compunction to the perpetration
of enormous crimes. To make matters still worse, the king now fell entirely under the
influence of Madame de Maintenon. This woman, who figures so prominently in these awful
tragedies, was the grand-daughter of the Protestant historian Agrippa d'Aubigne. She was a
Calvinist by birth, but changed her religion at an early age, and being governess in the
family of one of the royal mistresses, her beauty and address fascinated the king, who
privately married her on the death of the queen, Maria Theresa. Madame de Maintenon did
not particularly hate her former co-religionists, but being resolved above all things to
retain her influence over Louis, and seeing the direction in which his humor set –
namely, that of expiating his profligacys by the sacrifice of the Huguenot heretics –
she and Father la Chaise became the counselors and partners of the unhappy monarch in
those deeds of tyranny and blood which shed an ever-deepening darkness and horror over the
life of Louis XIV as he approached the grave.
Whether it was the number or the quality of the conversions that did not satisfy the court
it is hard to say, but now greater severitys were had recourse to. It was deemed bad
economy, perhaps, to do with money what could be done by the sword. Accordingly the
dragonnades were now set on foot. A commencement was made in Poitou. In 1681 a regiment of
cavalry was sent into this province, with instructions from the Minister of War, Louvois,
that the greater part of the men and officers should be quartered on the Protestants.
"If," said he, "according to a fair distribution, the Religionists ought to
have ten, we may billet twenty on them." The number of soldiers allotted to each
Protestant family varied from four to ten. The men were made aware that they might do as
they had a mind, short of actually killing the inmates. "They gave the reins to their
passions," says Migault, describing the horrors of which he was eye-witness;
"devastation, pillage, torture – there was nothing they recoiled at." The
details must be suppressed; they are too horrible to be read. The poor people knew not
what to do; they fled to the woods; they hid themselves in the caves of the mountains;
many went mad; and others, scarce knowing what they did, kissed a crucifix, and had their
names enrolled among the converts. The emigration was resumed on a great scale.
Thousands rose to flee from a land where nothing awaited them but misery. The court
attempted to arrest the fugitives by threatening them with the galleys for life. The
exodus continued despite this terrible law. The refugees were joyfully welcomed in England
and in the other Protestant lands to which, with their persons, they transferred their
industry, their knowledge of art and letters, and their piety. They now made Europe
resound with their wrongs – though not one of their books could cross the frontier of
their native land. We quote a few sentences from Jurieu (1682), who, fleeing to Holland,
became Pastor of the French Church in Rotterdam: – "We were treated as if we
were the enemies of the Christian name. In those places where Jews are tolerated they have
all sorts of liberties; they exercise the arts, and carry on trades; they are physicians;
they are consulted, and Christians put their lives and health into their hands. But we, as
if polluted, are forbidden to touch children on their entrance into the world; we are
excluded from the bar, and from all the faculties; we are driven away from the king's
person; all public posts are taken away from us; we are forbidden to use those means by
which we save ourselves from dying of hunger; we are given up to the hatred of the mob; we
are deprived of that precious liberty which we have purchased by so many services; our
children, who are part of ourselves, are taken away from us. Are we Turks or infidels? We
believe in Jesus Christ, we believe in the eternal Son of God, the Redeemer of the world;
the maxims of our morality ate pure beyond contradiction; we respect kings; we are good
subjects and good citizens; we are as much Frenchmen as we are Reformed Christians."
The Protestants thought one other attempt ought to be made, though not by arms, to recover
some little from the wreck of their liberties. They agreed that such of their churches as
were still standing should be re-opened for public worship on the same day in all the
southern provinces of France. This they thought would prove to the king in a peaceable way
that the abjurations, so loudly vaunted by his counselors, were a wholesale delusion. The
project was carried into effect, but the Government pretended to see in it insurrection,
and the poor Huguenots were visited with a yet heavier measure of vengeance. The
dragonnades were extended to all the provinces of Southern France. The Protestants fled to
the forests, to the deserts of the Cevennes, to the mountains of the Pyrenees.
They were tracked by the soldiers, and on refusing to abjure, were sabered or hanged. Some
of the pastors were broken on the wheel. Many of the churches spared till now were
demolished, and a hideous devastation was inflicted on private dwellings and property.
Everywhere there was a Reign of Terror; and the populace, entirely in the hands of
ruffians, who, if they forbore to kill, did so that they might practice excruciating and
often unnamable tortures upon their victims, now came in crowds to the priests to abjure.
"Not a post arrives," wrote Madame de Maintenon, in September, 1685,
"without bringing tidings that fill him (the king) with joy; the conversions take
place every day by thousands" Twenty thousand abjured in Bearn, sixty thousand in the
two dioceses of Nimes and Montpellier: and while this horrible persecution went on, the
Edict of Nantes was still law.[3]
CHAPTER 5 Back to Top
REVOCATION OF THE EDICT OF NANTES.
Edict of Revocation – Summary of its Enactments – The Protestant Churches
Demolished – Charenton, etc. – The Pastors Banished – Severe Penalties
– No Burial without the Sacrament – Lay Protestants Forbidden to Emigrate –
Schomberg and Admiral Duquesne – The Ports and Outlets from France Closed – The
Flight of the Huguenots – Their Disguises – Flight of Women – Their
Sufferings on the Way – Probable Numbers of the Refugees – Disastrous Influence
of the Revocation on Science and Literature – on Trade and Manufactures – on the
Army and Navy – France Weakened and Other Countries Enriched – Panegyrics of the
Clergy – Approval of the Pope – A Te Deum at Rome – Medals in Commemoration
of the Event.
THE Edict of Nantes was already in effect repealed. There was
hardly one of its provisions which had not been set aside either by interpretations which
explained it away, or by edicts which directly nullified it; and now scarcely anything
remained of that famous charter of Huguenot rights, save the parchment on. which it was
written and the seals that attested its stipulations and promises, which, read in the
light of the scenes that were being enacted all over France, looked like mockery.[1] But the work must be completed.
The king judged that the hour had now arrived for dealing the blow which should extinguish
for ever Protestantism in France. By the advice of his counselors – Father la Chaise,
his confessor; Madame de Maintenon, his wife; the Chancellor Le Tellier, and Count Louvois
– the king, on the 18th of October,[2] 1685, signed the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
The Revocation swept away all the rights and liberties which Henry I5 r. and Louis XIII
had solemnly guaranteed to the Protestants It declared all further exercise of the
Reformed worship within the kingdom illegal; it ordered the demolition of all the
Protestant churches; it commanded the pastors to quit the kingdom within a fortnight, and
forbade them to perform any clerical function on pain of the galleys; all Protestant
schools were closed; and all infants born subsequent to the revocation of the edict were
to be baptized by priests, and educated as Roman Catholics; all refugees were required to
return to France and abjure their religion within four months, and after the expiry of
that term non compliance was to be punished with confiscation of all their property; all
Protestants were forbidden to quit the kingdom under pain of the galleys of men, and of
confiscation of body and goods if women; and, in fine, all laws against relapsed heretics
were confirmed. A clause was added which occasioned a cruel disappointment: it was couched
in the following seemingly clement terms: – "Those Protestants who have not
changed their religion shall be allowed to dwell in the cities and places of our realm
unmolested till it shall please God to enlighten them, as he has others." This clause
was interpreted as a permission to the Reformed to hold their opinions in their own breast
and practice their worship in private. It was not long before they had discovered that the
true reading of the clause was as follows – until they shall be converted, as others
have been, by the dragoons.
On the 22nd of October the Act was registered, and on the same day the Protestants were
notified by a public spectacle that its execution had commenced. The great Church of
Charenton, in the neighborhood of Paris, built by the celebrated architect Jacques
Debrosse, and capable of containing 14,000 persons, was razed to the ground. The first
blow was dealt the detested structure by two Government commissioners; then a mob of some
hundreds threw themselves upon it, win pickaxes and levers; in five days not a trace of
the colossal fabric was to be seen, and a cross twenty feet high, adorned with the royal
arms, rose in triumph over the demolished edifice. Other temples throughout France,
venerable for their age, or imposing from their size, which had escaped the demolitions of
former years, were now swept away. Alas, the sorrowful scenes that marked the closing of
these churches! Drowned in tears, the congregation assembled to hear their pastor's
farewell sermon, and sing their last psalm; then, forming a long and mournful procession,
they passed before the minister, who bestowed on each singly his benediction, exhorting
him to be steadfast unto the death. With many a hallowed Communion Sunday lingering in
their memories, they then passed out for ever. Many of these churches fell amid a confused
noise of blaring trumpets, the shoutings of Romanists, and the sobbings of Protestants.
Topping the ruins of the Church of Nimes might long be seen a stone which had formed the
lintel of the portrico of the now overthrown edifice, on which were graven the words,
"This is the House of God, this is the Gate of Heaven."[3]
Though but the crowning act of a treacherous, cruel, and most tyrannical policy
under which they had groaned for years, the Revocation fell upon the Huguenots like a
thunder-bolt. Their eyes opened on blank desolation ! Not a single safe-guard had been
left them; not a single right of conscience, or of property, or of body of which they had
not been stripped. The fact seemed too terrible to be real; the crime – the folly
– too stupendous for any king to commit! The Protestants amounted to between one and
two millions; their factories and workshops were to be found in nearly all parts of
France; their commerce and merchandise upheld its great cities, their energy and
enterprise were the life of the nation; and to be all at once flung beyond the, pale of
law, beyond the pale of humanity! They were stupefied.
But they soon found that the first blow was far indeed from exhausting the calamities with
which this measure was pregnant. The edict opened out in a series of oppressions to which
they could see neither limit nor end. Troops were sent into the provinces to execute it.
As an inundation breaks in, or as a tempest sweeps onward, so did a torrent of pillagings,
outrages, and murders rush upon France. Louis XIV in all this was not persecuting, he was
only converting; for had not the Savior said, "Compel them to come in"? An army
of "booted apostles" scouring the country and 800 Protestant churches now in
ruins attested the reality of the Revocation; but instantly came new provisions to amplify
and perfect the edict. Protestant preaching had already been forbidden on land; now it was
forbidden on board ship. Protestants, or new Catholics, as they were termed – for it
was assumed that now there were not any more Protestants in France – were forbidden
to employ as servants any save Roman Catholics, under penalty of a fine of 1,000 livres.
Huguenots were absolutely forbidden to enter, in the capacity of servants, any family,
whether Roman Catholic or Huguenot, under pain, if men, of being sent to the galleys, and
if women, of being flogged and branded with a fleur-de-lis.
Even English families resident in France were not exempt from the operation of this law.
Protestant ministers found lurking in France after the expiry of the fifteen days given
them for removal were to be put to death; and, to hasten their departure and make sure
that not one heretical teacher remained in the country, a reward of 5,500 livres was
offered for the apprehension of ministers in hiding. Pastors who should return to their
native land without a written permission from the king were to expiate their offense with
their lives, while the terrors of the galleys, imprisonment for life, and confiscation of
property were suspended above those who should dare to harbor such. Not a few foreigners,
particularly Englishmen, were summoned to abjure, and on their refusal were thrown into
prison. The English monarch sent tardy remonstrances against these insults to his crown,
and the Court of Versailles responded with an equally tardy satisfaction.
Nor did these annoyances and torments terminate with life. Not only were the death-beds of
all Protestants besieged, and their last moments disturbed by the presence of priests, but
no grave could receive the body of the man who died without confession and without the
Sacrament of extreme unction. His corpse was a thing too vile to rest in the bosom of the
earth – it must rot above ground; it was exposed on the highway, or was flung into
the public sewer. The body of M. de Chevenix, a man illustrious for his learning and
piety, was subjected to this indignity. Dragged away on a hurdle, it was thrown upon a
dung-hill. His friends came by night, and wrapping it in linen, bore it reverently on
their shoulders, and buried it in a garden, giving vent to their sorrow, as they lowered
it slowly into its place of sepulture, by singing the seventy-ninth Psalm: "Save me,
O Lord, for the waters are come into my soul."[4]
While one clause of the Act of Revocation made it death for the pastor to remain in
France, another clause of the same Act made it death for the layman to flee from it. The
land was converted into a vast prison. The frontiers were jealously guarded; sentinels
were placed at aft the great outlets of the kingdom; numerous spies kept watch at the
seaports; officers patrolled the shore; and ships of war hovered off the coast to prevent
escape beyond those dismal limits within which the Protestant had only the terrible
alternative of sacrificing his conscience, or surrendering his liberty or life. Many
earnestly petitioned for leave to withdraw from a land where to obey God was to incur the
wrath of the king, but they petitioned in vain. Of the native subjects of Louis, we know
of only two to whom this favor was conceded. The Marshal Schomberg and the Marquis de
Ruvigny were permitted to retire, the first to Portugal, and the second to England. The
Admiral Duquesne was summoned into the presence of Louis XIV., and urged to change his
religion. Pointing to his hairs, which tempest and battle had bleached, the hero said,
"For sixty years, sire, have I rendered unto Caesar that which I owe to Caesar:
suffer me still to render to God that which I owe to God." He was permitted to live
in his native land unmolested. Among the names that lent a glory to France there were none
greater than these three. Schomberg was at the head of the army, Duquesne was the creator
of the navy, and De Ruvigny was equally renowned in diplomacy; the Revocation deprived
France of the services of all the three. This was much, and yet it was but the first
installment of that mighty sum which France was destined to pay for the Revocation in
after-years.
Nothing can be imagined more appalling than was now the condition of the Protestant, as he
looked around him in his native land. The king was his enemy, the law was his enemy, his
fellow-countrymen were his enemies; and on all sides of him was a cordon of guards and
gens-d'armes, to apprehend and subject him to terrible sufferings should he attempt to
escape from the vast prison which had shut him in. But fruitless were all the means taken
to prevent the flight of the Huguenots. Fruitless were the peasants that clay and night,
armed with scythes and similar weapons, guarded the high-roads, and watched the fords of
rivers; fruitless the troops that lined the frontier, and the ships that cruised off the
ports and examined all outward-bound vessels; fruitless the offered spoils of the captured
fugitives, by which it was sought to stimulate the vigilance of the guards; fruitless even
the reports which were put in circulation, that no asylum was to be found in foreign
countries that 10,000 refugees had died of starvation in England, and that of those who
had fled, the vast majority were soliciting permission to return. In vain were all these
efforts to check the emigration; danger was braved, vigilance was eluded; and the
frontiers were crossed by an ever-enlarging crowd, who were even more anxious to find
liberty of conscience than to escape from death.
The devices resorted to and the disguises assumed by the fugitives to avoid detection were
infinite. Some attired themselves in the garb of pilgrims, and with shallop and
palmer-staff pursued their journey to their much-wished-for shrine – a land of
liberty. Some traveled as couriers; some as sports-men, carrying a gun on their shoulder;
some as peasants driving cattle; some affected to be porters, carrying burdens; others
were attired in footmen's liveries, and others wore soldiers' uniforms. The rich in some
cases hired guides, who, for sums varying from 1,000 to 6,000 livres, conducted them
across the frontier. The poor, setting out alone, chose by-paths and difficult
mountain-tracks, beginning each day's journey at night-fall, and when the dawn appeared,
retiring to some forest or cavern for rest and sleep. Sometimes they lay concealed in a
barn, or burrowed in a hay-stack, till the return of the darkness made it safe for them to
continue their flight. Nobles and gentlemen, setting their servants on horseback, would
put on their dress, and follow on foot as though they were lackeys.
The women were not less fertile in artifices and disguises. They dressed themselves as
servants, as peasants, as nurses; even noble ladies would journey onward trundling
wheel-barrows, or carrying hods, or bearing burdens. The young disfigured their faces by
smearing or dyeing their skin and cutting off their hair, thus converting blooming youth
into withered and wrinkled age. Some dressed themselves as beggars, some sold rosaries,
and some reigned to be deaf or insane.[5] The perils that environed them on every side could not daunt their
heroic resolution. They urged their fleeing steps onward through the darkness of night and
the tempests of winter, through tangled forests and quaking morasses, through robbers and
plunderers, forgetting all these dangers in their anxiety to escape the guards of the king
and arrive at the rendezvous, and rejoin fathers, or brothers, or husbands, who had
reached the appointed place by another route. The terrors of the persecutor had overcome
the sense of weariness, and hundreds of miles seemed short to some who, brought up in
luxury and splendor, had never before, perhaps, walked a league on foot. The ocean had no
terrors to those who knew that there was a land of liberty beyond it, and many crossed the
English Channel at that inclement season in open boats. Those on the sea-board got away in
Dutch, in English, and in French merchantmen, hidden in bales of goods, or buried under
heaps of coal, or stowed in empty barrels, where they had only the bung-hole to breathe
through. The very greatness of their misery wrought some alleviation of their hardship.
Their woeful plight melted the hearts of the peasants on the frontier, and they suffered
them in some instances to escape, when it was in their power to have delivered them up to
the dragoons. Even the sentinels sometimes acted as the guides of those whom they had been
appointed to arrest. There was hardly a country in Europe into which these men did not
flee, but England and Holland and Germany were their main asylums.
It is only an approximate appreciation that can now be formed of the numbers of
Protestants who succeeded in escaping from France. The official reports sent in to the
Government by the Intendants are not to be relied on. Those whose duty it was to frame
them had many motives for making the emigration appear less than it really was. They
naturally were unwilling to falsify the previsions of the court which had buoyed itself up
with the hope that only a very few would leave their native land. Besides, to disclose the
real extent of the emigration might seem to be to present an indictment against
themselves, as chargeable with lack of vigilance in permitting so many to escape. It is
vain, then, to think of arriving at an exact estimate from these documents, and these are
the only official sources of information open to us. But if we look at the dismal blanks
left in France, at the large and numerous colonies planted in foreign countries, and at
the length of time during which the exodus continued, which was not less than from fifteen
to twenty years, it is impossible to resist the conclusion that the emigration was on a
scale of gigantic magnitude. Of the one million Protestants and upwards scattered among
the twenty millions of Frenchmen, it is probable that from a quarter to half a million
emigrated. Jurieu estimates that in 1687, 200,000 persons had already left France.
Antoine Court, one of the preachers of the desert, makes the total 800,000 persons.
Sismondi says from 300,000 to 400,000. In a celebrated memorial addressed to Louvois in
1688, Vauban says "that France had lost 100,000 inhabitants, 60,000,000 of francs in
specie, 9,000 sailors, 12,000 veterans, 600 officers, and her most flourishing
manufactures. The Duke de Saint Sinton says in his Memoirs that all branches of trade were
ruined, and that a quarter of the kingdom was perceptibly depopulated."[6]
The face of France was changed in a day. Its framework was suddenly and violently
shaken and loosened, as if an earthquake had rocked the land. The current of the nation's
life was not indeed stopped outright, but its flow became languid and sluggish beyond the
power of king or of parliament again to quicken it. The shock was felt in every department
of national enterprise, whether mental or industrial. It was felt at the bar, which it
stripped of some of its brightest ornaments. It was felt in the schools of philosophy.
Some of the ablest cultivators of science it drove away. The great astronomer and
mathematician, Huygens, had to quit France and seek asylum in Holland. It was felt in the
ranks of literature. It chased beyond the frontier some of the finest writers and most
eloquent orators that France contained. In the list of these illustrious refugees we find
Claude, Jurieu, Lenfant, Saurin, Basnage, Bayle, and Rapin. It was felt in the army and
navy. The Revocation drove beyond the frontier the flower of the French soldiers, and
decreed that henceforth those banners which had waved so proudly on many a victorious
field should be folded in humiliation and defeat. The Revocation was felt in the iron
works and smelting furnaces on the Vrigne and at Pouru-Saint-Remy. It was felt in the
manufactures of arms and implements of husbandry in the Sedanais. It was felt in the gold
and silver lace works of Montmorency and Villiers-le-Bel. It was felt in the hat factories
of Coudebec. It was felt in the wool-carding establishments of Meaux; in the cloth
manufactories of Picardy, Champagne, and Normandy; in the silk-weaving establishments of
Tours and Lyons; in the paper mills of Auvergne and the Angoumois; in the tanneries of
Touraine; on the shipping wharves and in the trading establishments of Bordeaux, La
Rochelle, and other towns, where the foreign trade had been almost exclusively in the
hands of Protestants. In short, not an art was cultivated, not a trade was carried on in
France which did not suffer from this blow; not a province was there where the blight it
had inflicted was not to be seen in villages half-depopulated, in habitations deserted, in
fields lying unploughed, and in gardens and vineyards overgrown with weeds and abandoned
to desolation. The ravages inflicted by the Revocation were to be traced not on the land
only, but on the ocean also. The fleet of foreign ships which had gladdened the shores and
crowded the harbors of France, to carry thence the beautiful and varied fabrics which her
ingenious sons had worked on her looms and forged on her anvils, from this time all but
disappeared. The art and genius which created these marvels had transferred themselves to
Germany, to Holland, to England, and to Scotland, where they had taken root, and were
producing those implements with which France had been accustomed to enrich other nations,
but which now she had to beg from her neighbors.
Thus strangely did that country defeat what had been the grand object of her policy for
half a century. Her aim all through the administrations of Richelieu and Mazarin was to
consolidate her power, and lead in the councils of Europe. But this one act of Louis XIV
did more to weaken France than all that Richelieu and Mazarin had done to strengthen her.
Not only did Louis weaken the fabric of his own power, he enhanced the strength of that
interest which it was his great object to abase. The learning, the genius, the art which
were the glory of his realm, and would have been the bulwark of his throne, he drove away
and scattered among Protestant nations. His folly herein was as conspicuous and as
stupendous as his wickedness.
But the Revocation was not the act of the king alone. The clergy and the nation equally
with Louis must bear the guilt of his great crime. The people by their approbation or
their silence became the ac. complice of the monarch; and the clergy made his act their
own by exhausting the whole vocabulary of panegyric in its praise. According to them the
past history of the world had nothing more wise or more magnanimous to show, and its
author had placed himself among the heroes and demi-gods of fame. We might fill almost a
volume with the laudations written and spoken on the occasion. "You have doubtless
seen the edict by which the king revokes that of Nantes," wrote Madame de Sevigne to
her daughter a few days after the publication of the decree. "There is nothing so
fine as all that it contains, and never has any king done or ever will do ought so
memorable!" The chancellor, Le Tellier, was so carried away by the honor of affixing
the seal of state to this atrocious edict, that he declared that he would never seal
another, and in a fit of devout enthusiasm he burst out in the song with which the aged
Simeon celebrated the advent of the Savior: "Now lettest thou thy servant depart in
peace, since mine eyes have seen thy salvation." When the men of law were so moved,
what might we not expect in the priests? They summoned the people to the churches to unite
in public thanksgivings, and they exhausted all their powers of eloquence in extolling the
deed. "Touched by so many marvels," exclaimed Bossuet, "let us expand our
hearts in praises of the piety of Louis. Let our acclamations ascend to the skies, and let
us say to this new Constantine, this new Theodosius, this new Marcian, this new
Charlemagne, what the thirty-six Fathers formerly said in the Council of Chalcedon: 'You
have strengthened faith, you have exterminated heretics; it is a work worthy of your
reign, whose proper character it is. Thanks to you, heresy is no more.' God alone can have
worked this marvel. King of heaven, preserve the king of earth: it is the prayer of the
Church; it is the prayer of the bishops."
The other great preachers of Paris also celebrated this edict, as throwing into the shade
all past monuments of wisdom and heroism. It is in the following terms that Massillon
glorifies Louis' victory over heresy: "How far did he not carry his zeal for the
Church, that virtue of sovereigns who have received power and the sword only that they may
be props of the altar and defenders of its doctrine! Specious reasons of state! in vain
did ye oppose to Louis the timid views of human wisdom, the body of the monarchy enfeebled
by the flight of so many citizens, the course of trade slackened either by the deprivation
of their industry or by the furtive removal of their wealth; dangers fortify his zeal; the
work of God fears not man; he believes even that he strengthens his throne by overthrowing
that of error. The profane temples are destroyed, the pulpits of seduction are cast down,
the prophets of falsehood are torn from their flocks. At the first blow dealt to it by
Louis, heresy falls, disappears, and is reduced either to hide itself in the obscurity
whence it issued, or to cross the seas, and to bear with it into foreign lands its false
gods, its bitterness, and its rage."[7]
Nor was it popular assemblies only who listened approvingly to these flights of
rhetoric; similar laudations of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes were pronounced
before the French Academy, and received the meed of its applause. The Abbe Tallemand, when
speaking of the demolition of the Protestant church at Charenton, exclaimed –
"Happy ruins, the finest trophy France ever beheld! The statues and the triumphal
arches erected to the glory of the king will not exalt it more than this temple of heresy
overthrown by his piety. That heresy which thought itself invincible is entirely
vanquished." Bossuet had compared Louis to Constantine and Theodosius; Tallemand,
discoursing to a body of learned men, seeks for a more classic prototype of the King of
France. A second Hercules had arisen, he told the Academy, and a second hydra, more
terrible by far than the monster which the pagan god had slain, had fallen beneath the
blows of this second and greater Hercules.
In the midst of this universal chorus of applause we expect to hear one dissenting voice
lifted up. Surely the Jansenists will rebuke the madness of the nation, and in some small
degree redeem the honor of France. Alas! they are silent. Not one solitary protest do we
hear against this great crime. But the Jansenists are not content to Be silent; they must
needs speak, but it is to approve of the Revocation. Through their great interpreter
Arnault, they declared that "the means which had been employed were rather violent,
but nowise unjust."
It remained for one other and mightier voice to speak. And now that voice is heard, from
the other side of the Alps, expressing a full approval of the Revocation. All the previous
inferior utterances are repeated and sanctioned in this last and greatest utterance, and
thus the Roman Catholic world makes the deed its own, and accepts the Revocation with all
its plunder and blood, and the punishment that is to follow it. The Pope, Innocent XI,
made a Te Deum be sung at Rome for the conversion of the Huguenots, and sent a special
brief to Louis XIV, in which he promised him the eternal praises of the Church, and a
special recompense from God for the act of devotion by which he had made his name and
reign glorious.
Art was summoned to lend her aid in appropriately commemorating the triumph of Louis over
heresy. In front of the Hotel de Ville the provost and sheriffs of Paris erected a brazen
statue in honor of the king.[8] It
bore the proud words – Ludovico Magno, Victori perpetuo, Ecclesiae ac Regum
Dignitatis Assertori (To Louis the Great, eternal Conqueror, and Assertor of the Dignity
of the Church and of Kings). Its bas-reliefs displayed a frightful bat hovering above the
works of Calvin and Huss, and enveloping them in its dark wings – emblematic imagery
borrowed probably from one of Lesueur's masterpieces in Versailles, commemorating a
similar event. Three medals were struck to perpetuate the memory of the Revocation.[9] One of them represented Religion
planting a cross on a heap of ruins, denoting the triumph of truth over error; with this
legend, Religio Victrix (Religion the Conqueror); and underneath were the words, Templis
Cal-vinianorum eversis, 1685 (The Temples of Calvin overturned, 1685). Another displays a
figure holding a cross, its foot planted on a prostrate foe, while in the background rises
proudly an edifice, surmounted by the motto, Haeresis Extincta, and underneath are the
words, Edictum Octobris, 1685, – intimating that by the edict of October, 1685,
heresy had been extinguished. A third represents Religion placing a crown on the head of
Louis, who stands leaning upon a rudder, and trampling under foot a dead enemy, the symbol
of heresy. The motto – which, says Weiss, "comprises at once an error and a
lie" – is Ob vicies centena millia Cal-vinianorum ad Ecclesiam revocata, 1685
(For a hundred thousand Calvinists, twenty times told, brought back to the Church, 1685).
All these medals proclaim what Louis XIV and the Jesuits believed to be the fact, that
Calvinism had been eternally extinguished. The edict of October, 1685, was the date (they
imagined) of its utter overthrow. As a matter of fact, however, it was the treachery and
cruelty of the Revocation that, above most things, aroused the Protestant spirit of
Europe, and brought about that great Revolution which, three short years afterwards,
placed William of Orange on the throne of Great Britain.
CHAPTER 6 Back to Top
THE PRISONS AND THE GALLEYS.
"New Catholics" – Suspected and Watched – New and Terrible
Persecutions – Described by Quick – The Dungeons – Their Horrors – M.
de Marolles, and other Prisoners – Other Modes of Punishment – Transportation
– Sold into Foreign Slavery – Martyrdom of Fulcran Rey – Claude Brousson
– his Preaching – His Martyrdom – Drums round the Scaffold – The
Galley Chain – Chateau de la Tournelle – The Galleys.
Or the tens of thousands of Frenchmen, of all ranks, and in
every disguise who were now hurrying along the highways and byways of France, intent only
on escaping from the sod that gave them birth, all were not equally fortunate in reaching
the frontier. Many hundreds were arrested in their flight, and brought back to endure the
rage of their persecutors. Their miserable fate it now becomes our duty to describe. Nor
of these only shall we speak, but also of their many companions in suffering, who remained
in their native land, when their brethren had fled before the awful tempest that was now
thundering in the skies of France. It is a tale of woe, with scarcely one bright feature
to relieve it.
Of those who remained, estimated by Sismondi at about a million, many conformed to the
king's religion, impelled by the terrors of the edict, and such now passed under the name
of "The New Catholics." But their downcast looks belied their professions; their
sincerity was suspected, and they were constantly watched. So little faith had the Jesuits
in the conversions of which they boasted so loudly in public! Inspectors were established
in several parishes to examine if the new converts went regularly to mass, if they took
the Sacrament at Easter, and if they paid a dutiful obedience to the commandments of the
Church. This was a return, in the polished era of Louis XIV, to the regime of the tenth
century. Even the monarch deemed this scrutiny somewhat too close, and issued private
instructions to his agents to temper their zeal, and moderate the rigor of the Act.[1]
According to the edict, all Protestant children must attend a Roman Catholic
school, and receive instruction in the catechism. A new ordinance enjoined that all
children above six years of age, whose parents were suspected of being still Protestant at
heart, should be taken from their homes, and confided to Roman Catholic relations, or
placed in hospitals. The convents and asylums of all France were not enough to accommodate
the crowd of abducted youth about to be swept into them, and the priests contented
themselves with seizing only the children of the rich, who were able to pay for their
maintenance.
The edicts of the king threatened books as well as persons with extermination. The
Archbishop of Paris had compiled a list of works which the faithful could not read but at
the risk of deadly injury. With this list in his hand the officer entered every suspected
house, and whenever he found a forbidden book he instantly destroyed it. These visits were
repeated so often that many books of rare value, known to have then existed, are now
extinct, not one copy having escaped. The records of Synods, and the private papers and
books of pastors, were the first to be destroyed. Wherever a Bible was found it ,was
straightway given to the flames.[2] The
edict required that the "New Catholics" should be instructed in the faith they
professed to have adopted; but the priests were too few and the crowd of converts too
many, so the cures lightened their labors by calling the Capuchins to share them with
them. But these were rude and illiterate men. The merest youth could put them to silence.
To gross ignorance they not infrequently added a debauched life, and in the case of
Protestants of riper years, their approach awakened only disgust, and their teachings had
no other effect on those to whom they were given, than to deepen their aversion to a
Church which employed them as her ministers. When the first stunning shock of the edict
had spent itself, there came a recoil. The more closely "the new converts"
viewed the Church into which they had been driven, the stronger became their dislike of
it. Shame and remorse for their apostasy began to burn within them. Their sacrilegious
participation in the mass awoke their consciences thousands resolved, rather than lead a
life of such base and criminal hypocrisy, to abandon, at whatever cost, the communion they
professed to have espoused, and return to the open profession of the Protestant worship.
They withdrew from the cities. They sought a dwelling in the wildernesses and forests, and
practiced their worship in dark caves, in deep ravines, and sometimes on the tops of
mountains. There they promised to one another to live and die in the Reformed faith.
When the king and his counselors saw the flag of defiance waving on the mountains of the
Cevennes, and the Lower Languedoc, their rage rose to frenzy. New ordinances came to
intensify the rigors of the persecution. Quick has grouped the horrors that now
overwhelmed the poor Protestants of France, in a recital that is almost too harrowing for
perusal.
"Afterwards," says Quick, "they fell upon the persons of the Protestants,
and there was no wickedness, though ever so horrid, which they did not put in practice,
that they might enforce them to change their religion. Amidst a thousand hideous cries and
blasphemies, they hung up men and women by the hair or feet upon the roofs of the
chambers, or nooks of chimneys, and smoked them with wisps of wet hay till they were no
longer able to bear it; and when they had taken them down, if they would not sign an
abjuration of their pretended heresies, they then trussed them up again immediately. Some
they threw into great fires, kindled on purpose, and would not take them out till they
were half roasted.
They tied ropes under their arms, and plunged them once and again into deep wells, from
whence they would not draw them till they had promised to change their religion. They
bound them as criminals are when they are put to the rack, and in that posture putting a
funnel into their mouths, they poured wine down their throats till its fumes had deprived
them of their reason, and they had in that condition made them consent to become
Catholics. Some they stripped stark naked, and afar they had offered them a thousand
indignities, they stuck them with pins from head to foot; they cut them with pen-knives,
tore them by the noses with red-hot pincers, and dragged them about the rooms till they
promised to become Roman Catholics, or till the doleful cries of these poor tormented
creatures, calling upon God for mercy, constrained them to let them go. They beat them
with staves, and dragged them all bruised to the Popish churches, where their enforced
presence is reputed for an abjuration. They kept them waking seven or eight days together,
relieving one another by turns, that they might not get a wink of sleep or rest. In case
they began to nod, they threw buckets of water on their faces, or holding kettles over
their heads, they beat on them with such a continual noise, that these poor wretches lost
their senses. If they found any sick, who kept their beds, men or women, be it of fevers
or other diseases, they were so cruel as to beat up an alarm with twelve drums about
their-beds for a whole week together, without intermission, till they had promised to
change."[3]
What follows is so disgusting that it could not be quoted here unless it were
covered with the decent veil of a dead language.
The Lutherans of Alsace, protected by recent diplomatic conventions, were exempt from
these miseries; but with this exception the persecution raged through the whole of France.
In Paris and its immediate neighborhood, matters were not urged to the same dire
extremity. Those who had instigated the king to revoke the Edict of Nantes, had assured
him that the mere terror of the Act would suffice to accomplish all he wished, and they
now strove to conceal from Louis the formidable proportions of the actual horrors. But in
other parts of France no check was put upon the murderous passions, the brutal lusts, and
the plundering greed of the soldiery, and there a baffled bigotry and tyranny glutted
their vengeance to the utmost. Among the dreadful forms of punishment inflicted on the
Protestants was the dungeon. Such as were caught in attempts to escape, or refused to
abjure, were plunged into loathsome prisons. Here generally there reigned unbroken silence
and darkness. The poor prisoner could not receive a visit from pastor or relation; he
could not console himself by singing a psalm or by reading his Bible: shut up with lewd
and blaspheming felons, he was constrained to hear their horrible talk, and endure their
vile indignities. If his meekness and patience overcame their cruelty, or softened the
gaoler, he was at once shifted to another prison, to prevent his being treated more
tenderly by those whose compassion he had excited. The letters of M. le Febvre, arrested
in 1686, and confined fifteen years in a solitary dungeon, have disclosed the terrible
sufferings borne by those who were shut up in these places.
"For several weeks," says he, "no one has been allowed to enter my dungeon;
and if one spot could be found where the air was more infected than another, I was placed
there. Yet the love of truth prevails in my soul; for God who knows my heart, and the
purity of my motives, supports me by his grace." He shows us his dungeon. "It is
a vault of irregular form, and was formerly a stable, but being very damp, it was
injurious to horses. The rack and manger are here still. There is no way of admitting
light but by an opening with a double grating, in the upper part of the door. Opposite the
opening there are iron bars, fastened at their upper ends into the wall. The place is very
dark and damp. The air is noisome and has a bad smell. Everything rots and becomes moldy.
The wells and cisterns are above me. I have never seen a fire here, except the flame of a
candle. You will feel for me in this misery, but think of the eternal weight of glory that
will follow."
Another prisoner, M. de Marolles, a distinguished scientist, tells us that the solitude
and perpetual darkness of his prison engendered, at last, the most frightful and
terrifying ideas in his mind. Believing himself on the brink of insanity, he had recourse
to prayer, and was delivered. A perfect calm filled his mind, and those phantoms took
flight that had so troubled his soul. "He makes the days of my affliction pass
speedily away," said he in the last letter he was ever to write. "With the bread
and water of affliction, He affords me continually most delicious repasts."[4]
In the letters of M. le Febvre, cited above, mention is made of a shepherd who was
removed from Fort St. Nicholas to a dungeon in the Chateau d'Ife.[5] The descent into this dungeon was by a ladder, and it was lighted
only by a lamp, for which the gaoler made the prisoners pay. The shepherd, when first
consigned to it, had to lie on its miry bottom, almost without clothing. A monk, who went
down into it to visit its wretched inmates, could not help declaring that its horrors made
him shudder, that he had not nerve enough to go again. He could not refrain from team at
the sight of the unhappy beings before him, one of whom had already, though still alive,
become the prey of worms. This was the terrible fate not of a few hundreds only. It is
believed that at one stage of the persecution there were from 12,000 to 15,000 persons in
the prisons and dungeons of France.
Another mode of punishment was transportation to Canada – the Canada of 200 years
ago. This method was resorted to in order to relieve the prisons, which, full to overflow,
could not receive the crowds that were being daily consigned to them. Collected from the
various prisons of France, or gathered from the country around Nimes and Montpellier,
these confessors of the Gospel were brought down in gangs to Marseilles, the women
strapped down in carts, and the men mounted on horses, their feet tied below the animals
belly. The embarkation and voyage entailed incredible and protracted suffering. The
vessels that bore them across the Atlantic were small, filthy, and often unseaworthy. Nor
did their miseries end with their voyage. On their arrival in the New World they were sold
into a slavery so cruel, that in most cases they speedily perished. Those who were thus
dragged from the pleasant fields of France, and put under the lash of barbarous
task-masters in a foreign land, were not the refuse of French society; on the contrary,
they were the flower of the nation. In these manacled gangs were men who had shone at the
bar, men who had been eminent in the pulpit, writers who were the glory of their country,
and men and women of noble or of gentle birth; yet now we see them borne across the deep,
and flung into bondage, because a sensualist king – the slave of mistresses and
priests – so willed it.
The policy of the persecutors was to "wear out" the Protestants, in preference
to summarily exterminating them by fire and cord. It is true the murders in the fields
were numerous; there were few spots in the Cevennes which martyr-blood did not moisten,
but only occasionally in the cities was the scaffold set up. We select from the Lettres
Pastorales of Jurieu [6] a
few instances. One of the first to suffer in this way was Fulcran Rey, a young man of
Nimes. He had just finished his course of theological study when the storm burst. Does he
now decline the office of pastor?
No: accepting martyrdom beforehand, he writes a farewell letter to those at his father's
house, and goes forth to break the silence which the banishment of the ministers had
created in France by preaching the Gospel. In a little while he was arrested. On his trial
he was promised the most flattering favors if he would abjure, but his constancy was
invincible.
He was sentenced to be hanged, after having been tortured. On hearing his doom, he
exclaimed, "I am treated more gently than my Savior was in being condemned to so mild
a form of death. I had prepared my mind to being broken on the wheel, or being burnt to
death." Then, raising his eyes to heaven, he gave thanks to God for this mitigation
of his anticipated agonies. Being come to the scaffold, he wished to address the crowd,
and confess before them the faith in which he died; but, says Jurieu, "they were
afraid of a sermon delivered by such a preacher, and from such a pulpit, and had stationed
around the gibbet a number of drummers, with orders to beat their drums all at once."
He died at Beaucaire, July 7th, 1686, at the age of twenty-four.
But the martyr of greatest fame of that era is Claude Brousson. Brousson had been a
distinguished member of the bar at Toulouse, where he pleaded the cause of the oppressed
Churches. Silenced as an advocate, he opened his lips as a preacher of the Gospel. His
consecration to his office took place in the wilds of the Cevennes, which were then
continually resounding with the muskets of the murderous soldiery. The solitary hut, or
the dark wood, or the deep ravine henceforth became his home, whence he issued at
appointed times to preach to the flock of the desert. After awhile he was so hotly pursued
that he judged it prudent to withdraw from France. But in his foreign asylum his heart
yearned after his flock, and, finding no rest, he returned to those "few sheep in the
wilderness." A sum of 500 louis was offered to any one who would bring him to the
Intendant, dead or alive; nevertheless Brousson went on for five years in the calm
exercise of his ministry. His sermons were published at Amsterdam in 1695, under the title
of The Mystical Manna of the Desert. "One would have expected," says Felice,
"that discourses composed by this proscribed man, under all oak of the forest, or on
a rock by some mountain torrent, and delivered to congregations where the dead were
frequently gathered as on a field of battle, would have been marked by eager and gloomy
enthusiasm. Nothing of the kind is, however, to be found in this Mystical Manna. The
preacher's language is more moderate and graceful than that of Saurin in his quiet church
of the Hague; in the persecution he points only to the hand of God, and is vehement only
when he censures his hearers."[7] At
last, in 1698, he was arrested at Oleron and carried to Montpellier. Before his judges he
freely admitted the graver charge of his indictment, which was that he had preached to the
Protestant outlaws; but he repudiated energetically another accusation preferred against
him, that he had conspired to bring Marshal Schomberg into France at the head of a foreign
army. He was condemned to die. On the scaffold, which he mounted on the 4th of November,
he would once more have raised his voice, but it was drowned by the roll of eighteen
drums. Little did Louis XIV then dream that his great-grandson, and next successor save
one on the throne of France, should have his dying words drowned by drums stationed round
his scaffold.
Of all the punishments to which the proscribed Protestants of France were doomed, the most
dreadful was the galleys. The more famous galleys were those of Marseilles, and the
journey thither entailed hardships so terrible that it was a common thing for about
three-fourths of the condemned to die on the road. They marched along in gangs, carrying
heavy irons, and sleeping at night in stables or vaults. "They chained us by the neck
in couples," says one who underwent this dreadful ordeal, "with a thick chain,
three feet long, in the middle of which was a round ring. After having thus chained us,
they placed us all in file, couple behind couple, and they passed a long thick chain
through these rings, so that we were thus all chained together. Our chain made a very long
file, for we were about four hundred."[8] The fatigue of walking was excessive, each having to carry about
fifty pounds weight of chains. One of their halting-places, the Chateau de la Tournelle,
he thus speaks: "It is a large dungeon, or rather spacious cellar, furnished with
huge beams of oak placed at the distance of about three feet apart. To these beams thick
iron chains are attached, one and a half feet in length, and two feet apart, and at the
end of these chains is an iron collar. When the wretched galley-slaves arrived in this
dungeon, they are made to lie half down, so that their heads may rest upon the beam; then
this collar is put round their necks, closed, and rivited on an anvil with heavy blows of
a hammer. And these chains with collars are about two feet apart, and as the beams are
generally about forty feet long, twenty men are chained to them in file. This cellar which
is round, is so large that in this way they can chain up as many as five hundred. There is
nothing so dreadful as to behold the attitudes and postures of these wretches there
chained. For a man so chained cannot lie down at full length, the beam upon which his head
is fixed being too high; neither can he sit, nor stand upright, the beam being too low. I
cannot better describe the posture of such a man than by saying he is half lying, half
sitting, – part of his body being upon the stones or flooring, the other part upon
this beam. The three days and three nights which we were obliged to pass in this cruel
situation so racked our bodies and all our limbs that we could not longer have survived it
– especially our poor old men, who cried out every moment that they were dying, and
that they had no more strength to endure this terrible torture."[9]
This dreadful journey was but the prelude to a more dreadful doom. Chained to a
bench of his galley, the poor prisoner remained there night and day, with felons for his
companions, and scarcely any clothing, scorched by the sun, frozen by the cold, or
drenched by the sea, and compelled to row at the utmost of his strength – and if,
being exhausted, he let the oar drop, he was sure to be visited with the bastinado. Such
were the sufferings amid which hundreds of Protestants of France wore out long years. It
was not till 1775, in the beginning of Louis XVI's reign that the galleys released their
two last Protestant prisoners, Antoine Rialle and Paul Archard.[10]
CHAPTER 7 Back to Top
THE "CHURCH OF THE DESERT."
Secessions – Rise of the "Church of the Desert" – Her Places of
Meeting – Her Worship – Pastors – Communion "Tokens" – Night
Assemblies – Simplicity yet Sublimity of her Worship – Renewed Persecutions
– War of the Camisards – Last Armed Struggle of French Protestantism – No
Voice – Bossuet – Antoine Court – The "Restorer of Protestantism"
– Death of Louis XIV – Theological Seminary at Lausanne – Paul Rabaut
– The Edict of Malesherbes – The Revolution.
IT seemed in very deed as if the once glorious Protestant
Church of France had fallen before the storm, and passed utterly from off the soil she had
but a century before covered with her goodly boughs. Her ministers banished, her churches
razed, her colleges closed, her sons driven into exile, and such of them as remained in
the land languishing in prison, or dragging out a life of wretched conformity to the
Romish Church – all public monument of French Protestantism had been swept away, and
the place that had known it once seemed fated to know it no more for ever.
A deep spiritual decay proved the forerunner of this sore judgment. An emasculated
Protestantism had taken the place of that grand Scriptural faith which had given such
breadth of view and elevation of soul to the fathers of the Huguenots. This cold belief,
so far from rallying new champions to the Protestant standard, could not even retain those
who were already around it. The nobles and great families were apostatizing; the ministers
were going over to Rome at the rate of a score or so year by year; and numbers of the
people had enlisted in the armies of Louis XIV, although they knew that they should have
to contend on the battle-field against their brethren in the faith, and that the king's
object in the war was to make France strong that it might be able to deal a fatal blow to
the Protestantism of Europe.[1] These
were symptomatic of a most melancholy decline at the heart of French Protestantism, and
now the axe was laid at the root of that tree which, had it been left standing in the
soil, would in a few years have died of utter rottenness.
The cutting down of the trunk was the saving of the life, for that moment shoots began to
spring forth from the old root. In the remote south, amid the mountains of Dauphine and
the Cevennes, after the first stunning effects of the blow had abated, the Reformed began
to look forth, and draw to one another;, and taking courage, they met in little companies
to celebrate their worship, or to partake of the Sacramental bread. Thus arose The
"Church of the Desert." These assemblies speedily increased from a dozen or
score of persons to hundreds, and from hundreds at last to thousands. They were ministered
to by men who had learned their theology in no school or college, nor had the hands of
presbyter been laid upon their head; on them had come only "the anointing of the Holy
Spirit." The assemblies they addressed met on the side of a mountain, or on some
lonely moor, or in a deserted quarry or gloomy cavern, or amid the great stems and
overshadowing branches of a forest. Intimation of the meeting was sent round only on the
evening before, and if any one had scandalized his brethren by immorality, he was omitted
in the invitation. It was the only ecclesiastical discipline which was administered.
Sentinels, stationed all round, on rocks or on hilltops, signaled to the worshippers below
the approach of the dragoons, indicating at the same time the quarter from which they were
advancing, that the people might know in what direction to flee. While the congregation
was assembling, worship was commenced by the singing of a psalm, the Hundredth being
commonly selected. The elders then read several chapters of the Bible. At this stage the
pastor, who had kept his place of concealment till now, made his appearance, attended by a
body-guard of young men, who escorted him to and from the place of meeting, and were
prepared to protect his flight should they be surprised by the soldiers. The sermon was
not to exceed an hour and a quarter in length. Such were the limits which the Synods of
the Church had fixed, with an obvious regard to the safety of the worshippers.
The "Church of the Desert" had been some time in existence before she had the
happiness of enjoying the ministry of her exiled pastors. A few returned, at the peril of
their lives, when they heard that their scattered flocks had begun to meet together for
the performance of worship. About 1730 a theological academy was established at Lausanne,
in Switzerland, and thence emanated all the Protestant pastors of France till the reign of
Napoleon. The same forms of worship were observed in the wilderness as in the city church
in former times. Public prayer formed an important part of the service, conducted either
by the ministers or, in their absence, by the elders. The prayers of the pastors were
commonly extemporaneous, whereas the elders usually availed themselves of the aid of a
liturgy. The Sacrament of the Lord's Supper was dispensed at Christmas, at Easter, and at
Pentecost, as well as at other times. The purity of the table was anxiously guarded. No
one was admitted to it till first he had signified his desire to an elder, and received
from him a little medal or "token."[2] These were made of lead, and roughly engraved, having on one side
all open Bible, with the rays of the sun, emblematic of the Spirit's light, illuminating
its page, and the motto, "Fear not, little flock;" and on the other, a shepherd
tending his sheep, or a Communion cup, and a cross, suggestive of persecution. The
communicant put down his "token" on the table, and the bread and cup were then
given to him. Often would it happen that those who had gone to mass would beg, with tears
in their eyes, admission to the table, but there they could not sit till they had given
ample proof of their Penitence.
These worshipping assemblies were usually convened at night, the more effectively to avoid
pursuit. When they met in a wood, as very often happened, they hung lamps on the boughs of
the trees, that they might see the passages of Scripture which were read, and the psalms
that were sung. Afterwards, when the congregations had swelled to thousands, they met
during day, selecting as their rendezvous the mountain-top, or some vast stretch of
solitary moor. Their worship, how simple in its outward forms, but in spirit how sublime,
and in its accessories how grand! the open vault above, the vast solitude around, the
psalm and prayer that rose to heaven amidst the deep stillness, the dangers that environed
the worshippers – all tended to give a reality and earnestness to the devotions, and
impart a moral dignity to the worship, compared with which the splendor of rite or of
architecture would have, been but desecration. The Protestant Church of France had
returned to her early days. It was now with her as when Calvin administered to her the
first Communion on the banks of the Claim This was her second birthday.
When the king and the Jesuits learned that the Protestants had begun again to perform
their worship, they broke out into a transport of wrath that was speedily quenched in
blood. More arrests, more dragoons, more sentences to the galleys, more scaffolds; such
were the means by which they sought to crush the "Church of the Desert."
Everywhere in Languedoc and Dauphine the troops were on the alert for the Reformed.
"It was a chase," as Voltaire has expressed it, "in a wide ring." The
Marquis de la Trousse, who commanded in the Cevennes, when he surprised a congregation,
made his soldiers fire into it as if it was a covey of game. The Protestants had no arms,
and could offer no resistance. They dropped on their knees, and raising their hands to
heaven, awaited death.
The truthful Antoine Court says that "he was furnished with an exact list of
assemblies massacred in different places, and that in some of these encounters from 300 to
400 old men, women, and children were left dead upon the spot."[3] But no violence could stop these
field-preachings. They grew ever larger in numbers, and ever more frequent in time, till
at last, we are assured, it was nothing uncommon, in traversing the mountain-side or the
forest where they had met, to find, at every four paces, dead bodies dotting the sward,
and corpses hanging suspended from the trees.
The outbreak of the Camisards came to diversify with new and even greater horrors this
terrible tragedy. Driven to desperation and stung to madness by the numberless cruelties,
injustices, and infamies of the Government, and permitting them. selves to be directed by
certain of their own number whom they regarded as prophets, the peasants of Vivarais and
Languedoc rose in arms against the royal troops. Ignorant of the art of war, and provided
only with such weapons as they took from their enemies, they lurked behind the bushes and
crags of their mountains, and sold their lives as dearly as they were able. They never
amounted to more than 10,000, but at times they held in check armies of double that
number.
Tiffs guerilla warfare lasted from 1702 to 1706, and was attended with frightful slaughter
on both sides. The Cevenols joined the Camisards, which enlarged the seat and intensified
the fury of the war. The court took the alarm, and more soldiers were poured into the
infected provinces. The more effectually to suppress the rising, the Romanist population
were removed into the cities, and the country was laid waste. And the work of devastation
not proceeding rapidly enough with the musket, the sword, and the axe, the faggot was
called in to expedite it; the dwellings of the peasantry were burned down, and the
district, so flourishing before the Revocation, was converted into one vast gloomy
wilderness. This was the last armed struggle of the Reformation in France. No noble or
pastor took part in it; it was waged for liberty rather than for religion, and though it
stained rather than honored the cause in the name of which it was waged, it emboldened the
Protestants, who from this time were treated somewhat less mercilessly, not because the
Government hated them less, but because it feared them more.
These atrocities were enacted upon no obscure stage, and in no dark age, but in the
brilliant era of Louis XIV. Science was then cultivated, letters flourished, the divines
of the court and of the capital were learned and eloquent men, and greatly affected the
graces of meekness and charity. We wait to hear these lights of their age exclaim against
the awful crimes of which France was the theater. Surely some voice will be lifted up.
Bossuet, "the Eagle of Meaux," has come to be credited with a
"charity" superior to his country, and which shone all the brighter from the
darkness that surrounded it. It would unspeakably delight one to find a name, otherwise so
brilliant, unstained by the oppressions and crimes of the period; but the facts brought to
light by M. M. Haag, in La France Protestante, completely disprove the truthfulness of the
panegyrics which the too partial biographers of the distinguished bishop have pronounced
upon his moderation. These show that Bossuet was not superior in this respect to his
contemporaries. In giving vigorous enforcement to the edicts of the king within his own
diocese, he but acted consistently with his avowed principles. "It behooves us to
give obedience to kings," said Bossuet, "as to Justice itself. They are gods,
and participate in a certain sense in the independence of God. No other than God can judge
their sentences or their persons."[4] This prepares us for the part he acted against the Protestants.
The Intendant who executed the law in his diocese, and who had orders to act according to
Bossuet's advice, condemned to death several Protestants of Nanteuil, and even the Abbe le
Dieu admits that the bishop demanded their condemnation. True, he demanded also their
pardon, but this "pardon" consisted in the commutation of the penalty of death
to the galleys for life. Further, it is certified by a letter of Frotte, a former canon of
St. Genevieve, and whom Bossuet himself describes as a very honest man, that the bishop
caused Protestants to be dragged from the villages of his diocese, cited them before him,
and with a military officer sitting by his side, summoned them to abjure their religion;
that he used to have children torn from their parents, wives from their husbands, and to
have dragoons quartered upon Calvinists to force them to abandon their faith. He asked for
lettres de cachet to be issued against the Crochards, father and son, at the very time
that the former was dying.[5] He
instigated a ruthless persecution of two children, the Mitals.[6] We find him too in the memoir addressed to the minister
Pontchartrain, which is published in the seventeenth volume of his works, demanding the
imprisonment of two orphans, the Demoiselles de Neuville, whose father was serving in the
army of William of Orange, thus punishing the children for the faults, as he deemed them,
of the parent. These facts, which are beyond dispute, completely overthrow the claim for
superior clemency and mildness which has been set up for the eloquent bishop.
To pursue the century year by year to its close would only be to repeat endlessly the same
tale of crime and blood; the facts appertaining to the progress of Protestantism in
France, from the war of the Camisards until the breaking out of the great Revolutions.
group themselves around two men – Antoine Court and Paul Rabaut. Antoine Court has
received from the French Reformed the well-earned title of "Restorer of
Protestantism."
He found the French Protestant Church at the close of the Camisard war at the last
extremity. She needed educated pastors, she needed public instruction, she needed order
and discipline, and above all a revival of piety; and he set about restoring the
Protestant Church as originally constructed by the first Synod at Paris in 1559. He was
then young, and his task was great, but he brought to it a sound judgment and admirable
prudence, an indefatigable zeal, and a bodily constitution that sustained itself under the
pressure of prodigious labors, and he succeeded in raising again the fallen edifice.
Commencing with assemblies of ten or a dozen, he saw around him before ending his career
congregations of eight and ten thousand. By his missionary tours he revived the all but
extinct knowledge and zeal of the Protestants. He re-organized the worshipping assembly;
he re-constituted the Consistory, the Colloquy, and the Synod; and he provided a race of
educated and pious pastors. He convoked a Synod (October 21st, 1715), the first which had
met since the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. At that moment Louis XIV lay dying in his
splendid palace of Versailles. History delights in contrasts, and we have here one that
will repay our attention. On the one side is the great monarch; his children dead; his
victories swept away; the commerce and industry of his kingdom ruined; many tracts lying
untilled; while his subjects, crushed under enormous taxes, and cursing the man whose wars
and pleasures had plunged his realm into millions of debt, waited gloomily till his
remains should be borne to the grave, that they might throw stones and mud at his coffin.
On the other side we behold a youth of nineteen laying anew the foundations and raising up
the walls of that Protestantism to commemorate the entire destruction of which Louis XIV
had caused so many medals to be struck, and a bronze statue to be erected.
Having re-constituted upon its original bases the Reformed Church of France, Antoine Court
in 1730 retired to Lausanne to preside over the seminary he had there founded, and which
continued for eighty years to send forth pastors and martyrs to France.[7] Paul Rabaut took his place as
nourisher of that Protestantism which Antoine Court had restored. The life of Rabaut was
full of labors and perils; but he had the satisfaction of seeing the Protestant Church
growing from day to day in spite of bloody arrets, and in defiance of the continued
operation, sometimes in greater and sometimes in less intensity, of the dragonnade, the
galleys, and the scaffold. As the result of continual journeyings, during which he seldom
slept more than two nights in the same hiding-place, he kept flowing the fountains that
his great predecessor had opened, and streams went forth to water the weary land. But
neither then nor since has the Protestant Church of France attained the glory of her
former days, when sovereigns and princes sat in her Synods, when great generals led her
armies, and learned theologians and eloquent preachers filled her pulpits. She continued
still to wear her chains. At length in 1787 came the Edict of Malesherbes, which merely
permitted the Protestants to register their births, marriages, and deaths; in other words,
recognized them as subjects, and permitted them to prosecute their professions and trades,
but still held them punishable for their religious opinions. At last, amid clouds of
seven-fold blackness, and the thunderings and lightnings of a righteous wrath, came the
great Revolution, which with one stroke of awful justice rent the fetters of the French
Protestants, and smote into the dust the throne which had so long oppressed them.
FOOTNOTES
VOLUME THIRD
BOOK TWENTY-SECOND
VOLUME THIRD- BOOK TWENTY-SECOND- CHAPTER 1
[1] See ante, vol. 2., p. 624.
[2] Felice, History of the Protestants of France, vol. 1., p. 309.
[3] Elie Benoit, Histoire de l'Edit de Nantes, tom. 2., p. 295. This is a work in five volumes, filled with the acts of violence and persecution which befell the Protestants from the reign of Henry IV to the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
[4] Felice, vol. 1., p. 315.
[5] Serres, Gen. Hist. of France, continued by Grimston, pp. 256, 257.
[6] Ibid. Young, Life of John Welsh, pp. 396, 397; Edin., 1866.
[7] Elie Benoit, tom. 2., p. 377.
VOLUME THIRD- BOOK TWENTY-SECOND- CHAPTER 2
[1] Felice, pp. 326, 327.
[2] Felice, p. 329.
VOLUME THIRD- BOOK TWENTY-SECOND- CHAPTER 3
[1] Weiss, History of the French Protestant Refugees, p. 26; Edin., 1854.
[2] Weiss, Hist. French Prot. Refugees, p. 34.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid., p. 35.
[5] Hall's Works, vol. 6., p. 878.
VOLUME THIRD- BOOK TWENTY-SECOND- CHAPTER 4
[1] Voltaire, Age of Louis XIV., vol. 1., p. 73; Glas., 1753.
[2] Agnew, Protestant Exiles from France in the Reign of Louis XIV., vol. 1., p. 94 (a work of great research).
[3] Elie Benoit, Histoire de L'Edit de Nantes, tom. 4., livr. 17., 18.; Delft, 1695.
VOLUME THIRD- BOOK TWENTY-SECOND- CHAPTER 5
[1] See Bulletin de la Societe de l'Histoire du Protestantisme Francais: Deuxieme annee; p. 167 et seq.; Paris, 1854.
[2] Weiss says the 22nd of October. It was probably signed on the 18th and published on the 22nd of October.
[3] Weiss, p. 72.
[4] The Archbishop of Dublin, Richard Chevenix Trench, is his great-grandson. The archbishop is descended by the mother's side from the family of Chevenix, and by the father's side from another Huguenot family, that of La Tranches.
[5] Elie Benoit, vol. 5., pp. 554, 953.
[6] Felice, vol. 2., p. 63. See also Bulletin de la Societe de l'Histoire du Protestantisme Francais: Premiere Annee; pp. 316, 535; Paris, 1853.
[7] Massillon's Funeral Oration on Louis XIV.
[8] This statue was melted in 1792, and cast into cannon, which thundered at Valmy. (Weiss, p. 93.) .
[9] We say three, although there are five, because two of the number axe obviously reproductions with slight variations in the design.
VOLUME THIRD- BOOK TWENTY-SECOND- CHAPTER 6
[1] Felice, vol. 2., p. 79.
[2] Ibid., vol 2, p. 78
[3] John Quick, Synodicon in Gallia Reformata, pp. 130, 131; Lond., 1692.
[4] History of the Sufferings of M. Louis de Marolles; the Hague, 1699. See also Admiral Baudin's letter to the President of the Society of the History of French Protestantism – Bulletin for June and July, 1852.
[5] Situated on the rocky isle that fronts the harbor of Marseilles.
[6] Published by him every fortnight after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
[7] Felice, vol. 2., p. 87.
[8] Autobiography of a French Protestant condemned to the Galleys for the sake of his Religion (transl. from the French), p. 209. This work was written by Jean Marteilhe, who passed some years in the French galleys. It was translated by Oliver Goldsmith, first published at Rotterdam in 1757, and has since been re-published by the Religious Tract Society, London. See also Elie Benoit, bk. 24.
[9] Autobiography of a French Protestant, etc., pp. 203, 204.
[10] Bulletin de la Societe de l'Histoire du Protestantisme Francais, pp. 176, 320; Paris, 1853.
VOLUME THIRD- BOOK TWENTY-SECOND- CHAPTER 7
[1] Weiss – Bulletin de la Societe de l'Histoire du Protestantisme Francais, pp. 231-234; Paris, 1853.
[2] These medals or "tokens" are engraved on page 324. See Bulletin de la Societe de l'Histoire du Protestantisme Francais, p. 13; Paris, 1854.
[3] Felice, vol. 2., p. 82.
[4] Politique Tiree de l'Ecriture Sainte, livr. 4., art. 1., prop. 2.
[5] Bulletin de la Societe de l'Histoire du Protestantisme Francais, vol. 4.
[6] Ibid., vol. 10. p. 50.
[7] Weiss, in his History of the Refugees, says that more than 700 pastors emanated from this famous school. M. Coquerel, in his History of the Churches of the Desert, reduces the number to 100. The most reasonable calculation would not give less than 450, among whom were Alphonse Turretin and Abraham Ruchat, the historian of the Reformation in Switzerland.