BOOK IV.

FROM THE REVOCATION OF THE EDICT OF NANTES UNTIL THE EDICT OF

TOLERATION.

(1685-1787.)

I.

Two opposite influences divided this period: the traditional spirit

of persecution, which still excited cruel violence and frightful

executions during the latter half of the eighteenth century; and

the new spirit of toleration, which, passing from the conscience of

men of worth into the writings of philosophers, from these writings

into the convictions of the intelligent classes, from these classes

into the legislature and councils of the king, at length acquired

an irresistible authority, and compelled even the priesthood to bow

before maxims more true, more moral, more Christian than their own.

When he affixed the seal of the state to the Edict of Revocation, the

Chancellor Letellier pronounced, with accents of joy and triumph, the

_Nunc dimittis_ of Simeon. He, and Louis XIV. with him, believed that

the Edict would be a final stroke [of policy]. It was then, on the

contrary, that the whole strife again began.

So long as the Reformed had had anything to lose, were it only a

shadow of their ancient liberty, were it only the empty name of the

Edict of Henry IV., the majority had confined themselves to the limit

of petitions and complaints. They always trusted that the sacredness

of the law, justice, and humanity, would reappear in the heart of

the monarch, and they carried their resignation to such an extent,

as to originate the proverbial saying: “a Huguenot’s patience.” But

everything—absolutely everything, was lost; they consulted no longer

aught than what they owed to their conscience and their outraged

faith; and by the persevering resolution to brave the most barbarous

edicts at the cost of exile, the galleys, and death, they ended by

wearying the very ferocity of their executioners.

A solemn lesson springs out of the epoch on which we are about to

enter. It is easier to make martyrs than apostates; and the violence

of the sword, unless there be total extermination (an impossibility

in the reign of Louis XIV.), is broken by the power of thought.

The act of Revocation was rigorously executed against the pastors.

The letter of the edict, which accorded fifteen days’ delay for

departure, was overstepped. Claude received an order to quit [the

country] within twenty-four hours, and “_the man of sedition_,” as

Madame de Maintenon called him, was accompanied by one of the king’s

servants, who never lost sight of him for an instant. The other

pastors of Paris obtained two days for their preparations. Those

of the provinces had a little more time extended to them, but by a

complete denial of human and social rights, their children, under the

age of seven years, were taken away from them. Some were even forced

to abandon infants, which their mothers were nursing, and started on

the road of banishment with wives, whose grievous woe scarcely left

them strength to accept their support.

It had been calculated that many of the pastors would abjure; there

were, however, but very few recantations; for even those ministers,

who had yielded in the first movement of stupor and fear, almost all

returned to their ancient faith. Old men of eighty and ninety years

of age were seen bent on devoting the few remaining days of their

life to distant journeys, and more than one died before he could

reach an asylum where he might rest his wayworn feet and aching head.

The arrival of these pastors produced an inexpressible sensation

in the foreign countries to which they went. On all sides people

hastened, with indignant and pitying hearts, and tearful eyes,

to salute these venerable confessors of the Gospel, who, leaning

on their traveller’s staff, came ahungered and in rags, weeping

for their children and their flocks, left in the hands of the

persecutors, to sit beside the hearth of hospitality. A loud and

fearful cry rose throughout all Protestant Christendom against Louis

XIV., and even the (Roman) Catholics of those lands felt the flush of

burning shame mantle upon their foreheads as they thought of their

dishonoured church.

The faithful followed their leaders in crowds. It was in vain that

laws, increasing in cruelty, condemned the men who tried to flee

from their native soil, to perpetual imprisonment at the galleys,

the women to seclusion for life, and both to forfeiture of goods; it

was in vain they sentenced those to the same penalties, and shortly

afterwards to death, who gave them assistance; it was in vain that a

part of the victims’ spoils were promised to the informer. Emigration

spread from province to province, and foiled the despotism of Louis.

We cannot in our times form any conception of such cruel laws; for,

in short, if the king would endure but one religion in France, he

ought at least to have sanctioned the departure from the realm, of

those who were not, or refused to be, of it. This is so elementary

a principle of natural justice, that even the Spanish Inquisition

and the League had always permitted a choice between banishment and

abjuration. Louis XIV. by an unheard-of abuse of power, would not

permit it. He regarded his compromised _glory_ alone, and did not see

that no one compromised it so much as he did himself.

The language of these ordinances is as inconceivable as their

grounds. Words assumed a monstrous meaning. Thus, we read that flight

to foreign parts became “_criminal disobedience_,” as if it were a

crime to abandon everything rather than deny one’s faith! Again, we

read that the fugitives were guilty of ingratitude for not having

profited by the permission to return to France, as if there had not

been imposed as the absolute condition of their return, the necessity

of rebelling against the God of their conscience. To such a depth did

Louis descend under the twofold prompting of his pride and Father La

Chaise!

Guards were placed at the entrance of the towns, at river-ferries,

in the ports, on the bridges, the highways, at every avenue leading

to the frontiers, and thousands of peasants joined the troops posted

from distance to distance, that they might earn the reward promised

to those who stopped the fugitives. Everything failed. The emigrants

purchased passports, which were sold to them by the very secretaries

of the governors, or by the clerks of the ministers of state. They

bought over the sentinels with money, giving as much as six thousand

and even eight thousand livres as the price of escape. Some, more

daring, fought their way across the frontiers, sword in hand.

The majority marched at night, by remote and solitary paths,

concealing themselves in caverns during the day. They had

_itineraries_ prepared expressly for this kind of travelling. They

went down precipices, or climbed mountain-heights, and assumed all

sorts of disguises. Shepherds, pilgrims, soldiers, huntsmen, valets,

merchants, mendicants: they were always fugitives. Many, to avoid

suspicion, pretended to sell chaplets and rosaries.

The eyewitness Bénoit has given us a minute account:—“Women of

quality, even sixty and seventy years of age, who had, so to

speak, never placed a foot upon the ground except to cross their

apartments, or to stroll in an avenue, travelled a hundred leagues

to some village, which had been indicated by a guide. Girls of

fifteen, of every rank, exposed themselves to the same hazard. They

drew wheelbarrows, they bore manure, panniers, and other burdens.

They disfigured their faces with dyes, to embrown their complexion,

with ointments or juices that blistered their skin, and gave

them a wrinkled aspect. Women and girls were seen to counterfeit

sickness, dumbness, and even insanity. Some went disguised as men;

and some, too delicate and small to pass as grown men, donned the

dress of lackeys, and followed on foot, through the mud, a guide on

horseback, who assumed the character of a man of importance. Many

of these females reached Rotterdam in their borrowed garments, and

hastening to the foot of the pulpit, before they had time to assume

a more decent garb, published their repentance of their compulsory

signature.”[98]

The sea facilitated the evasion of a host of the Reformed. They

hid themselves in bales of merchandise, in casks, under heaps of

charcoal. They huddled together in holes in the ship’s hold, and

there were children who passed whole weeks in these insupportable

hiding-places without uttering a cry that might betray them.

Sometimes the peril of an open boat was hazarded without a mouthful

of provisions, the preparation of which might have prevented the

flight of the fugitives, who thus put to sea with only a little water

or snow, with which mothers moistened the lips of their babes.

Thousands of emigrants perished of fatigue, cold, hunger, or

shipwreck, and by the bullets of the soldiery. Thousands of others

were captured, chained to murderers, dragged across the kingdom

to inspire their brethren with greater fear, and were condemned

to labour at the oar on board convict vessels. The galleys of

Marseilles were filled with these unfortunates, among whom were

ancient magistrates, officers, people of gentle blood, and old men.

The women were crowded into the convents and the tower of Constance,

at Aigues-Mortes. But neither threats, nor dangers, nor executions,

could prevail against the energy and heroic perseverance of an

oppressed conscience.

The court became alarmed at the depopulation of the country and the

ruin of industry. It thought that it was less a matter of faith

that excited the French to flee from France, than the attraction of

danger, and one day it therefore threw open all the outlets from

the country. The next day, finding that the emigration had only

multiplied, it closed them.

Touched by so great and so noble a misfortune, foreign nations

rivalled each other in the display of their sympathy for the

refugees. England, Switzerland, Holland, Prussia, Denmark, Sweden,

generously met their first wants, and it never appeared more clearly,

according to the remark of a contemporary, that the fountain of

charity is inexhaustible. The more there was given, the more it

seemed necessary to give. Private individuals contended with their

governments in the distribution of relief. The fugitives were

received with open arms: they were furnished with the means of

work, with houses, and even churches; and they repaid this liberal

hospitality by the example of their faith, a life of probity, and

an industrious activity that enriched their adopted countries. “The

French Protestants carried to England,” says Lemontey, “the secret

and use of the valuable machinery which has been the foundation of

her prodigious fortune, while the just complaint of these exiles

cemented the avenging league of Augsburg.”[99]

It is difficult to fix the number of the refugees precisely. The

figures indicated by Vauban have been already noticed. An intendant

of Saintonge wrote, in 1698, that his province had lost a hundred

thousand Reformers. Languedoc had lost from forty to fifty thousand

before the war of the Camisards,[100] and Guienne at least as many.

The emigration was proportion ably greater still in the Lyonnese

and Dauphiny, on account of their proximity to the frontiers.

Whole villages were abandoned, and many towns were half deserted.

Manufactories were closed by hundreds; certain branches of industry

entirely disappeared, and a vast extent of land went altogether out

of cultivation.

Voltaire says, that in the space of three years, nearly fifty

thousand families quitted the kingdom, and were followed by hosts

of others. A pastor of the wilderness, Antoine Court, estimates the

number at eight hundred thousand persons. Sismondi reckons that if

the lowest numbers be taken, there remained in France somewhat more

than a million of Reformed, and that from three to four hundred

thousand established themselves in other countries. M. Capefigue,

a writer hostile to the Reformation, who consulted the population

tables of the general districts, calculates the emigration at two

hundred and twenty-five or two hundred and thirty thousand souls,

namely, one thousand five hundred and eighty ministers, two thousand

three hundred elders, fifteen thousand gentlemen, and the remainder

consisting almost entirely of traders and artisans. It is worthy of

remark that the intendants made these returns in the first years of

the Revocation, and that they were interested in showing the number

of the emigrants to be as small as possible, in order to avoid the

reproach of negligence.[101]

It appears probable that from the years 1669 to 1760, emigration,

which was more than once renewed and suspended, according to the

alternatives of persecution and repose, drove out of France, without

counting those who returned at the end of a few years, four or

five hundred thousand persons, who generally belonged to the most

enlightened, the most industrious, and the most moral portion of the

nation.

Thirteen hundred refugees passed through Geneva in one week. England

formed eleven regiments of French volunteers, and twenty-two French

churches rose in London. An entire suburb of that metropolis was

peopled by refugees. Holland won back by the emigration more than she

had been deprived of by the invasions of Louis XIV., and colonies of

Huguenots were founded even in North America, and at the Cape of Good

Hope. The name of these and their children has survived everywhere

with honour.

This emigration has been sometimes compared with that of the year

1792; but the difference is much greater than the resemblance. The

emigrants of the Revolution had only lost aristocratic privileges;

the refugees of the Revocation had been despoiled of their very means

of religious and civil existence. The first, at least those who

emigrated at the beginning, left their country, because they would

not accept the common law of equal rights; the latter, because they

were deprived of that common law. The emigration of 1792 was composed

of only one class of individuals, who had no other profession than

that of arms; the emigration of 1685 comprised all the constituent

elements of a people—merchants, manufacturers, mechanics, labourers.

Moreover, the refugees founded numerous and useful establishments, of

which many yet still remain, while the later emigrants have nowhere

left enduring traces of their passage.

It is equally difficult to calculate the number of emigrants, who

perished in the attempts to escape, in party fights, in prison, on

the scaffold, and at the galleys, from the Edict of Revocation to the

Edict of Toleration of Louis XVI. Sismondi thinks that the number

of those who perished is equal to that of the emigrants; that is to

say, according to his calculations, three or four hundred thousand.

This amount would seem to be too high. Yet Boulainvillers assures

us that, under the intendancy of Lamoignon de Bâville, in the single

province of Languedoc, a hundred thousand persons fell victims to a

premature death, and that a tenth perished by fire, strangulation, or

the wheel. Probably a hundred thousand should be added for the rest

of the kingdom in the eighteenth century. Thus two hundred thousand

Frenchmen were sacrificed after an edict of pacification, which had

lasted nearly ninety years! Such were the new and bloody hecatombs,

that were immolated upon the altars of intolerance!

II.

The Protestants—we may now employ this name, as its use became

general even in ecclesiastical documents—the Protestants, who had

remained in the kingdom, were still the prey of the _dragonnades_,

after the Edict of Revocation, each time they endeavoured to raise

themselves. Those of the principality of Orange and the Messin

country, who had hoped to find in their privileged position a

guarantee against violence, were compelled to submit to that [which

had been inflicted upon others]. The Lutherans of Alsace alone

were spared, on account of their numbers and the recent diplomatic

conventions, which protected them.

At Paris, some little moderation was observed, for fear of

disturbing, as we have already remarked, the _fêtes_ and the repose

of Louis. Nevertheless, four days after the Revocation, the place

of worship at Charenton was demolished to the last stone, and the

members of the flock were ordered to join the religion of the king

without delay.

As they showed no alacrity in obeying, the principal elders were

imprisoned by means of _lettres de cachet_. Next, the Marquis de

Seignelay summoned a hundred of the Notables to his mansion, and

desired them, in the presence of the procurator-general and the

lieutenant of police La Reynie, immediately to sign an act of union.

On several exclaiming against this brutal conduct, the doors were

immediately shut, and they were told with vehement threats that they

would not be permitted to return until they had signed—an unworthy

ambush, an act of violence and extortion more characteristic of a

bandit of Calabria, than of a secretary of state, and the grandson of

the great Colbert.

All the Protestants of France were required, according to the terms

of the edict, to send their children to (Roman) Catholic schools, and

to have them taught the (Roman) Catholic catechism. A new ordinance

directed that the children, from five to six years old, of those who

were suspected of still adhering to the Reformed religion, should be

taken away from them and confided to (Roman) Catholic relations, or

be placed elsewhere. But this measure overstepped the possibility of

execution. There were not sufficient colleges, convents, or hospitals

in France to hold so many victims. The administrators of the laws

were obliged to confine themselves to the children of the rich, who

could afford to pay an alimentary pension, and in particular to girls

of tender age. This detestable kidnapping continued during a great

part of the century, and many families still preserve a painful

remembrance of the losses they experienced by such abductions.

War was declared against books as well as individuals. The district

commanders received orders to visit the houses of the Reformed with

the index of the archbishop of Paris, already mentioned, and to seize

all suspected writings. These domiciliary visits, which were repeated

at intervals, have destroyed to the very last copy, a great number of

previous works. The Bible even, was especially confiscated and burned

with implacable hatred.

The priests were not able to give regular instruction to this

multitude of pretended converts. Capuchin friars and the like were

employed, who were gross, impudent, unlettered, and, in many cases,

most immoral men. They filled the Protestants with disgust and

contempt. Children stopped their mouths with their objections, and

persons of mature age imbibed a deeper aversion for a church that

employed ministers of such a character.

Recourse was had to new measures of rigour to drag from the reluctant

acts of Catholicity. The curates made a roll-call of “_the re-united

brethren_” who were placed upon benches apart from the true

Catholics; and those who were so unfortunate as not to be present at

the service, or the communion, were exposed to severe punishment.

The military supported this inquisition to the utmost, and some

intendants, who were desirous of avoiding restitution of the property

of which the Reformers had been deprived, established an inspector

in each parish, whose business it was to examine whether the new

converts went regularly to mass, how they behaved there, whether

they attended the Paschal communion, and faithfully observed the

commandments of the Church. The _régime_, in fine, of the ninth and

tenth centuries was restored, and Frenchmen were treated in the same

manner as the savages of Paraguay had been by the Jesuits. The king

perceived that matters had been carried too far, and secretly wrote

to the intendants not to interfere any further to such an extent in

the transactions of private life.

In spite of the rigour of the laws, and in some manner owing to that

very rigour, Protestants reappeared on all sides. Full of horror with

respect to (Roman) Catholicism, they had feigned to embrace it under

the sabres of the dragoons, and cursing the law which, by an infamous

sacrilege, compelled them to receive the communion in the Church of

Rome, although they did not believe in its dogmas,—shame, remorse,

the desire of expiating the error they had committed, all served

to reanimate their energy. They held meetings in the wilds, on the

summit of mountains, in deep ravines, and vowed, in the name of God,

to live and die in the Reformed faith.

This opposition particularly manifested itself in Lower Languedoc,

Vivarais, and Cevennes, which abounded in retreats almost

inaccessible to the soldier. The principal events of our history are

henceforth concentrated in those provinces. At the commencement of

the French Reformation, the provinces around Paris took the first

rank. Then came the turn of Béarn, Poitou, Guienne, and Saintonge.

Next the Reformation was apparent only in the mountain-heights of

Languedoc. The other provinces of the south followed the movement,

but at a later period and with less lustre. The centre, the west, and

the north long confined themselves to the silence of domestic worship.

It will be observed also that the meetings of the Protestants at the

end of the seventeenth century, and the opening of the eighteenth,

presented a striking feature of resemblance to those of the first

days of Farel and Calvin; for they comprised scarcely any but the

poor, and people of low degree. The peasantry of Cevennes united with

the artisans of Meaux; but the nobles, and the rich inhabitants, had

abjured, or sought an asylum in foreign lands, and nearly all those

who had neither fallen nor fled, secluded themselves from the rest.

From 1559 to 1685 the French Reformation reckoned great families,

who perhaps brought with them less religious vitality than political

passions; after the Revocation, it again recruited itself from the

popular masses, and gathered there a strength, a devotion, and a

constancy, to which it had for some time been a stranger.

Upon the news of these meetings, some of the pastors returned to

France; and as they were not numerous enough for the task, they took

assistants with them, who received the name of _preachers_. These

were labourers, workmen, and shepherds, who without other preparation

than their fervid zeal, rose in the meetings, and addressed pious

exhortations to the audience, out of the abundance of their hearts.

Some disorder of belief and conduct flowed from this, of which we

shall have to speak.

Learning that the pretended converts were again beginning to

celebrate their worship, the anger of the king, of his ministers,

and of the Jesuits, was kindled to an excess of fury that knew no

bounds. It was a phrenzy. The punishment of death was pronounced,

in the month of July, 1686, against the pastors who had returned

to France; the infliction of perpetual confinement in the galleys,

against those who afforded them help, an asylum, or assistance of any

kind; a reward of five thousand five hundred livres was promised to

whoever should take a minister, or cause him to be taken; lastly, the

punishment of death was pronounced against those who were discovered

at a meeting. One is tempted to ask if such laws could have issued

from the polished court of Louis XIV., that would have disgraced a

race of cannibals.

On all sides the soldiers flew to the occupation of tracking the

Reformers. It was, according to Voltaire’s expression, “a hunt in

a great enclosure.” The Marquis de la Trousse, nephew of Madame de

Sévigné, who commanded in Cevennes, scoured and beat the country

continually with his troops. When he heard the Protestants praying,

or chanting psalms, he made his soldiers fire upon them, as if

they were wild beasts. Yet these poor people were unarmed; they

did not defend themselves; and if they could not escape by flight,

they awaited death upon their knees, raising their hands to heaven,

or embracing each other. The veracious and honest pastor, Antoine

Court, says that “he was furnished with an exact list of the meetings

massacred in different places, and that there were encounters in

which three or four hundred persons, old men, women, and children,

remained dead on the spot.”

In the times of the Albigenses, or of the slaughters of Mérindol, an

end would have been put to these meetings by an universal butchery,

in which not even the infant at the domestic hearth would have been

spared.

In the time of Louis XIV. manners had already become less barbarous

than the laws; the arm of the smiter was partially arrested, and

after sanguinary effusions, compelled to stay.

This was not the only retrograde step. When the Reformers were on

their death-bed, fearing no longer the punishments of men, and

awaiting the judgment of God, they refused to receive the sacraments

of the [Roman Catholic] church. The result of this was [the

promulgation of] a fresh law, not less atrocious than the preceding,

but which it was impossible to carry into execution for any great

length of time. Perpetual confinement at the galleys, or imprisonment

for life, with confiscation of property, was decreed against the

sick, who should recover after having rejected the _viaticum_; and

against those who should die, in the same refusal, vengeance upon

their corpses, which were doomed to be drawn upon hurdles, and then

flung into the common sewers.

Rulhières says that to obtain the signature of Louis to this law, he

was persuaded that it was simply one of commination. However, it was

applied in some places by the priests and the dregs of the populace,

and the soil of France was polluted by these hideous sights.

Some moribund Protestants themselves caused the priests to be

summoned to their bedside, in order that they might declare their

rejection of the sacraments of the Church, because they saw in

this an act of reparation before God and man. Then their corpses,

or their mangled members, were dragged through the streets along

the gutters, amidst the execrations of a drunken mob; so horrible

was such a spectacle at Calais, that an executioner fled to avoid

participating in it, and nothing but the fear of death could induce

him to return. Elsewhere, the Protestants themselves were forced to

drag the bodies of their brethren. When one of them fell fainting to

the ground, and was killed by the soldiers, he was thrown upon the

same hurdle. Guards were placed about the corpses to prevent their

being carried off by relations and buried in secret.

This was outstepping anew the limit of possibility in the reign of

Louis XIV. All respectable people, (Roman) Catholics as well as

Reformed, raised a shout of horror; and although the law was not

formally repealed, the intendants were ordered not to execute it

except in extreme cases. The secretary of state for ecclesiastical

affairs wrote to them, on the 6th of February, 1687, that his majesty

released them in some degree from the execution of this ordinance.

“With regard to those,” he said, “who, when dying, make similar

declarations (the refusal of the sacraments) through a mere motive of

obstinacy, and whose relations disapprove of such rejection, it will

be well not to raise the question and not to prosecute. Therefore,

his majesty thinks fit that you should inform the ecclesiastics that

they are, on these occasions, enjoined not to summon so readily

judges as witnesses, in order that it may not be necessary to execute

the declaration in its fullest extent.” This applied to the curates,

who, _viaticum_ in hand, went to the houses of the heretics, escorted

by judges and ushers, in order to inflame the passions of the

populace.

Thus difficulties sprang up at the very moment when it was expected

that they had all been overcome. There was only one course to take,

since it was no longer possible to butcher a million of Frenchmen:

this was to retrace the steps that had been taken; but the court had

not the courage to do this, in spite of the advice of Vauban, who,

from the year 1686, had dared to pronounce the word _retractation_,

and it floated between the impossibility of overcoming and the shame

of acknowledging its error.

The prisons were overflowed; the galleys choked; and as there were

no means of lodging so many convicts, a great number were transported

to America, where they nearly all miserably perished. Among those

who remained in the convict vessels, or were condemned to capital

punishment, many displayed great examples of fidelity and resolution.

Jurieu enumerated these instances in his _Pastoral Letters_,

published every fortnight, immediately after the Revocation. We will

extract only one or two.

A retired captain of the merchant service, Elie Neau, had been sent

to the hulks of Marseilles for having attempted to fly his country.

There he became a missionary and preacher. He exhorted his brethren,

consoled them, and set them an example of patience and virtue. “I do

not,” he wrote to his pastor, a refugee in Holland, “I do not wish

any evil to those who have placed me in fetters. On the contrary,

while they thought they did me harm, they have in reality done me

much good; for I understand now that true freedom consists in being

liberated from sin.”

The (Roman) Catholic almoner, seeing that he strengthened his

companions in misery, styled him a plague-spot and a poisoner, and

even protested that he would not say mass while this man remained

on the galley. Elie Neau was therefore shut up in a dungeon of the

citadel in 1694.

He remained there for several years, deprived of light, air, and

frequently of food, covered with a sack, a convict cap placed upon

his head, and deprived of all books, even (Roman) Catholic books, and

yet he wrote to his pastor: “If I told you that in place of the sun,

the light of nature, the sun of grace shines with its divine rays in

our hearts (he had two companions in his dungeon)!... It is true that

we have many sad moments, which are terrible to the flesh; but God is

always near, to impose silence upon us, and to soften the bitterness

by His infinite goodness.”

Elie Neau was restored to liberty with other victims of the

Protestant faith, through the intervention of the king of England. It

will be remembered that France had already suffered a like disgrace

in the reign of Henry II.[102]

The preachers and the pastors were doomed to certain death. There was

no chance of pardon or pity for them. The first who was led to the

gallows was a young man of Nismes, named Fulcran Rey. He had just

completed his theological studies, and had not yet received pastoral

ordination. He began, however, to preach, “convinced,” says Jurieu,

“that when the house is on fire, it is the duty of every one to aid

in extinguishing the flames.” Rey had taken the precaution to write a

farewell letter to his father, knowing that he would not long escape

the persecutors. He was, in effect, sold by some wretch, and arrested

in the town of Anduze.

Promises and threats were simultaneously used to induce him to change

his religion. The priests, the judges, and the intendants, held out

to him the most signal favours if he would abjure, and a frightful

death if he refused. His steadfastness was unbroken; Rey had welcomed

martyrdom beforehand. He only asked one thing, and that was that he

might not see his father and mother, the sight of whom he feared

would unnerve him.

When the sentence was read to him that condemned him to be hanged,

after the torture, he said, “I am treated more mildly than my

Saviour, by being sentenced to so mild a death. I had prepared myself

to be broken upon the wheel or burned.” Then raising his eyes to

heaven, he thanked the Almighty.

On his way to the gallows, he met many who had abjured, and seeing

them bathed in tears, he addressed fraternal exhortations to them.

He would also have confessed his faith from the scaffold: “But a

sermon,” says Jurieu, “from such a pulpit and by such a preacher,

was too formidable, and a number of drummers had been placed round

the gibbet, who were ordered to commence beating their drums all

together.” Fulcran Rey perished at Beaucaire, the 7th of July, 1686,

at the age of twenty-four years.

Astonishing vicissitude of human affairs! Who would have said to

Louis XIV. that the grandson of his child, a king of France, would

also have his voice drowned by drummers in like manner around his

scaffold? O princes, be mindful how you accustom your subjects to the

sight of sanguinary executions! You are but men yourselves, and the

day of misfortune may overtake you likewise!

Claude Brousson was the most renowned of the martyrs of this era,

and has left the deepest traces of admiration and commiseration in

the memory of the Protestant people. He was born at Nismes in 1647,

and practised at the bar of Castres and Toulouse. So long as he could

defend the cause of the oppressed churches before the tribunal,

he was desirous of no other avocation; but when he was no longer

permitted to plead, he devoted his oratorical powers to preaching. He

had been offered in vain the place of a counsellor of Parliament, if

he would change his religion; but the conscience of Claude Brousson

was one of those that could not be bought.

He was ordained to the ministry at Cevennes, amidst the sound of

grape-shot, that spread death amongst the ranks of his brethren; and

thenceforth, with no other shelter than savage rocks, the woods, or

some isolated hut, he unceasingly preached the word of the Gospel.

When he was too closely surrounded, he quitted France; but he

afterwards returned, at the call of his soul and the wailings of the

people. His wife and friends constantly besought him not to hazard

his life, but they could not restrain him.

In 1693 a price was set upon his head, and five hundred livres were

promised to whoever should deliver him up dead or alive. Brousson’s

only reply to this atrocious proclamation was a calm and simple

apology, addressed to the intendant of the province.

His sermons, which appeared at Amsterdam, in 1695, under the title of

_The Mystic Manna of the Desert_, are replete with the same feeling.

It might be expected that discourses composed under a forest oak, or

upon the rock beside a torrent, by one proscribed, and pronounced

in meetings that ofttimes terminated in fearful massacres, would be

impressed with a dark and vehement exaggerated. Yet there is nothing

of this in the _Mystic Manna_. The language of this preacher was more

moderate and more gladsome than that of Saurin in the peaceful church

of the Hague; he only saw in persecution the hand of God, and his

words were only burning when he censured his hearers.

Claude Brousson was at length captured at Oléron, in Béarn, in the

year 1698, and transferred to Montpellier. He might have escaped at

the passage of the canal of Languedoc; but believing that his hour

was come, he did not. In his interrogatory he accepted, without

any opposition, the accusations respecting his exercising the

ministerial office, but he denied in the most energetic terms a

reproach which was absolutely false, that he had ever conspired to

introduce Marshal Schomberg into France at the head of a foreign army.

On the 4th of November he was led to the scaffold, and his voice was

stifled by the rolling of eighteen drums. “I have executed more than

two hundred condemned,” said the hangman some days after, “but no

one made me tremble so much as M. Brousson. When he was put to the

torture, the commissioner and the judges turned pale and trembled

more than he did, who raising his eyes, prayed to God. I would have

fled, had I been able, rather than have put so honest a man to death.

If I dared speak, I could say many things about him; certainly, he

died like a saint.”

III.

Generous protestations were speedily raised as soon as it became

generally known what evils had followed upon the Revocation of the

edict, and to what extremities the council was reduced in order to

maintain the delusive fiction of the unity of faith in the kingdom.

The Jansenists must be first mentioned. They declared that their

blood curdled at the thought of the sacrilegious communions forced

upon the heretics, and rejected as a monstrous offence against the

Deity himself, a proselytism only successful under the terror of

dragoons, the galleys, and gibbets.

The bishops of Grenoble and Saint-Pons deserve an honourable mention.

The former addressed a letter condemnatory of the forced communions

to the curates of his diocese. The latter wrote to the commander

of the troops, that all compulsion in such a matter was impious.

“It is,” he said, “veritable sacrilege. And it could be wished that

the unhappy wretches who are guilty of these abominations, and

the ministers of the altar who are the instruments of them, were

cast into the sea, according to the words of the Scripture, with a

millstone about their necks; for they not only confirm the Huguenots

in their unbelief, but they also shake the thereby wavering faith of

the Catholics.”

Many honest and pious curates, moreover, refused to discharge the

office of informers, and to torture until the actual moment of death,

the souls that declined their ministry. But the Jesuits and the great

body of the clergy persisted in urging and employing measures of

severity. Fénélon wrote from Saintonge in 1686, “The Jesuits here are

a set of obstinates, who have no other words for the Protestants than

fines and imprisonment in this world, and the devil and hell in the

next. We have had infinite trouble to stop these good fathers from

bursting into violent exclamations against our mildness.”

It is at first sight a singular thing, to see on one side the Jesuits

so notorious for their equivocal piety, for their accommodative

morality, the inventors of _easy devotion_, soliciting the most

violent measures against the Protestants; and, on the other side, the

Jansenists, so rigid in their articles of faith, and so austere in

their practice, insisting upon a moderate course. But surprise ceases

when we reflect that the former sought only for power, the latter

were chiefly solicitous for sincerity. The first were contented with

(Roman) Catholics of any kind, provided they bent their necks to the

yoke of the Church; the second wanted none but true Catholics, and

would not take them at the hands of soldiers and hangmen.

The nomination of M. de Noailles (afterwards a cardinal), to the

see of Paris, gave some strength to the Jansenist party, who had

never been completely banished from the court or the councils. The

archbishop presented a memorial to the king, in which he exhorted him

to adopt measures more conformable with Christianity. He was seconded

by many persons of importance, who had studied the political side

of the question with attention. The superintendent Pontchartrain

regretted the loss of so many artisans and industrious citizens.

The Marquis d’Aguesseau, the Duke de Beauvilliers, the Marquis de

Pompone, and the Marshal Catinat, avowed the same opinions. They were

above all struck with the progress of public poverty. They saw with

affright that the force of destruction had at that epoch infinitely

surpassed the power of production, and that the finances of the state

were in a deplorable condition.

Vauban wrote the following lines to Louvois, which prove that the

Revocation was not so popular with the enlightened classes as was

pretended. “The forced conversions have inspired a general horror

of the conduct of the ecclesiastics. If it is to be pursued, the

necessity arises of exterminating the pretended new converts as

rebels, or of banishing them as relapsed, or of confining them as

madmen;—execrable projects, contrary to all the Christian virtues,

moral and civil!”

Even the timid Racine himself raised his voice, in the tragedy of

Esther, represented in 1689. “The choice of the subject,” says one

of the commentators of this great poet, “permitted the strongest

allusions. At the very moment when the Protestants were persecuted,

the poet dared to make known the true maxims of the Gospel. He

defended the oppressed in the presence of the royal oppressor.

Lastly, he painted Louvois in the most odious light; and that there

might be no possibility of his not being recognised, he put in the

mouth of Haman the very words which had escaped from the minister in

the delirium of his pride.”[103]

Fénélon prepared a memoir of remarkable boldness for the perusal of

Louis XIV. This composition, which was for a long time unknown, was

first published in 1825. In it the archbishop of Cambray represents

Father La Chaise as a man of a gross and limited mind, afraid of

sound virtue, loving only profane and libertine people, nourishing

the king’s ignorance, and as _a blind man leading another_. He

reproaches Louis himself in terms more severe than any we have used

towards him in this history: “You do not love God,” Fénélon thus

addresses him; “you only fear Him with the fear of a slave; it is

hell, and not God, whom you dread. Your religion only consists of

superstition, and petty superficial practices. You are scrupulous

about trifles, and callous with regard to terrible evils. You care

for nought but your own glory and pleasure. You centre everything in

yourself, as if you were the God of the earth, and all the rest had

been created only to be sacrificed to you!”

Madame de Maintenon, having quarrelled with Father La Chaise, and

being, moreover, no longer anxious about her future [condition], also

seemed to side with the Archbishop de Noailles, Fénélon, and the

Jansenists. She wrote [to this effect] to one of her relations: “You

have been converted; do not meddle with the conversion of others. I

avow to you that I do not wish to be responsible to God nor the king

for all these conversions.”

But the unbounded pride of Louis XIV., which revolted from the idea

of confessing to his people and Europe that he had been mistaken,

the remembrance of the praises that had been bestowed upon him for

this measure, the influence of Father La Chaise, who treated as

prevarication every project of milder proceedings, and the negative

answers of the majority of the bishops to M. de Noaille’s letter of

consultation, as to the steps it would be advisable to take,—all

prevented the plan of the Jansenists from succeeding.

These laborious negotiations only elicited the Edict of the 13th of

April, 1698, which solemnly confirmed the Revocation of the Edict of

Nantes. Not one of the laws of torture and blood was abolished: only

it was commanded that new means should be employed for the better

instruction of the united subjects.

The conduct of the governors and the intendants was not changed in

the least by it. They acted towards the Reformers like proconsuls,

possessed of the enormous privilege of imprisoning, condemning to the

galleys, dragging to the scaffold, shooting, abducting children, and

confiscating property, without a single judicial form. Intolerance

had subjected the Protestant population to the _régime_ of Turkey.

Of all these intendants, the most notorious was Lamoignon de Bâville,

who for thirty-three years had been the supreme administrator, or,

as he was called, the King of Languedoc. His motto was: “_Ever

ready, never hurried._” He was a calm, methodical, hard man, without

a passion but that of power, coolly ordering the most frightful

executions, hanging, beheading, quartering sixty or eighty persons

at a time, devastating whole cantons, burning towns and villages,

not out of religious zeal, but for state reasons. His character was

a compound of Louis XI., Richelieu, and Robespierre, and he would

subordinate to his policy the sufferings, tortures, and murder of a

whole people without compunction. Bâville was, indeed, to use the

phrase of a contemporary, “the terror and the horror of Languedoc.”

He did not approve of the Revocation; but from the moment it was

pronounced, his advice was to carry it into extreme execution against

the obstinate. “It is requisite, in order to insure the tranquillity

of the state,” he wrote, “to change their will, to regulate

ourselves upon what we have already done, to reduce them to a full

submission, by tearing the prejudices of birth from their hearts,

and by compelling them, authoritatively, to adopt the religion of

the state.” It was of little importance to him whether the religion

were false or true, accepted or rejected by the conscience of the new

converts; it was the _religion of the state_, and submission must be

made thereto. “_Let them be damned, provided they obey_,” was the

saying of a military commander of the same epoch. Supreme and vilest

expression of the moral degradation of being a persecutor without

being even a fanatic!

This ferocious proconsul was exasperated at the obstinacy of the

Protestants in holding their meetings. He surrounded them with

troops, and charged them with the bayonet and the sword. The most

notable of the prisoners were hanged upon the first trees, the others

were sent to the galleys, and there were numbered, at the beginning

of the eighteenth century, two thousand of these unfortunate

convicts, who were worse treated than highway robbers.

The priests of these parts, receiving nothing but marks of aversion

and contempt from those whom they regarded as their flocks, partook,

for the most part, of Bâville’s anger, and helped him to assuage it.

They spied out the delinquents, denounced them to the authorities,

put themselves at the head of the soldiers, and displayed all the

more barbarity, in that it was not in their calling to be cruel.

The most bloodthirsty of all was one Chayla, an inspector of

missions, and arch-priest. He had turned his presbytery into a

stronghold, or a cavern of bandits, and seemed to feel an exquisite

delight in the torments of his victims. “Sometimes,” says Count de

Gébelin, “he tore out their beards or their eyebrows with pincers,

sometimes he put hot coals into their hands, which were then

forcibly clenched, so long as the coals could burn; sometimes he

enveloped their fingers with cotton steeped in oil or tallow, and

then setting fire to it, would sear their hands until they cracked,

or were consumed to the bone.”[104]

Having arrested a band of fugitives, and shut them up in pens

like animals, among whom were two ladies, related to the most

important families of the country, a band of forty or fifty

determined men presented themselves before the door of his house at

Pont-de-Montvert, singing a psalm. These avengers of blood first

broke open the dungeons, and delivered the prisoners, whose swollen

bodies and fractured limbs were scarcely able to bear the motion that

restored them to liberty.

The Abbé du Chayla ordered his servants to repel these persons with

fire-arms, and one of the assailants fell. The others set fire to the

presbytery, seized the arch-priest, made him gaze upon his victims,

their mangled limbs and lacerated bodies, and then all, after this

frightful act of accusation, stabbed him with their weapons. He

received fifty-two wounds. Such was the beginning of the war of the

Camisards.

IV.

This last struggle of the French Reformation bears no comparison

with any that preceded it. Admiral Coligny and Henry of Navarre were

backed by entire provinces, and half the nobility of the kingdom. The

Duke de Rohan also was a redoubtable chief, and a skilful leader,

who with his followers fought pitched battles. In this instance

there were only poor peasants, without weapons but those which they

wrenched from [the hands of] their enemies, ignorant of the art of

war, and reduced to sell their lives dearly, behind the copses and

rocks of their mountains. They were led on by no nobles; they were

not even supported by the Reformed _bourgeoisie_ of the plains and

towns; this time it was the meanest of the people who spilled their

blood, and died around the standard on which they had inscribed:

“Freedom of religion!”

The Camisards were led by men, whom they regarded as inspired, or

prophets. A new convert, half abbé, half playwright, who curiously

mingled comedy with controversy,—Bruyëis, has attacked these prophets

with irony and gall in his _History of Fanaticism_. Other (Roman)

Catholic writers have followed him. Even the Bishop Fléchier pursues

the prophets of Languedoc with his cold and harsh antitheses.

Rulhières was more just: he had the good faith to accuse the

persecutors of the Cévenoles of these mental aberrations. “Can we

forget then,” he asks, “that their places of worship had been cast

down; their country delivered up to military pillage; their children

carried off; the houses of those styled obstinate, razed; that the

most zealous of their pastors had been broken upon the wheel, while

no one had instructed them in our religion?”[105]

Such, in effect, were the causes of these wild ecstasies, or

inspirations—the want of spiritual leaders and of schools,

spoliations, sufferings, threatened executions, the continual fear

of the hulks and the gibbet. The minds of these unfortunates became

excited; and finding no support on earth, they easily believed that

they had supernatural communications from on high.

This religious exaltation began in the province of Vivarais, from

the time of the _dragonnades_ and the Revocation [of the Edict of

Nantes]. The fourth pastoral letter of Jurieu, dated the 15th of

October, 1686, mentions that a man belonging to Codognan, imagined

that he had seen a vision and heard a voice, which said to him, “Go,

and console my people.” In Béarn and elsewhere, simple people fancied

they had heard the singing of psalms in the air, and had witnessed

miraculous apparitions.

Shortly afterwards, Isabeau Vincent appeared, _the Shepherdess of

Dauphiny_, a young girl of sixteen or seventeen years of age, who

could neither read nor write. She had ecstasies. “For the first five

weeks,” says Jurieu, “she spoke during her ecstasies no language but

that of her country, because her only auditors were the peasantry of

her village. The noise of this miracle having spread, people came to

see her who understood and spoke French. She then began to speak

French, and with a diction as correct as if she had been brought up

in the first houses of Paris. She composed admirable and excellent

prayers. Her action had no violence. Her lips moved slightly, and

without the least appearance of convulsion.”[106]

It was then as if a moral contagion had spread over the whole of

Vivarais and Languedoc. Prophets were counted by hundreds. They were

people of the lower classes, who had read nothing but the Bible;

they quoted passage after passage, which they continually applied on

every occasion. They particularly invoked the texts of the books of

prophecies in the Old Testament and Apocrypha. Even children felt

these inspirations, and persisted in them, notwithstanding the severe

corrections of their parents, who were held responsible for these

strange phenomena.

This ecstasy had four degrees: the calling, the inspiration, the

prophecy, and the gift, or the inspiration in its highest degree.

It cannot be doubted that the ecstasies were sincere. They were the

first to believe in the spirit, which they said filled them, and

obeyed it without reservation, hesitation, or delay, although they

went to a certain death.

This spirit, they would say, made them better people. “The persons,

who had received the inspiration,” they said, “directly abandoned

every kind of licentiousness and vanity. Some who had led a debauched

life, first became steady and pious, and every one who frequented

their society also became better-behaved, and led an exemplary life.

This spirit begot in us a horror of idolatry, a contempt for the

world, charity, internal consolation, hope, and an unleavened joy of

heart.”[107]

The Camisard chiefs were designated by the spirit. They believed

themselves to be filled with it, and this was the source of their

courage, their triumphs, and their constancy in the greatest

extremities. Whether the necessity of the moment was to collect their

scattered bands, to fix the point of attack, to choose the day of

combat, to retreat, to advance, to discover traitors and spies, to

spare prisoners, or to put them to death, it was the spirit they

consulted: everywhere and in all things their persuasion was that

they acted under the immediate and sovereign direction of heaven.

One of these Camisards, Elie Marion, thus tells this with great

simplicity in his _Théâtre Sacré des Cevennes_: “We were without

strength and without counsel, but our inspirations were our succour

and our support. They elected our leaders, and conducted them; they

were our military discipline. It is they who raised us, even weakness

itself, to put a strong bridle upon an army of more than twenty

thousand picked soldiers. It is they who banished sorrow from our

hearts in the midst of the greatest peril, as well as in the deserts

and the mountain fastnesses, when cold and famine oppressed us.

Our heaviest crosses were but lightsome burdens, for this intimate

communion that God allowed us to have with Him, bore up and consoled

us; it was our safety and our happiness.”[108]

Upon what does the judgment of enlightened, as well as of ignorant

men depend? These inspirations, those inner voices recall, trait for

trait, the language and the history of Joan of Arc. The religious

phenomenon is absolutely the same. But the Maid of Orleans delivered

France, and the people of Cevennes were vanquished. The first has

been almost worshipped: the others have been for the most part

treated as madmen and fanatics. If the English had triumphed in the

fifteenth century, the shepherdess of Vaucouleurs would also have

been regarded by historians as a poor peasant girl, crazed by silly

delusions!

Roland and Cavalier were the two principal leaders of the Cévenoles:

the former, more resolute, firm, and inaccessible to seduction,

remained to the very last sword in hand, and was the true type of the

Camisards, although he has obtained less celebrity; the latter was

more skilful, adventurous, and brilliant, brave amongst the brave,

[no less than] an epic hero. Both trusted, like Oliver Cromwell, in

the authority of inspiration, and never were military commanders

better obeyed.

The soldiers called themselves children of God, people of God, the

flock of the Lord, and bestowed upon their chieftains the names of

brother Roland, brother Cavalier. Thus was equality and fraternity

joined to the most rigorous discipline.

They made stern and bloody reprisals upon their persecutors, the

priests and the soldiers; yet the spirit they consulted, habitually

induced them to set their prisoners free who had not injured them.

They punished with the utmost severity those of their number who

were guilty of unnecessary slaughter or acts of depredation. There

was no quarrelling, swearing, or drunkenness in their ranks. All

their provisions were held in common. They have been accused by their

enemies of having led a licentious life, because they had women in

their camp: these women were the wives, mothers, and daughters of the

Camisards, who attended them to prepare their food and to tend the

wounded.

Their magazines and hospitals were caverns. They clothed themselves

with the spoils of the soldiers of the royal army, and supplied

themselves with balls from the church bells and utensils of the

presbyteries. They had no money except such as was furnished them by

villagers almost as poor as themselves, or such as they picked up on

the fields of battle; but they needed it not.

Every band had its preacher, and like the Puritans of England, they

consecrated long hours to religious services. “Although the camp was

often in the week called to pray in common, Sunday was the Lord’s

day, appointed for public assemblies and general prayer. Two days

beforehand, the prophets announced to the neighbouring townships the

place of meeting.... At break of day the people arrived, and mingled

with the children of God. A prophet ascended a rock, which served

instead of pulpit; a second preacher followed, then a third, and from

homily to homily, from prayer to prayer, from canticle to canticle,

the insatiable multitude remained unwearied until evening insensibly

crept upon them. Then the people resumed the road to their villages,

and the Camisards that to their camp.”[109]

Their number never exceeded ten thousand. But they maintained a

secret intelligence with all the population of the new converts.

The herdsmen and labourers gave them notice, by recognised signs,

of the approach of the troops, and when they were obliged to fly,

the Camisards had secure retreats. Theirs was a guerilla warfare,

composed of surprises or encounters of a few hundreds of men on

either side. When they were victorious, they took advantage of their

success, to hold assemblies, at which all the Huguenots of the

neighbourhood attended; if they were overpowered, they fled to the

impenetrable gorges of the hills. They received the first fire of

their enemies on one knee, singing the sixty-eighth Psalm: “_Let God

arise, let his enemies be scattered_;” then, precipitating themselves

upon the foe, they fought with all the fury of despair, aware that

they would receive no quarter or mercy, and preferring the death of

the soldier to the gallows or the wheel.

The war of the Camisards lasted from 1702 to 1704. The Count de

Broglie, brother-in-law of Bâville, and the king’s lieutenant-general

in Languedoc, ordered horrible devastations, without succeeding in

stifling the insurrection. His want of success led to his recall in

1703, and the court replaced him by the Marshal de Montrevel, a brave

but ignorant and presumptuous soldier, who also imagined that he

should put an end to the revolt by the terror of his executions.

Louis XIV. was deceived concerning this war, as he had been about

the conversion of the Protestants. Those who had promised that the

Revocation would not cost a drop of blood, were afraid to apprize

him of the extent of the evil. Montrevel was sent into Languedoc

by a subterfuge, the young Duke du Maine, who had been instructed

beforehand, having asked as a mark of honour, that a marshal of

France might command the troops in the province where he governed.

Madame de Maintenon said on this occasion: “It is useless for the

king to occupy himself with the details of this war; this would not

cure the evil, and would do him much harm.” And a secretary of state

wrote to the intendant of the province: “Take care not to give this

war the appearance of a serious matter.”

As soon as he had arrived in Languedoc, the Marshal de Montrevel

published two ordinances, in which the penalty of death was

pronounced, not only against those who had recourse to arms, but also

against all persons, who gave the Camisards food, or retreat, or any

assistance whatever. He announced that for every (Roman) Catholic

killed, he would hang two or three religionists, and that the

villages of the new converts, in which a priest or soldier perished,

should be immediately burned.

Massacres were now no longer counted. Gibbets, scaffolds, even stakes

were kept in permanent readiness. All the suspected were arrested.

Every population was put under restraint. The parents of the rebels

were carried off for punishment, the notables of each place were kept

as hostages, the young people were confined lest they should fly to

swell the bands of the Camisards, and when the prisoners were too

numerous, the executioner was put in play to thin them.

The (Roman) Catholics were invited to take refuge in the towns, and

the country was pitilessly laid waste, and as the work of destruction

did not make sufficient progress to satisfy Montrevel, he caused

the dwellings of the peasantry to be burned. Thus the land, so

flourishing before the Revocation, became a vast and mournful desert.

On the 1st of April, 1703, being Palm-Sunday, about three hundred

persons assembled in a mill near Nismes, for the purpose of religious

worship. Information of the meeting having been given to Montrevel,

he rose from table, and hastening to the place of meeting with

a troop of soldiers, ordered the doors to be burst open and the

slaughter of all present; the slowness of the carnage irritated his

impatience, and he gave the mill to the flames. Every one perished;

not a single person escaped, excepting a young girl, who was saved

by the humanity of a lackey of the marshal. She was hanged next day,

and her liberator only escaped the same fate through the earnest

intercession of some nuns.

The Bishop Fléchier, relating this atrocious butchery, says, with

the utmost coolness: “This example was necessary to arrest the pride

of these folks.” Priests and nobles, you complain of the executions

of 1793, and with reason; but you yourselves set the example, and

the cruelties of the men of the Reign of Terror have never surpassed

yours!

As an auxiliary to the regular troops, Montrevel formed companies

of (Roman) Catholic volunteers, under the name of Cadets of the

Cross, or White Camisards, in contrast to the Huguenots, who were

called Black Camisards. These new Crusaders were encouraged by a bull

of Clement XI., who granted them a general and absolute remission

of their sins, on the condition of exterminating the heretics

of Cevennes, “_a cursed brood issuing from the execrable race of

Albigenses_.”

The Cadets of the Cross were soon dissolved by their own party. They

were rogues, who, rejecting all discipline and not even respecting

the Church whose defenders they styled themselves, attacked

indiscriminately (Roman) Catholics and Huguenots, so that there was

spoil to be obtained.

Far from triumphing by his system of terror, Montrevel only increased

the number of his opponents. The Cévenoles, reduced to despair,

with nothing left to lose, and as ill used when they stayed at

home as when they took arms, fled in crowds to the ranks of the

Camisards. The detachments of Montrevel were defeated on every

side, in the winter of 1703-1704, at Nayes, by the rocks of Aubais,

at Martignargues, at the bridge of Salindres; and the marshal was

recalled.

The war began to excite serious uneasiness at Versailles. Holland

and England had put themselves in communication with the insurgents,

and had promised to send them succours. If a foreign fleet had

appeared upon the shores of the southern provinces, it might have

decided a general rising of the religionists of Languedoc, Vivarais,

Dauphiny, and Guienne, and might have thrown into the heart of the

kingdom fifty thousand combatants, and have struck a terrible blow

at the already sunken fortune of Louis XIV. The court comprehended

the danger, and the Marshal de Villars, who was sent to replace

Montrevel, received orders to try milder means.

Some of the Camisard leaders, having encountered great losses,

showed a disposition, soon after the new commander’s appointment, to

enter into an arrangement. They required, as the foremost condition,

liberty of conscience and worship: Villars answered this point with

equivocal phrases. Protestant historians affirm that the marshal

accepted the condition; the historians of the (Roman) Catholics, with

Fléchier at their head, deny it. It is difficult to unravel the truth

from such contradictory assertions.

This, however, is incontestable; during the negotiations between the

Duke de Villars and Cavalier, the Camisards held public assemblies at

Calvisson, singing psalms, praying, and preaching, in the midst of

an innumerable concourse of Protestants.

The interview of the marshal with the once baker’s boy took place

in the garden of the Récolets monks, at the gates of Nismes, on the

16th of May, 1704. “He is,” writes Villars to the minister of war,

“a peasant of the lowest rank, not yet twenty-two years of age, and

scarcely seeming eighteen, small and with no imposing mien, but

possessing firmness and good sense that are altogether surprising.

He has great talent in arranging for the subsistence of his men, and

disposes his troops as well as the best-trained officers could do it.

From the moment Cavalier began to treat, up to the conclusion, he has

always acted in good faith.”

Cavalier received a colonel’s commission, and went to Versailles,

where finding a cold reception, and suspecting that he was not safe,

he entered into a foreign service. He died governor of the island of

Jersey, with the reputation of a good general, and a worthy man.

The other leader of the Camisards, Roland, essayed to prolong the

struggle. To every proposition for an arrangement, he replied: “I

will not trust myself in the lion’s mouth.” A traitor sold him to

the intendant for a hundred louis, and he fell after a desperate

resistance. Some of his lieutenants still endeavoured to reinflame

the insurrection; and until as late as 1715 daring partisans agitated

Cevennes; but their attempts, which were not without courage, had no

success.

Such was the termination of the Protestant La Vendée. Its analogy

with the (Roman) Catholic La Vendée is striking. On both sides

oppressed conscience, and religion trodden underfoot, placed arms in

the hands of the people. Cathelineau, the driver, was the chief of

the Vendéans, as the baker’s boy, Cavalier, was of the Cévenoles.

Marshal de Villars and General Hoche could succeed in pacifying

either revolt by moderation alone. But the camp of the Vendéans

reckoned amongst its numbers the nobility and clergy; the Camisards

had with them neither gentlemen nor pastors. The first maintained,

without desiring it, the cause of ancient privileges, together with

the great principle of religious freedom; the latter fought for their

religion alone, and their blood was not spilled in vain.

The war of the Camisards, respecting which there may be different

opinions, which it is not our province to examine here, had a double

result; it reassured the Protestants, who nearly all returned to

their former faith, and it inspired the court of Versailles with

salutary apprehensions. The men, whom justice and respect for

conscience did not restrain, were arrested by fear, during the

remainder of the eighteenth century, from pushing the intrepid

mountaineers to extremities, who had once risen from beneath the axe

of the executioner.

V.

There cannot be a more painful subject for consideration than the

reign of Louis XIV. This aged king, nearly alone, outliving all the

great men of his era; the irreparable void left in his court by

the death of his children and his grandchildren; an unhappy war,

exposing the frontiers of his kingdom to the enemy; three millions

of debt; the people overwhelmed with imposts which they could no

longer pay; commerce destroyed, industry extinguished, a part of the

country lying fallow; the monarch hated by the nation, of which he

had once been the idol, consuming his days in the duties of a puerile

etiquette, or of a devotion more puerile still, and supporting with

difficulty a royalty, whose splendour and _prestige_, were decaying

with him. What an expiation was this for his despotic and insatiable

pride!

The quarrels of religion pursued him unceasingly, and left him no

repose. His court and council were divided upon the controversies

of Jansenism and Quietism. When he thought he had appeased them

on one side, they reappeared on the other, and his death-bed was

also troubled by the disputes of theologians concerning the bull

_Unigenitus_.

The Protestants were seldom, and then unwillingly, alluded to before

him, and he himself also avoided mentioning them. [Their repression]

was an undertaking that had failed, and he sought a refuge in

oblivion from his humiliating miscalculations.

The Reformed of Paris were treated more than ever with caution,

in order to spare the king painful reflections. The celebrated

lieutenant of police, Voyer-d’Argenson, expressly recommended

toleration. “The Inquisition, which is sought to be established

in Paris against the Protestants, whose conversion is very

doubtful,” he said, in a memorial addressed to the council, “would

be attended with great difficulties. It would force them to purchase

certificates, either for money or by sacrilege. It would drive away

from this city those who are born subjects of neutral princes, would

alienate more and more the unfriendly Protestants, blast the peace of

families, excite relations to become denouncers of each other, and

cause perhaps an universal murmur in the capital of the kingdom.” The

council took the hint, and declined to interfere with the Protestants.

In the provinces everything depended more or less upon the humour

of the governors and intendants. Bâville renewed from time to time

his sanguinary expeditions, although he had ceased to conceal from

himself their impotency. “There are districts of twenty and thirty

parishes,” he wrote, “where the curate is the most unhappy and the

most useless of all the inhabitants, and where, whatever care may

have been taken, not a single Catholic has been made, nor even one

established from without.”

The Protestants bore the burdens of the state, as soldiers, sailors,

and tax-payers, without enjoying any of the benefits which should

have belonged to all, of common right. The gentlemen served in the

army, where they were less scrupulous than elsewhere about acts

of Catholicity. The men of the middle class applied themselves

to agriculture and commerce; and they prospered, in spite of the

oppression of the laws, through that spirit of individuality and

activity which so eminently distinguishes Protestantism. The Marquis

d’Aguesseau avowed this, when new measures of severity were proposed

against them in 1713. “By an unfortunate fatality,” he said, “in

nearly every kind of art, the most skilful workmen, as well as the

richest merchants, belong to the pretended Reformed religion; it

would therefore be very dangerous to exact that they should become

Catholics.”

Things would probably have been allowed to continue under this

semi-toleration, but that the Jesuit Letellier, who had succeeded

in 1709 to Father La Chaise in the office of confessor to the king,

would not permit it. “He was,” says the Duke de Saint-Simon, “a man

of hard and obstinate temper, of incessant application, and of only

one idea—the triumph of his order and the overthrow of every other

school. His nature was cruel and ferocious; his personal appearance

no less unpromising; he would have excited fear, if met with in a

wood. His physiognomy was dark, gloomy, false, and terrible, and his

eyes were fierce, evil, and extremely sinister: one was struck on

seeing him.”[110]

Letellier extorted from the king, then verging on decrepitude and

death, the declaration of the 8th March, 1715. The title alone of

this law “_makes one’s blood curdle_,” to use the expression of the

Baron du Breteuil to Louis XVI. It is as follows: “It shall be a

law, that those who shall have declared that they will persist and

die in the pretended Reformed religion, whether they have abjured

or not, _shall be reputed as having relapsed_.” It therefore acted

upon the monstrous fiction that there were no longer any Protestants

in France, and that there could never be any more! All were held to

be legally (Roman) Catholics, since the refusal of the sacraments

exposed them to suffer the frightful penalties pronounced against

those who relapsed! It is with reason that Lamontey says in his book

upon the monarchical establishment of Louis XIV.: “The annals of the

world do not offer another example of a code wholly based upon a

lie.”[111]

The authors of this declaration relied upon the following reason:

“The sojourn that those who were of the pretended Reformed religion,

or who have been born of Calvinist parents, have made in our kingdom,

since we have abolished all exercise of the said religion, is a

sufficient proof that they have embraced the Catholic, Apostolic,

and Roman religion, _without which they would have been neither

suffered nor tolerated_.”—Neither suffered nor tolerated!—Had the

law commanded the killing of all the recusants to the very last? No!

Or had they been all banished from the kingdom? No! on the contrary,

they had been prohibited from quitting it, and this interdiction

had been renewed two years previously. Thus, on one side, they were

prevented from quitting France, and on the other, it was concluded

that they were (Roman) Catholics because they remained in it!

The Parliament of Paris, so complaisant up to this time where

laws of intolerance were concerned, delayed the registration

of the declaration of 1715 for a month. “The king,” said the

procurator-general, “has indeed abolished the exercise of the

pretended Reformed religion by his edicts, but he has not precisely

ordained that the religionists should abjure, and embrace the

Catholic religion. It is difficult to understand how a man who does

not appear to have been ever converted, should nevertheless have

fallen back into heresy, and that he should be condemned as if the

fact were proved.”

Louis XIV. died five months afterwards, declaring to the Cardinals

de Rohan and de Bissy, and to Father Letellier, that he was wholly

ignorant of the affairs of the Church, that he had acted according to

their desire, and that he threw upon them the responsibility before

God. At this last hour, when pride is silent, and all illusions fall

away, did he not find himself confronted face to face with grievous

errors and deep remorse?

Under the regency of Philippe d’Orléans, who hated the Jesuits and

drove Letellier from the court, the Reformed again entertained

some hope. This hope was increased, too, when the regent allied

himself with the Protestant powers against Spain. Far from being

blinded by bigotry, this prince was even wanting in any religious

conviction at all. His indifference, in the absence of a superior and

more praiseworthy principle, would probably dispose him to lend a

favourable ear to the complaints of the Reformed.

He did, in fact, debate whether he should retrace the step of the

Edict of Revocation. But besides that his libertine life hindered him

from long engaging upon important affairs, two things turned him from

his project. One was the fear of raising the great majority of the

clergy against him, the other was the recollection of the old wars

of religion. The Duke de Saint-Simon represented to him the renewal

of these wars as imminent, if he abolished the ordinances of Louis

XIV. This was at once a gross anachronism and contradiction; for the

Reformed would have been so much the more peaceable, as they would

have been better guaranteed in the free exercise of their religion;

however, the Duke d’Orléans, who understood and cared nothing about

these matters, thought it expedient to leave the ecclesiastical laws

as they were.

The idea was also conceived of founding a colony of refugees, who

by obtaining freedom of worship, might enrich the state by their

industry. The council of the interior inclined to this; but the

council of conscience refused, and the regent spoke no more about

it. It would in reality have been too evidently illogical to have

permitted the exercise of the Protestant religion in one part of the

kingdom, while continuing to exclude it in every other.

The Duke d’Orléans replied to the numerous petitions of the

religionists, that he hoped to find in their good conduct the

opportunity of showing them a treatment conformable to his prudence.

Several convicts, on account of religion, were liberated; departure

from the kingdom became unrestricted, and the intendants of Dauphiny,

Guienne, and Languedoc, who would have continued the system of the

_dragonnades_, received commands to be more moderate. Although this

was not toleration, yet persecution began to flag.

VI.

The misfortune of the times produced, as we have already seen, great

disorder in the bosom of the Reformed communion. There were no

pastors or regular instructions. The preachers, who travelled about

Vivarais and Cevennes, had more fervour than enlightenment, and more

zeal than judgment. Supernatural inspiration or ecstasy, which had

begun before the war of the Camisards, was not extinguished with it.

Men and women rose in the assemblies, and uttered burning words,

which influenced the mind of the audience, but did not enlighten

them. It will be remarked that at the same time, the Jansenists had

their fanatics and thaumaturgists. In the primitive ages of the

Church, the errors of the Montanists and the Donatists had alike

sprung from the source of persecution. Every oppressed communion has

been perplexed by those, who supposed themselves to be inspired.

Intelligent Protestants, or those of timid character, did not go

to hear these preachers; they confined themselves to domestic

worship, and observed externally some of the ceremonies of (Roman)

Catholicism. There was therefore a double cause of ruin at work

against the French Reformation—the excesses of the fervent, and the

concessions of the weak. It was necessary to provide a remedy, or

everything would be lost; it was necessary to re-awaken in the souls

of the religionists a living, and, at the same time, a rational

piety, to renew the bonds of discipline, to increase and to multiply

the assemblies by remodelling them, and to re-establish order in the

churches. Such was the mission of Antoine Court.[112]

He was born at Villeneuve-de-Berg, in the province of the Vivarais,

in 1696, and had followed from the age of seventeen the mission

of lecturer and preacher in the meetings of the wilderness. As

he belonged to a poor family, he had not received a classical

education; but he supplied this defect by his natural qualities,

his reflections, and knowledge of the Scriptures. Antoine Court had

the capacity to learn much and quickly. In his latter years he even

acquired an erudition very uncommon upon religious questions, and

the history of Protestantism, the proof of which may be seen in his

answer to the Bishop of Agen, published under the name of a _French

and Impartial Patriot_.

A man, who has distinguished himself by his constant sympathies

for the Reformed churches of France, M. de Végobre, has drawn

the following portrait of Antoine Court. [He possessed] sound,

straightforward sense, a wonderful facility of expression, both in

speaking and writing; an intrepid courage, joined with consummate

prudence in all his conduct; an astonishing vigour to support,

without wearying or slackening, the greatest fatigues of body and

mind; the most agreeable amenity in his intimate friendships, if we

may judge by his familiar letters; a purity of views and an integrity

of manners, which have ever been above all suspicion; and an unshaken

devotion to the holy cause to which he had consecrated himself:

these are the qualities which, standing in lieu of the resources

of education, which he was without, enabled him to inspire the

people with confidence, and to merit the name of “_Restorer of the

Protestantism of France_.”[113]

Four conditions appeared to him to be necessary for the

re-organization of the churches—regular religious assemblies; a

direct and inflexible combat against the disorders of the inspired;

the restoration of discipline by means of the consistories,

conferences, and synods; finally, the formation of a body of pastors.

The plan was vast, though judicious, but its execution involved great

difficulties.

Antoine Court established in the first place prayer meetings wherever

he could shelter his head. They were but scanty in the beginning. “It

was a great thing,” he says in an apologetic memoir, written forty

years afterwards, “when, by force of cares and solicitation, I could

anywhere induce six, ten, or a dozen persons to follow me to some

mountain cave, or deserted grange, or to the open country, to render

homage to God and to hear the discourse I wished to address to them.

What a consolation, however, it was to me to find myself, in 1744,

in assemblies of ten thousand souls in the same spot where I had

with difficulty gathered together, during the first meetings of my

ministry, fifteen, thirty, sixty, or at most a hundred persons!”

He next, with the view of remedying the disorders caused by the

inspiration, convoked the preachers of Cevennes, to whom he joined

some enlightened laymen. The first of these conferences or synods

assembled on the 21st of August, 1715, eleven days before the death

of the king, who thought he had crushed the French Reformation. Other

synods succeeded from year to year. They were held in the depth of a

cavern, or in an isolated hut; for if they had been discovered, all

the members, or at least the preachers, would have been capitally

executed.

Antoine Court, notwithstanding his youth, was the guide and soul of

these meetings, and the adhesion of the preachers proved that there

was among them neither unbelief nor pride, but simply involuntary

error or want of sufficient instruction. They only required to be

better advised and directed.

We will recount some of the dispositions, which were adopted in these

new synods. Elders were intrusted with the duty of watching over the

flocks, of convoking assemblies in suitable places, of providing for

the safety of the pastors, and of making collections for prisoners

and the poor. Women were prohibited from speaking in the meetings

of the faithful. The Bible was enjoined as the sole rule of faith,

and individual revelations were rejected as anti-Scriptural and

dangerous. (Synod of 1715.)

Fathers of families were exhorted to celebrate worship at home three

times a day, and to consecrate at least two hours to devotions on

Sunday. Those, who committed grave offences, were to be censured

in public, after three admonitions in private. The pastors were

recommended carefully to explain all the articles of religion, to

procure information respecting vices most common in each district,

with a view to their correction, and to assemble every six months

for the purpose of intercommunication. If any pastor caused scandal

to his brethren, or endangered them by his hasty zeal, he was to be

immediately deprived of his appointment. An engagement was entered

into to succour those, who had suffered in the cause of religion, but

to give no assistance to any, who exposed themselves to persecution

by their rashness. (Synods of 1716 and 1717.)

Of the six first subscribers to these regulations, four perished on

the scaffold; there is blood upon every succeeding page of French

Protestantism.