3. Persecution: the fate of the Huguenots
Persecution: the fate of the Huguenots As we saw in Chapter 6, section 1, Cardinal Richelieu had destroyed the political and military independence of the French Protestants or Huguenots in 1627–8. From that point, they were a religious minority existing in France by the bare permission of the state. They still had the legal rights of toleration guaranteed by the 1598 Edict of Nantes; but if the French crown chose at any time to revoke the Edict, the Huguenots no longer had the strength to resist an onslaught of Catholic intolerance.
Louis XIV was not a monarch to tolerate for long an entire community in his domain who rejected, cursed, and preached against his religion as the superstition of Antichrist. He could barely refrain from annihilating the Jansensists, but they at least were Catholic; Huguenots were simply damnable heretics outside the precincts of the one true Church. The king was egged on in his intolerance by the Catholic clergy, who had never accepted the Edict of Nantes; it was to them a permanent insult to the truth and glory of the Church they served. They wished to see a united Catholic
France. "One faith, one law, one king" was their motto.
Inspired by such sentiments, Louis began to pressurize his Protestant subjects with ever increasing harassments and discrimination. From 1681 onward, these became unbearable in the extreme. Huguenot churches were demolished in great numbers, as a punishment for having allegedly proselytized Catholics and baptized them as Protestants. Huguenot schools and colleges were shut down. Huguenots were barred from government service and from most of the trade guilds. Huguenot pastors were forbidden to live in the same area for more than three years. In a particularly anguishinducing measure, Louis decreed that any Huguenot child was legally entitled, from the age of seven, to declare himself or herself a Roman
Catholic; on the slightest pretext, government agencies would then forcibly remove from their families any child who was deemed to have turned
Catholic. Faced with such treatment, thousands of Huguenots began to leave France in search of religious freedom elsewhere. Meanwhile, Louis offered financial rewards to Huguenots who would convert to Catholicism; a special "treasury of conversions" was set up to pay handsome dividends to ex-Protestants. The policy worked; many converted.
Finally, on October 17th 1685, Louis officially revoked the Edict of Nantes. All Protestant pastors were banished from the kingdom, but their congregations were not allowed to follow them; Louis wished to destroy the Huguenot religious leadership, in order to make it easier to force the laity back into the Catholic Church. His method of choice to shepherd souls into the Church was the dragonnade. This meant handing over entire Protestant regions to military control; the troops had the right to do virtually as they pleased with the civilian populace, and the result was vandalism, outrage, torture, and (for resisters) death. If any Huguenots were caught trying to flee the country, the men were made galley slaves in the French navy, the women were imprisoned, and the children were sent to convents to be educated as Catholics.
But this did not deter people from making the attempt to escape the land, and something like 200,000 succeeded in leaving France, establishing themselves in other countries. Many found new lives in the Dutch Republic; many were welcomed as refugees in Britain (ironically under a Roman
Catholic king, James II, who could not withstand the overwhelming Protestantism of British popular opinion that clamoured to receive the Huguenots); the Calvinist government of Brandenburg-Prussia made generous provision for many who settled there, as part of its policy to promote the Reformed faith in its largely Lutheran lands.
It was a catastrophe for France. Some regions, such the Pays de Gex (bordering on Geneva), were almost completely depopulated. In others, such as Normandy, local industry was destroyed, since it had been
Huguenot-run; terrible poverty ensued. The armies of France's Protestant enemies were strengthened by the tide of refugees. Nor did Louis' policy bring any internal peace within France itself. It merely renewed the old wars of religion, when the remaining Huguenots of the Cevennes region
(southern-central France) rose in rebellion in 1702 against the dragonnades.
Led by prophets who claimed direct divine inspiration, the Camisards (as they were known) drained French military resources while Louis strove to crush the revolt.12 As an army in the field, the Camisards were finally defeated after two years of epic conflict in 1704, but the survivors used brutal guerilla tactics for another decade.
A famous "ordinary" victim of the persecution was the young Huguenot lady Marie Durand (1715–76). Arrested at the age of 15, Marie was locked away in the Tower of Constance in Aigues-Mortes, a prison for women. She
spent the next 38 years there, in wretched conditions, refusing all pressures to renounce her faith, and ministering to the other women prisoners. She was finally released in 1767. Many of her letters survive, revealing her intrepid character and efforts to publicize the sufferings of the women inmates of the prison.
The Camisard rebellion only really ended with the death of King Louis in 1715, and new leadership provided for the Camisards by Antoine Court
(1696–1760). Court suppressed the "prophets", and reestablished a more traditional Huguenot spirituality and church government and discipline. He was supremely successful, and has often been called the "Restorer of French Protestantism". The Huguenots under Court's guidance became an underground movement, "the Church of the Desert", meeting in secret.
They survived, and were finally granted full rights of citizenship in 1790 during the French Revolution. On almost all counts, Louis XIV's treatment of the Huguenots was both a disaster for his country and a failure.