EFFECTS OF THE REVOCATION.
The Revocation struck with civil death the entire Protestant
population of France. All the liberty of conscience which they had
enjoyed under the Edict of Nantes, was swept away by the act of the
King. They were deprived of every right and privilege; their social
life was destroyed; their callings were proscribed; their property was
liable to be confiscated at any moment; and they were subjected to
mean, detestable, and outrageous cruelties.
From the day of the Revocation, the relation of Louis XIV. to his
Huguenot subjects was that of the Tyrant and his Victims. The only
resource which remained to the latter was that of flying from their
native country; and an immense number of persons took the opportunity
of escaping from France.
The Edict of Revocation proclaimed that the Huguenot subjects of
France must thenceforward be of "the King's religion;" and the order
was promulgated throughout the kingdom. The Prime Minister, Louvois,
wrote to the provincial governors, "His Majesty desires that the
severest rigour shall be shown to those who will not conform to His
Religion, and those who seek the foolish glory of wishing to be the
last, must be pushed to the utmost extremity."
The Huguenots were forbidden, under the penalty of death, to worship
publicly after their own religious forms. They were also forbidden,
under the penalty of being sent to the galleys for life, to worship
privately in their own homes. If they were overheard singing their
favourite psalms, they were liable to fine, imprisonment, or the
galleys. They were compelled to hang out flags from their houses on
the days of Catholic processions; but they were forbidden, under a
heavy penalty, to look out of their windows when the Corpus Domini was
borne along the streets.
The Huguenots were rigidly forbidden to instruct their children in
their own faith. They were commanded to send them to the priest to be
baptized and brought up in the Roman Catholic faith, under the penalty
of five hundred livres fine in each case. The boys were educated in
Jesuit schools, the girls in nunneries, the parents being compelled to
pay the required expenses; and where the parents were too poor to pay,
the children were at once transferred to the general hospitals. A
decree of the King, published in December, 1685, ordered that every
child of _five years_ and upwards was to be taken possession of by the
authorities, and removed from its Protestant parents. This decree
often proved a sentence of death, not only to the child, but to its
parents.
The whole of the Protestant temples throughout France were subject to
demolition. The expelled pastors were compelled to evacuate the
country within fifteen days. If, in the meantime, they were found
performing their functions, they were liable to be sent to the galleys
for life. If they undertook to marry Protestants, the marriages were
declared illegal, and the children bastards. If, after the expiry of
the fifteen days, they were found lingering in France, the pastors
were then liable to the penalty of death.
Protestants could neither be born, nor live, nor die, without state
and priestly interference. Protestant _sages-femmes_ were not
permitted to exercise their functions; Protestant doctors were
prohibited from practising; Protestant surgeons and apothecaries were
suppressed; Protestant advocates, notaries, and lawyers were
interdicted; Protestants could not teach, and all their schools,
public and private, were put down. Protestants were no longer employed
by the Government in affairs of finance, as collectors of taxes, or
even as labourers on the public roads, or in any other office. Even
Protestant grocers were forbidden to exercise their calling.
There must be no Protestant librarians, booksellers, or printers.
There was, indeed, a general raid upon Protestant literature all over
France. All Bibles, Testaments, and books of religious instruction,
were collected and publicly burnt. There were bonfires in almost every
town. At Metz, it occupied a whole day to burn the Protestant books
which had been seized, handed over to the clergy, and condemned to be
destroyed.
Protestants were even forbidden to hire out horses, and Protestant
grooms were forbidden to give riding lessons. Protestant domestics
were forbidden to hire themselves as servants, and Protestant
mistresses were forbidden to hire them under heavy penalties. If they
engaged Protestant servants, they were liable to be sent to the
galleys for life. They were even prevented employing "new converts."
Artisans were forbidden to work without certificates that their
religion was Catholic. Protestant apprenticeships were suppressed.
Protestant washerwomen were excluded from their washing-places on the
river. In fact, there was scarcely a degradation that could be
invented, or an insult that could be perpetrated, that was not
practised upon those poor Huguenots who refused to be of "the King's
religion."
Even when Protestants were about to take refuge in death, their
troubles were not over. The priests had the power of forcing their way
into the dying man's house, where they presented themselves at his
bedside, and offered him conversion and the viaticum. If the dying man
refused these, he was liable to be seized after death, dragged from
the house, pulled along the streets naked, and buried in a ditch, or
thrown upon a dunghill.[10]
[Footnote 10: Such was, in fact, the end of a man so
distinguished as M. Paul Chenevix, Councillor of the Court of
Metz, who died in 1686, the year after the Revocation.
Although of the age of eighty, and so illustrious for his
learning, his dead body was dragged along the streets on a
hurdle and thrown upon a dunghill. See "Huguenot Refugees and
their Descendants," under the name _Chenevix_. The present
Archbishop of Dublin is descended from his brother Philip
Chenevix, who settled in England shortly after the
Revocation.]
For several years before the Revocation, while the persecutions of the
Huguenots had been increasing, many had realised their means, and fled
abroad into Switzerland, Germany, Holland, and England. But after the
Revocation, emigration from France was strictly forbidden, under
penalty of confiscation of the whole goods and property of the
emigrant. Any person found attempting to leave the country, was liable
to the seizure of all that belonged to him, and to perpetual
imprisonment at the galleys; one half the amount realised by the sale
of the property being paid to the informers, who thus became the most
active agents of the Government. The Act also ordered that all landed
proprietors who had left France before the Revocation, should return
within four months, under penalty of confiscation of all their
property.
Amongst those of the King's subjects who were the most ready to obey
his orders were some of the old Huguenot noble families, such as the
members of the houses of Bouillon, Coligny, Rohan, Tremouille, Sully,
and La Force. These great vassals, whom a turbulent feudalism had
probably in the first instance induced to embrace Protestantism, were
now found ready to change their profession of religion in servile
obedience to the monarch.
The lesser nobility were more faithful and consistent. Many of them
abandoned their estates and fled across the frontier, rather than live
a daily lie to God by forswearing the religion of their conscience.
Others of this class, on whom religion sat more lightly, as the only
means of saving their property from confiscation, pretended to be
converted to Roman Catholicism; though, we shall find, that these "new
converts," as they were called, were treated with as much suspicion on
the one side as they were regarded with contempt on the other.
There were also the Huguenot manufacturers, merchants, and employers of
labour, of whom a large number closed their workshops and factories,
sold off their goods, converted everything into cash, at whatever
sacrifice, and fled across the frontier into Switzerland--either
settling there, or passing through it on their way to Germany, Holland,
or England.
It was necessary to stop this emigration, which was rapidly
diminishing the population, and steadily impoverishing the country. It
was indeed a terrible thing for Frenchmen, to tear themselves away
from their country--Frenchmen, who have always clung so close to
their soil that they have rarely been able to form colonies of
emigration elsewhere--it was breaking so many living fibres to leave
France, to quit the homes of their fathers, their firesides, their
kin, and their race. Yet, in a multitude of cases, they were compelled
to tear themselves by the roots out of the France they so loved.
Yet it was so very easy for them to remain. The King merely required
them to be "converted." He held that loyalty required them to be of
"his religion." On the 19th of October, 1685, the day after he had
signed the Act of Revocation, La Reynee, lieutenant of the police of
Paris, issued a notice to the Huguenot tradespeople and
working-classes, requiring them to be converted instantly. Many of
them were terrified, and conformed accordingly. Next day, another
notice was issued to the Huguenot bourgeois, requiring them to
assemble on the following day for the purpose of publicly making a
declaration of their conversion.
The result of those measures was to make hypocrites rather than
believers, and they took effect upon the weakest and least-principled
persons. The strongest, most independent, and high-minded of the
Huguenots, who would _not_ be hypocrites, resolved passively to resist
them, and if they could not be allowed to exercise freedom of
conscience in their own country, they determined to seek it elsewhere.
Hence the large increase in the emigration from all parts of France
immediately after the Act of Revocation had been proclaimed.[11] All
the roads leading to the frontier or the sea-coast streamed with
fugitives. They went in various forms and guises--sometimes in bodies
of armed men, at other times in solitary parties, travelling at night
and sleeping in the woods by day. They went as beggars, travelling
merchants, sellers of beads and chaplets, gipsies, soldiers,
shepherds, women with their faces dyed and sometimes dressed in men's
clothes, and in all manner of disguises.
[Footnote 11: It is believed that 400,000 emigrants left
France through religious persecution during the twenty years
previous to the Revocation, and that 600,000 escaped during
the twenty years after that event. M. Charles Coquerel
estimates the number of Protestants in France at that time to
have been two millions of _men_ ("Eglises du Desert," i. 497)
The number of Protestant pastors was about one thousand--of
whom six hundred went into exile, one hundred were executed
or sent to the galleys, and the rest are supposed to have
accepted pensions as "new converts."]
To prevent this extensive emigration, more violent measures were
adopted. Every road out of France was posted with guards. The towns,
highways, bridges, and ferries, were all watched; and heavy rewards
were promised to those who would stop and bring back the fugitives.
Many were taken, loaded with irons, and dispatched by the most public
roads through France--as a sight to be seen by other Protestants--to
the galleys at Marseilles, Brest, and other ports. As they went along
they were subject to every sort of indignity in the towns and villages
through which they passed. They were hooted, stoned, spit upon, and
loaded with insult.
Many others went by sea, in French as well as in foreign ships. Though
the sailors of France were prohibited the exercise of the reformed
religion, under the penalty of fines, corporal punishment, and seizure
of the vessels where the worship was allowed, yet many of the
emigrants contrived to get away by the help of French ship captains,
masters of sloops, fishing-boats, and coast pilots--who most probably
sympathized with the views of those who wished to fly their country
rather than become hypocrites and forswear their religion. A large
number of emigrants, who went hurriedly off to sea in little boats,
must have been drowned, as they were never afterwards heard of.
There were also many English ships that appeared off the coast to take
the flying Huguenots away by night. They also escaped in foreign ships
taking in their cargoes in the western harbours. They got cooped up in
casks or wine barraques, with holes for breathing places; others
contrived to get surreptitiously into the hold, and stowed themselves
away among the goods. When it became known to the Government that many
Protestants were escaping in this way, provision was made to meet the
case; and a Royal Order was issued that, before any ship was allowed
to set sail for a foreign port, the hold should be fumigated with
deadly gas, so that any hidden Huguenot who could not otherwise be
detected, might thus be suffocated![12]
[Footnote 12: We refer to "The Huguenots: their Settlements,
Churches, and Industries in England and Ireland," where a
great many incidents are given relative to the escape of
refugees by land and sea, which need not here be repeated.]
In the meantime, however, numerous efforts were being made to convert
the Huguenots. The King, his ministers, the dragoons, the bishops, and
clergy used all due diligence. "Everybody is now missionary," said the
fascinating Madame de Sevigne; "each has his mission--above all the
magistrates and governors of provinces, _helped by the dragoons_. It
is the grandest and finest thing that has ever been imagined and
executed."[13]
[Footnote 13: Letter to the President de Moulceau, November
24th, 1685.]
The conversions effected by the dragoons were much more sudden than
those effected by the priests. Sometimes a hundred or more persons
were converted by a single troop within an hour. In this way Murillac
converted thousands of persons in a week. The regiment of Ashfeld
converted the whole province of Poitou in a month.
De Noailles was very successful in his conversions. He converted
Nismes in twenty-four hours; the day after he converted Montpellier;
and he promised in a few weeks to deliver all Lower Languedoc from the
leprosy of heresy. In one of his dispatches soon after the Revocation,
he boasted that he had converted 350 nobility and gentry, 54
ministers, and 25,000 individuals of various classes.
The quickness of the conversions effected by the dragoons is easily to
be accounted for. The principal cause was the free quartering of
soldiers in the houses of the Protestants. The soldiers knew what was
the object for which they were thus quartered. They lived freely in
all ways. They drank, swore, shouted, beat the heretics, insulted
their women, and subjected them to every imaginable outrage and
insult.
One of their methods of making converts was borrowed from the
persecutions of the Vaudois. It consisted in forcing the feet of the
intended converts into boots full of boiling grease, or they would
hang them up by the feet, sometimes forgetting to cut them down until
they were dead. They would also force them to drink water perpetually,
or make them sit under a slow dripping upon their heads until they
died of madness. Sometimes they placed burning coals in their hands,
or used an instrument of torture resembling that known in Scotland as
the thumbscrews.[14] Many of their attempts at conversion were
accompanied by details too hideous to be recorded.
[Footnote 14: Thumbscrews were used in the reign of James II.
Louis and James borrowed from each other the means of
converting heretics; but whether the origin of the thumbscrew
be French or Scotch is not known.]
Of those who would not be converted, the prisons were kept full. They
were kept there without the usual allowance of straw, and almost
without food. In winter they had no fire, and at night no lamp. Though
ill, they had no doctors. Besides the gaoler, their only visitors were
priests and monks, entreating them to make abjuration. Of course many
died in prison--feeble women, and aged and infirm men. In the society
of obscene criminals, with whom many were imprisoned, they prayed for
speedy deliverance by death, and death often came to their help.
More agreeable, but still more insulting, methods of conversion were
also attempted. Louis tried to bribe the pastors by offering them an
increase of annual pay beyond their former stipends. If there were a
Protestant judge or advocate, Louvois at once endeavoured to bribe him
over. For instance, there was a heretical syndic of Strasbourg, to
whom Louvois wrote, "Will you be converted? I will give you 6,000
livres of pension.--Will you not? I will dismiss you."
Of course many of the efforts made to convert the Huguenots proved
successful. The orders of the Prime Minister, the free quarters
afforded to the dragoons, the preachings and threatenings of the
clergy, all contributed to terrify the Protestants. The fear of being
sent to the galleys for life--the threat of losing the whole of one's
goods and property--the alarm of seeing one's household broken up, the
children seized by the priests and sent to the nearest monkery or
nunnery for maintenance and education--all these considerations
doubtless had their effect in increasing the number of conversions.
Persecution is not easy to bear. To have all the powers and
authorities employed against one's life, interests, and faith, is
what few can persistently oppose. And torture, whether it be slow or
sudden, is what many persons, by reason of their physical capacity,
have not the power to resist. Even the slow torment of dragoons
quartered in the houses of the heretics--their noise and shoutings,
their drinking and roistering, the insults and outrages they were
allowed to practise--was sufficient to compel many at once to declare
themselves to be converted.
Indeed, pain is, of all things, one of the most terrible of
converters. One of the prisoners condemned to the galleys, when he saw
the tortures which the victims about him had to endure by night and by
day, said that sufferings such as these were "enough to make one
conform to Buddhism or Mahommedanism as well as to Popery"; and
doubtless it was force and suffering which converted the Huguenots,
far more than love of the King or love of the Pope.
By all these means--forcible, threatening, insulting, and
bribing--employed for the conversion of the Huguenots, the Catholics
boasted that in the space of three months they had received an
accession of five hundred thousand new converts to the Church of Rome.
But the "new converts" did not gain much by their change. They were
forced to attend mass, but remained suspected. Even the dragoons who
converted them, called them dastards and deniers of their faith. They
tried, if they could, to avoid confession, but confess they must.
There was the fine, confiscation of goods, and imprisonment at the
priest's back.
Places were set apart for them in the churches, where they were penned
up like lepers. A person was stationed at the door with a roll of
their names, to which they were obliged to answer. During the service,
the most prominent among them were made to carry the lights, the holy
water, the incense, and such things, which to Huguenots were an
abomination. They were also required to partake of the Host, which
Protestants regarded as an awful mockery of the glorious Godhead.
The Duc de Saint-Simon, in his memoirs, after referring to the unmanly
cruelties practised by Louis XIV. on the Huguenots, "without the
slightest pretext or necessity," characterizes this forced
participation in the Eucharist as sacrilegious and blasphemous folly,
notwithstanding that nearly all the bishops lent themselves to the
practice. "From simulated abjuration," he says, "they [the Huguenots]
are dragged to endorse what they do not believe in, and to receive the
divine body of the Saint of saints whilst remaining persuaded that
they are only eating bread which they ought to abhor. Such is the
general abomination born of flattery and cruelty. From torture to
abjuration, and from that to the communion, there were only
twenty-four hours' distance; and the executioners were the conductors
of the converts, and their witnesses. Those who in the end appeared to
have become reconciled, when more at leisure did not fail, by their
flight or their behaviour, to contradict their pretended
conversion."[15]
[Footnote 15: "Memoirs of the Duke of Saint-Simon," Bayle St.
John's Translation, iii. 259.]
Indeed, many of the new converts, finding life in France to be all but
intolerable, determined to follow the example of the Huguenots who had
already fled, and took the first opportunity of disposing of their
goods and leaving the country. One of the first things they did on
reaching a foreign soil, was to attend a congregation of their
brethren, and make "reconnaisances," or acknowledgment of their
repentance for having attended mass and pretended to be converted to
the Roman Catholic Church.[16] At one of the sittings of the
Threadneedle Street Huguenot Church in London, held in May, 1687--two
years after the Revocation--not fewer than 497 members were again
received into the Church which, by force, they had pretended to
abandon.
[Footnote 16: See "The Huguenots: their Settlements, &c., in
England and Ireland," chap. xvi.]
Not many pastors abjured. A few who yielded in the first instance
through terror and stupor, almost invariably returned to their ancient
faith. They were offered considerable pensions if they would conform
and become Catholics. The King promised to augment their income by
one-third, and if they became advocates or doctors in law, to dispense
with their three years' study, and with the right of diploma.
At length, most of the pastors had left the country. About seven
hundred had gone into Switzerland, Holland, Prussia, England, and
elsewhere. A few remained going about to meetings of the peasantry, at
the daily risk of death; for every pastor taken was hung. A reward of
5,500 livres was promised to whoever should take a pastor, or cause
him to be taken. The punishment of death was also pronounced against
all persons who should be discovered attending such meetings.
Nevertheless, meetings of the Protestants continued to be held, with
pastors or without. They were, for the most part, held at night,
amidst the ruins of their pulled-down temples. But this exposed them
to great danger, for spies were on the alert to inform upon them and
have them apprehended.
At length they selected more sheltered places in remote quarters,
where they met for prayer and praise, often resorting thither from
great distances. They were, however, often surprised, cut to pieces by
the dragoons, who hung part of the prisoners on the neighbouring
trees, and took the others to prison, from whence they were sent to
the galleys, or hung on the nearest public gibbet.
Fulcran Rey was one of the most celebrated of the early victims. He
was a native of Nismes, twenty-four years old. He had just completed
his theological studies; but there were neither synods to receive him
to pastoral ordination, nor temples for him to preach in. The only
reward he could earn by proceeding on his mission was death, yet he
determined to preach. The first assemblies he joined were in the
neighbourhood of Nismes, where his addresses were interrupted by
assaults of the dragoons. The dangers to his co-religionaries were too
great in the neighbourhood of this populous town; and he next went to
Castres and the Vaunage; after which he accepted an invitation to
proceed into the less populous districts of the Cevennes.
He felt the presentiment of death upon him in accepting the
invitation; but he went, leaving behind him a letter to his father,
saying that he was willing, if necessary, to give his life for the
cause of truth. "Oh! what happiness it would give me," he said, "if I
might be found amongst the number of those whom the Lord has reserved
to announce his praise and to die for his cause!"
His apostolate was short but glorious. He went from village to village
in the Cevennes, collected the old worshippers together, prayed and
preached to them, encouraging all to suffer in the name of Christ. He
remained at this work for about six weeks, when a spy who accompanied
him--one whom he had regarded as sincere a Huguenot as himself--informed
against him for the royal reward, and delivered him over to the
dragoons.
Rey was at first thrown into prison at Anduze, when, after a brief
examination by the local judge, he was entrusted to thirty soldiers,
to be conveyed to Alais. There he was subjected to further
examination, avowing that he had preached wherever he had found
faithful people ready to hear him. At Nismes, he was told that he had
broken the law, in preaching contrary to the King's will. "I obey the
law of the King of kings," he replied; "it is right that I should obey
God rather than man. Do with me what you will; I am ready to die."
The priests, the judges, and other persons of influence endeavoured to
induce him to change his opinions. Promises of great favours were
offered him if he would abjure; and when the intendant Baville
informed him of the frightful death before him if he refused, he
replied, "My life is not of value to me, provided I gain Christ." He
remained firm. He was ordered to be put to the torture. He was still
unshaken. Then he was delivered over to the executioner. "I am
treated," he said, "more mildly than my Saviour."
On his way to the place of execution, two monks walked by his side to
induce him to relent, and to help him to die. "Let me alone," he said,
"you annoy me with your consolations." On coming in sight of the
gallows at Beaucaire, he cried, "Courage, courage! the end of my
journey is at hand. I see before me the ladder which leads to
heaven."
The monks wished to mount the ladder with him. "Return," said he, "I
have no need of your help. I have assistance enough from God to take
the last step of my journey." When he reached the upper platform, he
was about, before dying, to make public his confession of faith. But
the authorities had arranged beforehand that this should be prevented.
When he opened his mouth, a roll of military drums muffled his voice.
His radiant look and gestures spoke for him. A few minutes more, and
he was dead; and when the paleness of death spread over his face, it
still bore the reflex of joy and peace in which he had expired. "There
is a veritable martyr," said many even of the Catholics who were
witnesses of his death.
It was thought that the public hanging of a pastor would put a stop to
all further ministrations among the Huguenots. But the sight of the
bodies of their brethren hung on the nearest trees, and the heads of
their pastors rolling on the scaffold, did not deter them from
continuing to hold religious meetings in solitary places, more
especially in Languedoc, Viverais, and the provinces in the south-east
of France.
Between the year 1686, when Fulcran Rey was hanged at Beaucaire, and
the year 1698, when Claude Brousson was hanged at Montpellier, not
fewer than seventeen pastors were publicly executed; namely, three at
Nismes, two at St. Hippolyte and Marsillargues in the Cevennes, and
twelve on the Peyrou at Montpellier--the public place on which
Protestant Christians in the South of France were then principally
executed.
There has been some discussion lately as to the massacre of the
Huguenots about a century before this period. It has been held that
the St. Bartholomew Massacre was only a political squabble, begun by
the Huguenots, in which they got the worst of it. The number of
persons killed on the occasion has been reduced to a very small
number. It has been doubted whether the Pope had anything to do with
the medal struck at Rome, bearing the motto _Ugonottorum Strages_
("Massacre of the Huguenots"), with the Pope's head on one side, and
an angel on the other pursuing and slaying a band of flying heretics.
Whatever may be said of the massacre of St. Bartholomew, there can be
no mistake about the persecutions which preceded and followed the
Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. They were continued for more than
half a century, and had the effect of driving from France about a
million of the best, most vigorous, and industrious of Frenchmen. In
the single province of Languedoc, not less than a hundred thousand
persons (according to Boulainvilliers) were destroyed by premature
death, one-tenth of whom perished by fire, strangulation, or the
wheel.
It could not be said that Louis XIV. and the priests were destroying
France and tearing its flesh, and that Frenchmen did not know it. The
proclamations, edicts and laws published against the Huguenots were
known to all Frenchmen. Benoit[17] gives a list of three hundred and
thirty-three issued by Louis XIV. during the ten years subsequent to
the Revocation, and they were continued, as we shall find, during the
succeeding reign.
[Footnote 17: "Histoire de l'Edit de Nantes," par Elie
Benoit.]
"We have," says M. Charles Coquerel, "a horror of St. Bartholomew!
Will foreigners believe it, that France observed a code of laws framed
in the same infernal spirit, which maintained _a perpetual St.
Bartholomew's day in this country for about sixty years_! If they
cannot call us the most barbarous of people, their judgment will be
well founded in pronouncing us the most inconsistent."[18]
[Footnote 18: "Histoire des Eglises du Desert," par Charles
Coquerel, i. 498.]
M. De Felice, however, will not believe that the Revocation of the
Edict of Nantes was popular in France. He takes a much more patriotic
view of the French people. He cannot believe them to have been
wilfully guilty of the barbarities which the French Government
committed upon the Huguenots. It was the King, the priests, and the
courtiers only! But he forgets that these upper barbarians were
supported by the soldiers and the people everywhere. He adds, however,
that if the Revocation _were_ popular, "it would be the most
overwhelming accusation against the Church of Rome, that it had thus
educated and fashioned France."[19] There is, however, no doubt
whatever that the Jesuits, during the long period that they had the
exclusive education of the country in their hands, _did_ thus fashion
France; for, in 1793, the people educated by them treated King,
Jesuits, priests, and aristocracy, in precisely the same manner that
they had treated the Huguenots about a century before.
[Footnote 19: De Felice's "History of the Protestants of
France," book iii. sect. 17.]