religion situated in the kingdom. It was forbidden to assemble for the
exercise of the said religion, in any place, private house or tenement,
under penalty of confiscation of body and goods. All ministers of the said
religion who would not be converted were enjoined to leave the kingdom in a
fortnight, and divers favors were granted to those who should be converted.
Private schools for instruction of children in the said religion were
interdicted. Children who should be born to those of the said religion
should for the future be baptized by the parish curates, under penalty of a
fine of five hundred livres, and still more, if there were occasion, to
be paid by the parents, and the children should then be brought up in the
Catholic religion. A delay of four months was granted to fugitive Reformers
to leave the kingdom and recover possession of their property; this delay
passed, the property should remain confiscated. It was forbidden anew to
Reformers to leave the kingdom, under penalty of the galleys for men,
and confiscation of body and goods for women. The declarations against
backsliders were confirmed.
A last article, probably obtained by the representations of the Colberts,
declared that the Reformers, "till it should please God to enlighten them
like others, should be permitted to dwell in the kingdom, in strict loyalty
to the King, to continue there their commerce and enjoy their goods,
without being molested or hindered under pretext of the said religion."
The Edict of Revocation was sent in haste to the governors and intendants,
without waiting for it to be registered, which took place in the Parliament
of Paris, October 22d. The intendants were instructed not to allow the
ministers who should abandon the country to dispose of their real estate,
or to take with them their children above seven years of age: a monstrous
dismemberment of the family wrought by an arbitrary will that recognized
neither natural nor civil rights! The King recommended a milder course
toward noblemen, merchants, and manufacturers; he did not desire that
obstinacy should be shown "in compelling them to be converted immediately
without exception" "by any considerable violence."
The tone of the ministerial instructions changed quickly on the reception
of despatches announcing the effect of the edict in the provinces. This
effect teaches us more in regard to the situation of the dragooned people
than could the most sinister narratives. The edict which proscribed the
Reformed worship, which interdicted the perpetuation of the Protestant
religion by tearing from it infants at their birth, was received as a boon
by Protestants who remained faithful to their belief. They saw, in the
last article of the edict, the end of persecution, and, proud of having
weathered the storm, they claimed the tolerance that the King promised
them, and the removal of their executioners. The new converts, who,
persuaded that the King desired to force all his subjects to profess
his religion, had yielded through surprise, fear, want of constancy in
suffering, or through a worthier motive, the desire of saving their
families from the license of the soldiers, manifested their regret and
their remorse, and were no longer willing to go to mass.
All the leaders of the dragonades, the Noailles, the Foucaults, the
Basvilles, the Marillacs, complained bitterly of a measure that was useless
to them as to the demolition of Protestant churches and the prohibition of
worship, and very injurious as to the progress of conversions. They had
counted on rooting out the worship by converting all the believers. The
revocation of the Edict of Nantes sinned, therefore, in their eyes by
excess of moderation! Louvois hastened to reassure them in this respect,
and authorized them to act as if the last article of the edict did not
exist. "His majesty," he said, "desires that the extremest rigors of the
law should be felt by those who will not make themselves of his religion,
and those who shall have the foolish glory of wishing to remain the
last must be pushed to the last extremity." "Let the soldiers," he said
elsewhere, "be allowed to live very licentiously!" (November, 1685).
The King, however, did not mean it thus, and claimed that persecution
should be conducted with method and gravity. But men do not stop at
pleasure in evil: one abyss draws on another. The way had been opened to
brutal and cynical passions, to the spirit of denunciation, to low and
mean fanaticism; the infamies with which the subaltern agents polluted
themselves recoiled upon the chiefs who did not repress them, and on this
proud government that did not blush to add to the odium of persecution the
shame of faithlessness! The chiefs of the dragonades judged it necessary to
restrain the bad converts by making example of the obstinate; hence arose
an inundation of horrors in which we see, as Saint Simon says, "the
orthodox imitating against heretics the acts of pagan tyrants against
confessors and martyrs." Everything, in fact, was allowed the soldiers
but rape and murder; and even this restriction was not always respected;
besides, many of the unfortunate died or were maimed for life in
consequence of the treatment to which they had been subjected; and the
obscene tortures inflicted on women differed little from the last outrage,
but in a perversity more refined.
All the diabolic inventions of the highwaymen of the Middle Ages to extort
gold from their captives were renewed here and there to secure conversions:
the feet of the victims were scorched, they were strappadoed, suspended by
the feet; young mothers were tied to the bedposts, while their infants at
the breast were writhing with hunger before their eyes. "From torture to
abjuration, and from this to communion, there was often not twenty-four
hours' distance, and their executioners were their guides and witnesses.
Nearly all the bishops lent themselves to this sudden and impious
practice." Among the Reformed whom nothing could shake, those who
encouraged others to resistance by the influence of their character or
social position were sent to the Bastille or other state prisons; some were
entombed in subterranean dungeons--in those dark pits, stifling or deadly
cold, invented by feudal barbarism. The remains of animals in a state of
putrefaction were sometimes thrown in after them, to redouble the horror!
The hospital of Valence and the tower of Constance at Aigues-Mortes have
preserved, in Protestant martyrology, a frightful renown. The women usually
showing themselves more steadfast than the men, the most obstinate were
shut up in convents; infamous acts took place there; yet they were rare. It
must be said to the honor of the sex, often too facile to the suggestions
of fanaticism, that the nuns showed much more humanity and true religion
than the priests and monks. Astonished to see Huguenot women so different
from the idea they had formed of them, they almost became the protectors of
victims that had been given them to torment.
The abduction of children put the final seal to the persecution. The Edict
of Revocation had only declared that children subsequently born should be
brought up in the Catholic religion. An edict of January, 1686, prescribed
that children from five to sixteen years of age should be taken from their
heretical relatives and put in the hands of Catholic relatives, or, if they
had none, of Catholics designated by the judges! The crimes that we have
just indicated might, in strictness, be attributed to the passions of
subaltern agents; but this mighty outrage against the family and nature
must be charged to the Government alone.
With the revocation, the dragonade was extended, two places partially
excepted, over all France. When the great harvest had been sufficiently
gathered in the South and West, the reapers were sent elsewhere. The
battalions of converters marched from province to province till they
reached the northern frontier, carrying everywhere the same terror. Metz,
where the Protestants were numerous, was particularly the theatre of
abominable excesses. Paris and Alsace were alone, to a certain extent,
preserved. Louvois did not dare to show such spectacles to the society of
Versailles and Paris; the King would not have endured it. The people of
Paris demolished the Protestant church of Charenton, an object of their
ancient animosity; the ruling power weighed heavily upon the eight or nine
thousand Huguenots who remained in the capital, and constrained two-thirds
of them, by intimidation, to a feigned conversion; but there were no
striking acts of violence, except perhaps the banishment of thirty elders
of the consistory to different parts of the kingdom, and the soldiers did
not make their appearance. The lieutenant of police, La Reinie, took care
to reassure the leading merchants, and the last article of the Edict of
Revocation was very nearly observed in Paris and its environs. As to
Lutheran Alsace, it had nothing in common with the system of the Edict
of Nantes and the French Calvinists: the Treaty of Westphalia, the
capitulation of Strasburg, all the acts that bound it to France, guaranteed
to it a separate religious state. An attempt was indeed made to encroach
upon Lutheranism by every means of influence and by a system of petty
annoyances; but direct attacks were limited to a suppression of public
worship in places where the population was two-thirds Catholic. The
political events that soon disturbed Europe compelled the French Government
to be circumspect toward the people of this recently conquered frontier.
The converters indemnified themselves at the expense of another frontier
population, that was not dependent on France. The Vaudois, the first
offspring of the Reformation, had always kept possession of the high
Alpine valleys, on the confines of Piedmont and Dauphiny, in spite of the
persecutions that they had repeatedly endured from the governments of
France and Piedmont. The Piedmontese Vaudois had their Edict of Nantes;
that is, liberty of worship in the three valleys of St. Martin, La Luzerne,
and La Perouse. When the dragonade invaded Dauphiny, the Vaudois about
Briançon and Pignerol took refuge in crowds with their brethren in the
valleys subject to Piedmont. The French Government was unwilling to suffer
them to remain in this asylum. The Duke Victor Amadeus II enjoined the
refugees to quit his territory (November 4th). The order was imperfectly
executed, and Louis XIV demanded more. The Duke, by an edict of February 1,
1686, prohibited the exercise of heretical worship, and ordered the
schools to be closed under penalty of death. The _barbes_ (ministers),
schoolmasters, and French refugees were to leave the states of the Duke in
a fortnight, under the same penalty. The Vaudois responded by taking up
arms, without reflecting on the immense force of their oppressors. The
three valleys were assailed at the same time by French and Piedmontese
troops. The French were commanded by the governor of Casale, Catinat, a man
of noble heart, an elevated and philosophic mind, who deplored his fatal
mission, and attempted to negotiate with the insurgents, but Catinat could
neither persuade to submission these men resolved to perish rather than
renounce their faith, nor restrain the fury of his soldiers exasperated by
the vigor of the resistance. The valleys of St. Martin and La Perouse were
captured, and the victors committed frightful barbarities. Meanwhile
the Piedmontese, after having induced the mountaineers, who guarded the
entrance of the valley of La Luzerne, to lay down their arms, by false
promises, slaughtered three thousand women, children, and old men at
the Pré de la Tour! The remotest recesses of the Alps were searched; a
multitude of unfortunates were exterminated singly: more than ten thousand
were dragged as prisoners to the fortresses of Piedmont, where most of them
died of want. A handful of the bravest succeeding in maintaining themselves
among the rocks, where they could not be captured, and, protected by the
intervention of Protestant powers, and especially of the Swiss, finally
obtained liberty to emigrate, both for themselves and their coreligionists.
There has often been seen in history much greater bloodshed than that
caused by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, scenes of destruction
planned more directly and on a vaster scale by governments, and sometimes
the same contrast between an advanced state of civilization and acts of
barbarity; but no spectacle wounds moral sense and humanity to the same
degree as this persecution carried on coldly and according to abstract
ideas, without the excuse of struggle and danger, without the ardent fever
of battle and revolution. The very virtues of the persecutors are here
but an additional monstrosity: doubtless, there is also seen, at a later
period, among the authors of another reign of terror, this same contrast
that astounds and troubles the conscience of posterity; but they, at least,
staked each day their own lives against the lives of their adversaries,
and, with their lives, the very existence of the country involved in their
cause!
A million and a half of Frenchmen were in terror and despair; yet songs of
victory resounded around Louis the Great. The aged Le Tellier lifted to
heaven the hand that had just signed the Revocation, and parodied, on the
occasion of an edict that recalls the times of Decius and Diocletian,
the canticle by which Simeon hailed the birth of the Redeemer. He died
a fanatic, after having lived a cold and astute politician (October 31,
1685); he died, and the most eloquent voices of the Gallican Church broke
forth in triumphal hymns, as over the tomb of a victorious hero! "Let us
publish this miracle of our days," exclaimed Bossuet, in that funeral
oration of Le Tellier, wherein he nevertheless exhibited apprehensions of
new combats and of a sombre future for the Church; "let us pour forth our
hearts in praise of the piety of Louis; let us lift our acclamations to
heaven, and let us say to this new Constantine, to this new Theodosius, to
this new Marcianus, to this new Charlemagne: 'You have strengthened the
faith, you have exterminated the heretics; this is the meritorious work of
your reign, its peculiar characteristic. Through you heresy is no more: God
alone could have wrought this wonder.'" The gentle Fléchier himself echoed
Bossuet, with the whole corps of the clergy with the great mass of the
people. Paris and Versailles, that did not witness the horror of the
details, that saw only the general prestige and the victory of unity, were
deaf to the doleful reports that came from the provinces, and applauded the
"new Constantine."
"This is the grandest and finest thing that ever was conceived and
accomplished," wrote Madame de Sévigné. All the corporations, courts of
justice, academies, universities, municipal bodies, vied with each other in
every species of laudatory allusion; medals represented the King crowned
by Religion "for having brought back to the Church two millions of
Calvinists"; the number of victims was swollen in order to swell the glory
of the persecutor. Statues were erected to the "destroyer of heresy." This
concert of felicitations was prolonged for years; the influence of example,
the habit of admiring, wrung eulogies even from minds that, it would seem,
ought to have remained strangers to this fascination; every writer thought
he must pay his tribute; even La Bruyere, that sagacious observer and
excellent writer, whose acute and profound studies of manners appeared in
1687; and La Fontaine himself, the poet of free-thought and of universal
freedom of action.
The Government redoubled its rigor. The penalty of death was decreed
against ministers reëntering the kingdom without permission, and the
galleys against whomsoever should give them asylum; penalty of death
against whomsoever should take part in a meeting (July 1, 1686). And this
penalty was not simply a dead letter! Whenever the soldiers succeeded in
surprising Protestants assembled for prayer in any solitary place, they
first announced their presence by a volley; those who escaped the bullet
and the sword were sent to the gallows or the galleys. Measures almost as
severe were employed to arrest emigration. Seamen were forbidden to aid the
Reformers to escape under penalty of a fine for the first offence, and of
corporal punishment for a second offence (November 5, 1685). They went
further: ere long, whoever aided the flight of emigrants became liable to
the galleys for life, like emigrants themselves (May 7, 1686). Armed barks
cruised along all the coasts; all the passes of the frontier were guarded;
the peasants everywhere had orders to rush upon the fugitives. Some of the
emigrants perished in attempting to force an exit; a host of others
was brought back manacled; they dared not place them all under the
galley-master's lash; they feared the effects of their despair and of their
numbers, if they should mass them in the royal galleys; they crowded the
prisons with those who were unwilling to purchase pardon by abjuration. The
misfortunes of the first emigrants served to render their coreligionists,
not more timid, but more adroit; a multitude of pilgrims, of mendicants
dragging their children after them, of nomadic artisans of both sexes
and of all trades, incessantly took their way toward all the frontiers;
innumerable disguises thus protected the "flight of Israel out of Egypt."
Reformers selected the darkest winter nights to embark, in frail open
boats, on the Atlantic or stormy Channel; the waves were seen to cast upon
the shores of England families long tossed by tempests and dying with cold
and hunger.
By degrees, the guards stationed along the shores and the frontiers were
touched or seduced, and became saviors and guides to fugitives whom they
were set to arrest. Then perpetual confinement in the galleys was no longer
sufficient against the accomplices of the _desertes_; for the galleys an
edict substituted death; death, which fell not upon those guilty of the
pretended crime of desertion, was promised to their abettors (October
12, 1687). Some were given up to capital punishment; many, nevertheless,
continued their perilous assistance to emigrants, and few betrayed them.
Those Reformers whom the authority wished most to retain in the kingdom,
the noblemen, the rich citizens, manufacturers, and merchants, were those
who escaped easiest, being best able to pay for the interested compassion
of the guards. It is said that the fugitives carried out of France sixty
millions in five years. However this may be, the loss of men was much more
to be regretted than the loss of money. The vital energy of France did
not cease for many years to ooze away through this ever-open ulcer of
emigration.
It is difficult to estimate, even approximately, the number of Protestants
who abandoned their country, become to them a barbarous mother. Vauban
estimated it at a hundred thousand, from 1684 to 1691. Benoit, the
Calvinist historian of the Edict of Nantes, who published his book in 1695,
estimates it at two hundred thousand; the illustrious refugee Basnage
speaks vaguely of three or four hundred thousand. Others give figures much
more exaggerated, while the Duke of Burgundy, in the memoir that we have
cited above, reduces the emigration to less than sixty-eight thousand
souls in the course of twenty years; but the truly inconceivable illusions
preserved by this young prince, concerning the moral and political results
of the Revocation, do not allow us to put confidence in his testimony;
he was deceived, took pleasure in being deceived, and closed his ear to
whomsoever desired to undeceive him. The amount from two hundred thousand
to two hundred fifty thousand, from the Revocation to the commencement
of the following century, that is, to the revolt of Cévennes, seems most
probable. But it is not so much by the quantity as by the quality of
the emigrants that the real loss of France must be measured. France was
incomparably more weakened than if two hundred thousand citizens had been
taken at hazard from the Catholic mass of the nation. The Protestants were
very superior, on the average, if not to the Catholic middle class of Paris
and the principal centres of French civilization, at least to the mass of
the people, and the emigrants were the best of the Protestants. A multitude
of useful men, among them many superior men, left a frightful void in
France, and went to swell the forces of Protestant nations. France declined
both by what she lost and what her rivals gained. Before 1689 nine thousand
sailors, the best in the kingdom, as Vauban says, twelve thousand soldiers,
six hundred officers, had gone to foreign countries.
The most skilful chiefs and agents of contemporaneous industry went in
multitudes to settle in foreign lands. Industrial capacities, less striking
than literary capacities, inflicted losses on France still more felt and
less reparable. France was rich enough in literary glory to lose much
without being impoverished; such was not the case with respect to industry;
France was to descend in a few years, almost in a few months, from that
economical supremacy which had been conquered for her by long efforts of a
protective administration; populous cities beheld the branches of commerce
that constituted their prosperity rapidly sinking, by the disappearance of
the principal industrial families, and these branches taking root on the
other side of the frontiers. Thus fell, never to rise again, the Norman
hat trade--already suffering on account of regulations that fettered the
Canadian fur trade. Other branches, in great number, did not disappear
entirely, but witnessed the rise of a formidable competition in foreign
lands, where they had hitherto remained unknown; these were so many outlets
closed, so many markets lost for our exportation, lately so flourishing.
A suburb of London (Spitalfields) was peopled with our workmen in silk,
emigrated from Lyons and Touraine, which lost three-fourths of their looms;
the manufacture of French silk was also established in Holland, with
paper-making, cloth manufacture, etc. Many branches of industry were
transplanted to Brandenburg, and twenty thousand Frenchmen carried the most
refined arts of civilization to the coarse population thinly scattered
among the sands and firs of that sombre region. French refugees paid for
the hospitality of the Elector Frederick by laying the foundation of the
high destinies of Berlin, which on their arrival was still but a small city
of twelve or fifteen thousand souls, and which, thenceforth, took a start
which nothing was to arrest. Like the Hebrews after the fall of Jerusalem,
the Huguenot exiles scattered themselves over the entire world: some went
to Ireland, carrying the cultivation of flax and hemp; others, led by a
nephew of Duquesne, founded a small colony at the Cape of Good Hope.
France was impoverished, not only in Frenchmen who exiled themselves,
but in those, much more numerous, who remained in spite of themselves,
discouraged, ruined, whether they openly resisted persecution or suffered
some external observances of Catholicism to be wrung from them, all having
neither energy in work nor security in life; it was really the activity
of more than a million of men that France lost, and of the million that
produced most.
The great enterprise, the miracle of the reign, therefore miscarried; the
new temple that Louis had pretended to erect to unity fell to ruin as
it rose from the ground, and left only an open chasm in place of its
foundation. Everything that had been undertaken by the governing power of
France for a century in the direction of national, civil, and territorial
unity had gloriously succeeded; as soon as the governing power left this
legitimate field of unity to invade the domain of conscience and of human
individuality, it raised before itself insurmountable obstacles; it
concerned itself in contests wherein it was equally fatal to conquer or
be conquered, and gave the first blow to the greatness of France. What a
contrast between the pretensions of Louis that he could neither be mistaken
nor deceived, that he saw everything, that he accomplished everything, and
the illusions with which he was surrounded in regard to the facility of
success and the means employed! The nothingness of absolute power, and of
government by one alone, was thus revealed under the reign of the "Great
King!"
%THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION%
FLIGHT OF JAMES II
A.D. 1688
GILBERT BURNET
H.D. TRAILL