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.

Antoine Court had not received pastoral ordination. He induced one of his fellow-labourers, Pierre Corteis, to undertake a journey to Switzerland in order to be consecrated. On his return to Languedoc, Corteis laid hands on Antoine Court in the presence of a synod. The chain of time was thus continued, and the sacraments were no longer administered by any but ministers ordained according to the rules of discipline.

In 1718, a synod, consisting of forty-five members, ministers and elders, decided that young men should be intrusted with pastoral functions after a serious examination of their doctrine and morals. Two years later, the remuneration of the pastors was fixed at seventy livres, for their clothing and entire provision. They were lodged and maintained, from house to house, by the faithful. Their salary was afterwards increased to six hundred livres, and towards the end of the century to nine hundred livres. It was not more than the pay of a workman; but it was not the appetite for money that attracted men who, by accepting the pastoral charge, devoted themselves to an almost certain martyrdom.

The churches were invited to establish consistories, in default of which they were not to be visited by the ministers, nor to receive notice of the convocation of the assemblies—a spiritual punishment for a spiritual offence. This was a return to true ecclesiastical order.

The assemblies of the wilderness, as they were called, were held in open day, when the danger was not excessive, at night when persecution was rigorous, in some wild retreat, or in rocky nooks and quarries during adverse weather. The summonses were issued only a few hours before the meeting, and by emissaries of the most trustworthy character. Sentinels were placed about the heights, but unarmed, so that they might give the signal of the approach of soldiers.

The most intelligent and courageous acted as guides to the pastors, and after the service, conducted them to a secure shelter. Rarely did a pastor remain several days following in the same asylum. Wandering from place to place, forced to assume a thousand disguises, and bearing a borrowed name, he was compelled to hide himself like a malefactor, in order to proclaim the God of the Gospel. Such also was the life of the (Roman) Catholic priest under the _régime_ of 1793; the names of the persecutors change, but not the characters, nor the excesses of the persecution.

The worship in the desert was the same as in the times of liberty; liturgic prayers, singing of psalms, preaching, administration of the holy supper on feast-days; a simple worship, easily practicable everywhere, and which required no more preparation than that of the “upper room furnished,” in which the apostles and primitive Christians assembled at Jerusalem.

This simplicity, however, possessed a charm of nobility and grandeur, the calm of solitude suddenly broken by the voice of prayer; the songs of the faithful mounting to the invisible Being, in the presence of the magnificence of nature; the minister of Jesus Christ invoking his God, like the faithful of the primitive church, for the oppressors who raged because they had not yet led Him to the scaffold; poor peasants and humble artificers, who, laying aside their tools of labour for a day, felt anxiety for naught but the sublime interests of the faith of the life to come; the common sentiment of danger which placed their souls continually in presence of their sovereign Judge, endued all the assemblies of the wilderness with that serious majesty, which allies itself so well with the teaching of Christianity.

But whilst the French Reformation rose slowly from its ruins, a fresh blow was silently preparing to strike it anew.

VII.

This was the last great law against the Reformed, which was published on the 14th of May, 1724, in the form of a royal declaration. If it was never thoroughly executed to the letter, [although] it was often applied; and as it remained officially in force during sixty-three years, until the Edict of Toleration of Louis XVI., it is important that its origin, spirit, and principal articles should be made known.

The chief author of this law was Lavergne de Tressan, bishop of Nantes, almoner to the duke of Orleans, and a worthy acolyte of Cardinal Dubois, whom he had consecrated. Irreligious and immoral, and so avaricious as to have accumulated sixty-three benefices, he coveted the Roman purple, and thought that he could not prove his title to it better than by completing the extermination of the heretics. Lavergne de Tressan presented his project to Dubois and to the regent, each of whom refused to entertain it. He was more successful with the Duke de Bourbon, who had been appointed minister by Louis XV. This Duke de Bourbon was a severe and haughty man, of ignoble aspect, deficient at once both in convictions and intelligence, governed by shameless female favourites, and innocent of having ever passed any other than barbarous laws. He ordained, among other things, that all beggars should be branded with a hot iron.

Some magistrates, it is said, also had a hand in the declaration of 1724; they introduced certain modifications which were unfavourable to the domination of the clergy, as afterwards appeared.

The edict contained eighteen articles. It was a compilation of the most severe ordinances issued against the Reformed under the reign of Louis XIV., with, in general, aggravated penalties. The odious fiction was relied upon, that there were no longer any Protestants in France; and Louis XV., then fourteen years of age, was made to say in the preamble, that he had nothing so much at heart as to pursue the lofty designs of his right honoured lord and great-grandfather, and that he was desirous of enunciating his intentions explicitly.

For these reasons, he declared as follows—the punishment of perpetual imprisonment at the galleys for men, and seclusion during life for women, with confiscation of their property, if they attended any other worship than that of the (Roman) Catholic religion; punishment of death against all the preachers; of the galleys or imprisonment against those who sheltered or assisted them in any way whatever, and against those who omitted to denounce them; an order to parents to have their children baptized within twenty-four hours by the curate of the parish, to send them to the (Roman) Catholic schools and catechisms until the age of fourteen, and to the Sunday and feast-day teachings until the age of twenty; an order to midwives to report all births to the priests, and to physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries to give notice of every serious illness of the new converts, and authority for the priests to have interviews with the sick by themselves. If any one refused the sacraments or directed a member of his family to refuse it, he incurred the penalty of having relapsed. There was to be no legitimate marriage, except such as were celebrated according to the canons of the Church. Parents were not allowed to send their children out of the kingdom to be educated, nor to marry them there; but on the other hand, the minors of those parents who were abroad, might marry without the consent of their relations. The certificates of Catholicity were declared obligatory for all offices, all academic degrees, all admissions to trading corporations. Finally, the mulcts and confiscated property were to be appropriated for the relief of the re-united subjects who might be in want.

Never since the origin of human society, had the legislator more insolently disregarded the law of nature, the civil law, family, property, the liberty and sacredness of individual faith. This afforded another proof to what monstrous acts one is driven when, by confounding spiritual and temporal matters, the laws of the state are made subordinate to the maxims of the (Roman) Catholic church.

Historians unite in a common expression of horror at the Edict of 1724. Sismondi says, “It is with astonishment that we behold, in this infidel age, when the reins of power were held by a prince without belief or probity, and by a female courtier without modesty, the renewal of a persecution which the rigid faith of Louis XIV. could scarcely explain.... The clergy, who had not dared to ask for this inopportune law, accepted it with transport.”[114]

M. Charles Lecretelle also observes, “The first act of the government was as absurd as it was odious. It was even a more cruel edict against the Protestants than the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The most secret exercise of the Reformed religion was prohibited. Children were torn from their parents to be reared in the (Roman) Catholic religion.... In short, every kind of oppression that had been conceived by the ministers of Louis XIV., and that public horror had begun to render obsolete, was renewed. The Marchioness de Prie, whose impiety equalled that of Cardinal Dubois, persuaded her lover (the Duke de Bourbon) that he was acting upon the great principles of a statesman, by recommencing a new persecution. Everybody was disgusted by these efforts, which vice made to assume the appearance of zeal, and in this barbarous folly, regretted the regent’s toleration.”[115]

Rulhières and the Baron de Breteuil affirm that the council were surprised into sanctioning this edict. They prove that laws, inspired by two very opposite tendencies, had been strangely confounded in its compilation. The Molinist or Jesuitical spirit sought to employ universal outward constraint, consenting at the same time to a relaxation of all the interior conditions of Catholicity. The Jansenist spirit had, on the contrary, exacted rigorous conditions of Catholicity, but desired no constraint. Thus there was one of two things—either the employment of physical force, with a simple appearance of union with (Roman) Catholicism, or real union, without the employment of material force. But on the declaration of 1724, it was required, at one and the same time, that all people should be (Roman) Catholics under pain of the galleys and death, and that they should perform acts of Catholicity, which only good (Roman) Catholics could do. This was impracticable and absurdly impossible.

We should here observe the great change, which had begun to display itself in the conduct of the priests. On the eve and on the day of the Revocation, they widely extended their arms, as we have remarked before. They seemed to say to the Protestants, “Come, all of you, just as you are. We will be satisfied with the most vague and general abjuration. We will not interfere with you at the domestic hearth. It is enough if you only call yourselves Catholics and observe the principal forms of the Church.”

But subsequently, their language and their conduct sensibly changed, and their exactions increased from year to year, particularly when the law had declared that there were Protestants in the kingdom no longer. “Take heed,” the priests said; “we cannot administer the sacraments to false brethren; this would be an abominable profanation. We must have long and severe proofs, instructions of six months, a year’s, two years’ duration, solemn oaths; in short, a complete certainty that you are true and faithful Catholics. Otherwise, we will not celebrate your marriages, nor give you certificates of Catholicity, and you may maintain your civil rights as best you can.”

This alteration, continually more marked, is naturally explained by the disastrous defeats the priests had suffered since the Revocation. They imagined that the demolition of the places of worship, the banishment of the pastors, the deprivation of all regular instruction, the want of a religion, the legal duty of performing acts of Catholicity, would restore true believers to the Church, at least in the second generation. But their expectation had been deceived, particularly with regard to the country people and the industrial classes. Children and grandchildren hated the (Roman) Catholic church as much as their fathers; and they regarded the curates with no less detestation and contempt.

Tired of acting so miserable a part, they resolved to administer the sacraments to none but the most undoubted (Roman) Catholics, and they were perfectly right; but they should then have disavowed and rejected the intervention of physical constraint, which they did not. They persisted in calling for rigour, as if they were satisfied with appearances, and to exact positive proofs of religion, as if they employed rigour no longer! A more enormous and detestable contradiction has never been witnessed![116]

Then, having arrived at this degree of inconsequence, the clergy came into collision with the magistracy, and this is a new phase of the question, which it is important to understand; for all the remainder of this history until 1787 is involved in it.

If the councillors of the Parliaments, and the magistrates generally, exhibited severity against the Reformed, they always implied that the priests should administer the sacraments without exacting excessive proofs. From the reign of Louis XIV., their decrees might be interpreted in the following manner:—“We are absolutely determined that your marriages shall be blessed by a priest, and that your children shall be presented for Catholic baptism; otherwise, you shall have no civil status; your unions shall be illegal, and your children shall be attainted with illegitimacy; in certain cases, even, you shall forfeit your property and be condemned to the galleys. But reassure yourselves, we will require nothing but simple formalities. It is agreed that the clergy shall impose nothing else, and we will abide by it.”

Relying upon these maxims, the Protestants conceived that they were authorized in conceding to the priests as little as possible; but the latter replied,—“The opinion of the judges is nothing to us. The clergy alone have the light of deciding in sacramental matters. No human power can compel us to give them to those whom we think unworthy. Attend the mass and our instructions for years; confess yourselves regularly; show yourselves, in a word, to be faithful Catholics, and you shall participate in the favours of the Church; otherwise you shall not.”

Strange spectacle! The judge insisted upon the execution of the laws, because he interpreted them in one sense, and the priest applied them in another. The first was only solicitous for civil unity; the latter was anxious above all things for spiritual unity. One only obliged the Protestants to be (Roman) Catholics outwardly; the other used the sentence to force them to be so internally. To such an anomalous state of things had these edicts given birth, which had ceased to correspond with the general conscience of the epoch. Even the (Roman) Catholics themselves, it is well known, had analogous conflicts in respect of the refusal of the sacraments to the Jesuits, and the certificates of confession. The only solution of the problem lay in the mutual independence, that is now proclaimed in all the constitutions, of the civil and the religious state.

The Baron de Breteuil shows, in a memorial addressed to Louis XVI., the inextricable embarrassment that had arisen with regard to the Protestants. He says: “On one side, there is the absolute necessity of the certificate of Catholicity; on the other, a scrupulous and arbitrary examination before granting this certificate. What else than laws of impossible execution could result from all these confused ideas, from all these incoherent and contradictory dispositions?... These unfortunate people, alike rejected by our tribunals under one name, and repulsed by our churches under another name, unrecognised at the same time as Calvinists, and unrecognised as converts, wholly unable to obey laws which oppose each other, and thereby destitute of every means of proving, either before a priest or before a judge, the evidence of their births, their marriages, and their burials, are cut off, as it were, from the family of mankind.”[117]

The illustrious Chancellor d’Aguesseau has stated the dilemma in a very perfect manner. “Either the Church must relax its rigour by some modification, or if the Church does not think it ought to do so, it must cease to importune the king to use his authority to reduce his subjects to an impossibility, by commanding them to fulfil a religious duty, which the Church will not permit them to discharge.”

And, indeed, the declaration of 1724, while it repeatedly engendered frightful consequences, was never fully executed. It contained, moreover, dispositions revolting against the most sacred feelings of human nature, justice, and society. To punish with the galleys and confiscation of wealth a son, or a daughter, who addressed pious exhortations to a dying father; to inflict a similar punishment upon whoever should fail to denounce his pastor, or should open to him the door of his house; to load with a fine the physician who should refuse to discharge the infamous office of informer—all this, as M. de Sismondi remarks, bore the stamp of so barbarous and savage a fanaticism, that it may be doubted if the code of any other nation has approached it. Were it possible, again, in the eighteenth century, to write similar atrocities in the laws, it would be impossible to find judges and administrators to carry them out.

As it always happens, atrocity engendered ridicule. Some of the priests instituted a roll-call of children in the Church, after the example of serjeants at a military review, and noted those who were absent that their parents might be fined. But the children frequently refused to answer, mocked the curate, and disturbed his mass. What could be done? Where were the means of punishment, when it might be required to send a whole population, fathers, mothers, and children, to the galleys?

Cardinal Fleury, who governed the kingdom after the Duke de Bourbon, seems to have comprehended this difficulty. Having been engaged in his youth on a mission with Fénélon in Saintonge, and passed many years in Provence, he was acquainted with the invincible firmness of the Protestants. This, conjoined with the alliance of this priest with Great Britain and Holland, the mildness of his character, and his desire of sparing Louis XV. the anxieties of government, will explain his conduct towards the Protestants. He did not destroy the sword of intolerance, but he willingly let it remain in the scabbard.

The curates of Cevennes addressed several urgent remonstrances to him upon this subject. They bitterly complained of the increasing desertion of the Huguenots. The aged cardinal gave little heed to them; he was engrossed with other affairs, and feared disturbance more than heresy.

The persecution, therefore, was only local and momentary, according to the humour of the intendants. Some meetings were surprised and dispersed by the soldiery; some families were ruined, and other unfortunates were condemned to the galleys. The pastors, particularly, were tracked with implacable cruelty, in the hope that the terror of death would induce them to quit the kingdom.

Many of them were capitally executed. We will cite [the case of] the minister Alexander Roussel, who was hanged at Montpellier, on the 30th of November, 1728, respecting whose martyrdom a popular complaint has come down to us. He was sold for a bribe, and confessed without hesitation that he had preached in Cevennes. When he was asked where he lodged, he replied: “The heaven is my covering.” The Jesuits vainly solicited him to change his religion; his answer was: “I will ever keep the law of Jesus Christ: if I die for His sake, I shall dwell with angels.” He was dragged to the gallows with the rope about his neck, bareheaded and barefoot, singing the 51st psalm, and died uttering prayers to God for his judges and the executioner.

Another pastor, Pierre Durand, who, with Antoine Court, had signed the first deliberations of the synods of the wilderness, was also executed at Montpellier, on the 22nd of April, 1782. He was a man full of years, and noted for his faith and zeal. Five priests accompanied him to the scaffold, and endeavoured to wrench from him an abjuration at any price. Durand remained firm to the last.

These executions afflicted the Protestants of the wilderness, but did not cast them down. The very exactions of the clergy themselves conspired to drive them from the Church of Rome; for seeing that they would not be satisfied with simple forms of (Roman) Catholicism, they resolved upon renouncing the Church in their turn, and that completely. From this time the number of baptisms and marriages of the wilderness multiplied, in spite of the civil disabilities which attainted them.

Antoine Court strengthened and encouraged the faithful by his exhortations and his example. In 1728 he undertook a tour of nearly a hundred leagues, convoked thirty-two religious meetings in two months, and counted as many as three thousand hearers at the foot of his pulpit; even the most timid began to be emboldened.

The synods rapidly increased, and became more rigid against the parents, who allowed their children to be baptized in the (Roman) Catholic church, or to be married there. They also insisted upon the duty of taking part in the religious services. The synod of 1730 says: “Write to the Protestants under the Cross, that they may know the indispensable obligation they are under to attend the meetings of piety, whenever Providence shall furnish the opportunity. If after being sufficiently instructed in this duty, they refuse to fulfil it, it shall be declared that they are cut off from the Church of the Lord, and are no longer His children.”

It is interesting to observe that these men, who were denied all the rights of citizens, were so bent upon discharging all its duties, that they employed their authority in repressing contraband trade. They thus decided in 1730: “The members of our churches who, to escape paying the king’s dues, shall carry on or countenance smuggling, shall be first censured, and then, if they relapse, exposed to final excommunication. The assembly does not in this article comprise the contraband commerce in religious books, which do not anywise prejudice the king or the state.”

The re-awakening of Languedoc and Dauphiny excited a pious rivalry in other provinces. Rouergue, Guienne, Quercy, Saintonge, Aunis, and Poitou, held meetings again and demanded pastors. There were but few. Antoine Court sought the young men who appeared fitted for this holy vocation at the plough, in the trader’s warehouse, in the workman’s shop; but the instruction they derived from a wandering life was insufficient.

The restorer of French Protestantism began to reflect upon the necessity of a theological school. To open it in France was not to be dreamed of. The universities of England and Germany were too distant from the southern provinces, and did not speak their language. Geneva was too near, and its academy too severely watched. Antoine Court decided upon Lausanne. His long and urgent solicitations, his indefatigable endeavours, the liberality of Switzerland, England, and the other Protestant powers, contributed to found there a French theological seminary. Court went to establish it himself, in 1730, with the title of deputy-general of the churches, and directed this school during the thirty concluding years of his life. It was this college that sent forth all the Protestant pastors until the reign of Napoleon.

VIII.

Before we proceed to relate the events, which will conduct us beyond the year 1750, it is but a duty of justice which we owe to the refugee pastors, to follow them in their exile; they had all ceased to live in the former half of the eighteenth century. Although they died upon a foreign soil, the French Reformation has a right to claim them: they belong to it by their birth, their education, the first years of their ministry, by the language they used, and by the constancy of their sympathy for their oppressed brethren.

We shall not speak of the lay refugees, whose names are illustrious in literature, science, and industry, such as Rapin Thoyras, the learned Bayle, Denis Papin, the constructor of machines, the chemist Lémery, the traveller Chardin, and many others. We must confine ourselves to those fugitives, who exercised a direct influence upon the state of the Reformed churches of France.

It is universally acknowledged, that the majority of the fugitive pastors was composed of pious and intelligent men of irreproachable character. No Protestant clergy in Europe were superior to them. We will only mention the principal among them, arranging them according to the date of their death.

Pierre Jurieu (1637-1713) was a laborious and vehement controversialist. He has had numerous opponents among the (Roman) Catholics and the sceptics, and his memory has suffered in consequence. It must be confessed that he gave occasion to certain attacks by his venturous predictions, his assertions concerning suspected miracles, and the sharpness of his polemics. But these defects were redeemed by a host of estimable qualities; a firm attachment to his religious persuasions, an incomparable activity, a solid erudition in every branch of theological science, and a clear and ready wit. He never lacked penetration to discover error, or courage to combat it.

He did not long exercise the functions of a pastor. Nominated in 1674 professor of theology at Sédan, he made his appearance with much _éclat_. Bayle, who pursued him at a later period with so many invectives, at that time wrote: “He is one of the first men of his age, and if the delicacy of his constitution does not offer resistance to his ardour for study, and to his application to the functions of his office, everything may be expected of him. I tell you, and I repeat it, he is the first man of our communion, whether it be for sound judgment or for the nicety of his wit.”

It is not sufficiently known, that during his retreat in Holland, some years before the Revocation, he was almost the _only opponent_ (_le seul tenant_, as they called it), of Arnauld, Bossuet, Nicole, and Maimbourg. The others, being still in France, dared not speak out. But in his pulpit at Rotterdam, he recoiled before no truth, and his strong and unfettered voice often inflicted the most severe and just chastisements upon the persecutors.

Nor is it sufficiently known that he became, after the fatal edict, the protector of a crowd of refugees, that he solicited and procured for them the assistance of several sovereigns, and that at the same time he gave them the shelter of hospitality, he consoled and encouraged their brethren, who languished at home, by his _Pastoral Letters_.

The list of Jurieu’s works is very extensive. While yet with his flock at Vitry-le-Français, he composed a _Treatise on Devotion_, which was reprinted seventeen times within a few years, and twenty-six times in an English translation. This work has induced the regret that the author, absorbed by controversy, did not employ more of his time in writing books of simple edification.

His reply to Father Maimbourg, _Le Calvinisme et le Papisme mis en parallèle_ (“Calvinism and Popery Compared”), less pointed than the answer of Bayle, and less venomous, nevertheless obtained considerable applause, and was greatly read. Claude wrote to him: “Your last work against Maimbourg has at length reached me, and I have not read, but devoured it, without the possibility of quitting it. Everybody here (at Paris) of any note, with any courage or zeal left, is charmed with the book.”

He answered the attacks of Nicole by the _Vrai Système de l’Eglise_ (“The True System of the Church”), which competent judges declare to be his master-piece. In it Jurieu develops the doctrine of the invisible church, in opposition to the visible communion of Rome. He also produced _Histoire Critique des Dogmes et des Cultes_ (“A Critical History of Dogmas and Forms of Worship”), where humanity is considered in its religious development. The illustrious defender of the Reformed faith did not cease to wield his pen until the eve of the day of his death.

Pierre Allix (1641-1717) withdrew to England after the Revocation. He was only thirty years of age when he was summoned to succeed to the Drelincourts and Daillés. His discourses were full, solid, and distinguished for a sobriety and a clearness of style that made them equally pleasing to the educated and the ignorant. He had prepared his last sermon upon the farewell of Saint Paul to the Ephesians, to be preached at Charenton; but the place of worship was closed by the kings order eight days sooner than was expected.

“Doctor Allix,” says one of his biographers, “was loved and esteemed by all the learned men of his time. Extremely zealous for the Protestant religion, he was always ready to undertake its defence against the partisans of the Romish church. He passionately desired to unite the Protestants, particularly the Lutherans, with the Reformed, and he frequently consulted the ministers of Geneva, Holland, and Berlin, on this subject. He had a profound acquaintance with all the sciences. He was well versed in the Hebrew, Syriac, and Chaldean languages; and as his erudition was vast, and his memory excellent, he was a kind of living library.” Some writers of great weight have considered him to be the most learned of the ministers of Charenton.

Pierre Allix received at London the title of Honorary Doctor, from the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. The Anglican clergy had so high an opinion of his ability that they confided to him the task of writing _The History of the Councils_, and even the Parliament bestowed upon him particular marks of consideration.

Jean La Placette (1639-1718) was surnamed the Nicole of the Reformed, on account of his numerous and judicious moral writings. He equalled the Jansenist doctor in knowledge of the human heart, and surpassed him in that of the Scriptures. His style was simple and chaste, and he was, above all, sincere in the highest sense of the word.

La Placette was a pastor of the French church at Copenhagen for the space of twenty-six years (1685-1711). He dedicated his _Nouveaux Essais de Morale_ (“New Moral Essays”) to the queen of Denmark. “Our people,” he says in the preface, “are far from comprehending the extent of purity which the Gospel requires of us. They are even influenced by a great number of false maxims, more pernicious than errors of pure speculation. Besides, our writers—at least those of our nation—have been forced by the importunity of their adversaries, to give up all their leisure to the defence of the truth, so that they have been able to compose but a very few works of morality, and these only treat of some particular matters. Thus, that part of religion, which is, if I may venture to say so, the soul and essence of it, and which it is so necessary should be well explained and understood, has been in some sort neglected.”

David Martin (1639-1721) has acquired a popular name in the Reformed communion of France by his corrections of the old versions of the Bible. His translation, without being free from defects, is nevertheless that which most faithfully reproduces the simplicity and the vigour of the original text. He was invited in 1694, by the synod of the Walloon churches, to undertake this book and to accompany it with critical reflections. Thirteen years after, he published his new edition of the Bible, in two folio volumes.

This pastor had made the French language his particular study. “So well had he mastered all the rules and niceties,” says Nicéron, “that he was able to furnish remarks and observations to the French Academy. He sent many to them when the academy was about to print the second edition of its dictionary; and the letter of thanks which he received in return, shows the importance the Academy attached to his criticisms.”

David Martin twice refused the professorial chair; but he took pleasure in giving lectures at his house on theology, to the young students of Utrecht. At the age of upwards of eighty years he still preserved considerable mental vigour. On the 7th of September, 1721, he preached upon Providence, with a force which astonished all his auditory; at the conclusion of the sermon he was unable to descend from the pulpit but with the assistance of his friends, and two days after drew his last breath. This pious divine had always desired that he might die when leaving the house of God.

Jacques Basnage (1653-1723), grandson of Benjamin Basnage, of whom we have already spoken, surpassed all the members of his family in the variety of his acquirements, the extent of his labours, and the grandeur of the part he was summoned to play. “He was more fitted for a minister of state than of a parish,” says Voltaire.

Basnage, in fact, participated in several important negotiations. He took part in the conferences preceding the peace of Utrecht, and demanded, but uselessly, the re-establishment of religious freedom in France. Shortly afterwards, Cardinal de Bouillon, who had retired to Holland, confided to him the affairs he had to settle with the States-General. In 1716 the Abbé Dubois had recourse to the intermission of Basnage to conclude a treaty with the United Provinces and England. Singular spectacle! that of a poor exiled pastor influencing the alliances of his native country!

The regent also addressed him to prevent the Spanish Cardinal Alberoni from exciting insurrections among the Protestants of the southern provinces. Basnage advised the French government to put itself in communication with Antoine Court, and this humble minister of the desert, condemned to death by the laws [of his country], promised that Languedoc should not be disturbed. On this occasion, and at the express request of the Duke d’Orléans, Basnage wrote a pastoral instruction for the Reformed of France, which spread with rapidity. In it the author maintains the principles of Christianity respecting the obedience due to the sovereign; but, perhaps, after exhorting the oppressed to submission, he might have said something more to the oppressors.

Placed at the head of the French church of the Hague, appointed historiographer to the States-General of Holland, and surrounded by the esteem of the public, he was as happy as an exile from his native land could be. “He was true,” says a biographer, “even to the minutest things. The custom of the highest society had imbued him with a politeness rarely found in the learned. Affable and popular, his greatest pleasure was to serve others, and to employ his credit in favour of the unfortunate.”

It is surprising that he was able, in the midst of his political occupations and the labours of his pastoral office, to compose so many works on theology and ecclesiastical history. Some of them are very voluminous, among others, _L’Histoire de la religion des Eglises réformées_ (“The History of the Religion of the Reformed Churches”); _L’Histoire des Juifs_ (“The History of the Jews”); and that of the Church from the time of the Christian era to the eighteenth century. The erudition of Basnage is vast, his thought penetrating, and his style firm; he raised controversy to a height that has only been attained by Bossuet.

Jacques Abbadie (1654-1724) was the best apologist of Christianity, and one of the most able writers of the Reformed communion. After completing his studies at the academies of Sédan and Saumur, he entered into the service of the French church of Berlin. “The only thing that vexes me,” the Duke de Montausier said one day to the ambassador of the elector of Brandenburg, when speaking of a work of Abbadie, “is, that the author of this book should be at liberty.” If France had lost one of her glories, who was chargeable with the fault?

Abbadie afterwards withdrew to England, and died dean of the parish of Killaloe in Ireland. We read in a notice of his life: “His manners, polished by intercourse with good society, were mild and easy, and a more even and obliging temper never existed. As his mind was full of gaiety, and he expressed himself upon all kinds of subjects with as much elegance, correctness, and fire as in his meditated works, his conversation was as agreeable as useful, and one never quitted his company without regret.”

His treatise on _L’Art de se connaître soi-même_ (“The Art of Knowing Oneself”) is full of judicious observations, and shows that the author had profoundly meditated upon the relations of the human conscience to the duties of the Gospel. But the most celebrated of his works is the treatise on _La Verité de la religion Chrétienne_ (“The Truth of the Christian Religion”). It obtained the suffrage of (Roman) Catholics as well as Protestants. “This admirable work,” said the Abbé Desfontaines, forty years afterwards, “eclipses everything that has ever been published before it for the defence of Christianity. How many conversions has it not effected! How many strong minds has it not subjected!”

Madame de Sévigné wrote to the Comte de Bussi-Rabutin, “It is the most divine of books; this esteem is general. I do not believe any one has spoken of religion like this man. I shall re-peruse it every three months for the remainder of my life.” And the count answered with the same enthusiasm: “Until now I have never been touched by other books, which tell me of God, and now I see well the reason; it is that the source appeared doubtful; but seeing it clear and transparent in Abbadie, I value what I did not before esteem. I repeat it, this is an admirable book. He pourtrays to me everything he says, and compels my reason not to doubt that which once appeared to it incredible.”

The author combats the Atheists in the first part of his work, the Deists in the second, and the Socinians in the third. He starts with this proposition, “There is a God,” to arrive at this: “Jesus is the promised Messiah.” Then he ascends from this last proposition to the first. The book has been translated into several languages, and it has appeared in a great variety of editions.

Elie Bénoît (1640-1728) was a learned and industrious theologian. We discharge a debt of gratitude in consecrating a few lines to the author of _L’Histoire de l’Edit de Nantes_ (“The History of the Edict of Nantes”), of which we have made great use in our own.

He was pastor of the church of Alençon, and had the pain of seeing his place of worship closed, under the futile pretext that the faithful had assumed a defensive attitude on some occasion of their worship being interrupted by the populace. He went to Paris in support of their cause; but instead of obtaining the redress of his complaints, he was answered by threats.

Bénoît took refuge in Holland, and published there a letter addressed to his former parishioners. As we read in his memoirs, they emigrated _en masse_; for there remained in France scarcely an eighth, which will serve to explain why the town of Alençon ceases to figure in the catalogue of the Reformed churches.

The chief work of Bénoît is the history we have so often quoted. It should be read by all who are desirous of studying one of the most important periods of the French Reformation. More brevity and precision might perhaps be desired in this book, but assuredly not greater exactness. The author displays a correct judgment, and a moderation which proves him to have been swayed by no other passion than that of truth.

Jacques Saurin (1677-1730) was the greatest preacher of the French Protestants. He was born at Nismes, where his father practised as an advocate, and received his early education at Geneva. He was tempted, at the age of seventeen, by the profession of arms, and became an ensign in the Savoyard service. On the re-establishment of peace, he resumed his academical studies under the learned teachers Tronchin, Turretin, and Pictet.

In 1701 he was appointed pastor of a French church in London; and some years subsequently, having visited Holland and preached at the Hague, he received so much applause that a new place was created for him, under the title of “_minister of the nobles_:” he held it until his death.

From 1708 to 1725 he published five volumes of sermons; seven others, inferior to the first, appeared posthumously. He possessed all the great qualities of a Christian orator: a profound knowledge of the Bible, a healthy and vigorous theology, the art of devising learned and original plans, a masculine logic, judicious and always serious ornaments, and a style which was eminently subservient to thought; though sometimes it might be desired that there had been more unction in his speech and more correctness in his language. The misfortunes of the faithful, to whom Saurin preached the Gospel, enhanced his oratorical powers, by surrounding it with a tragic poignancy. Some of his sermons have thrown weight into the scales of the destinies of Europe.

The action, with which Saurin delivered his discourses, is not so well known as their substance. The journalists of his time speak of him in the following manner: “He has a natural exterior which prepossesses the congregation in his favour, whilst his voice is powerful and sonorous. Those, who remember the magnificent prayer which he pronounced before the sermon, will not have forgotten how the ear was filled with the most harmonious sounds. It could have been wished that his voice preserved the same _éclat_ until the end of the action; but as we are not drawing a panegyric, we may confess that he did not so well manage it. A little less impetuosity would have freed him from this defect. The expectation raised by the prayer was not disappointed by the sermon; [that it was not so] we [may] confidently appeal to his auditors. All, without any exception, were charmed; and he who came with the intention to criticise, gradually forgot his purpose, as he attentively sought to discover something susceptible of criticism.”[118]

Saurin published letters upon the state of Christianity in France. He reproached the Reformed with not having quitted a country where they could not freely celebrate their worship, and applied to them the name of temporisers. The reproach was too severe, and it is not to be regretted that his advice to emigrate _en masse_ was not followed.

He was accused before the Walloon synods of having justified officious lying in his discourses upon the Bible. This became the subject of a long and laborious polemical contest. Saurin addressed this declaration to the synods: “I have not pretended in my dissertation upon lying to do anything else than to report _historically_ the sentiments of those who believe that lying is always criminal, and of those who believe it to be innocent in certain cases. As for the holiness and veracity of God, as well as the obligation which binds men to speak the truth, I hold by the doctrine contained in my catechism, which I will ever teach.”

It is related that Saurin, who in the pulpit was so skilful in unravelling the passions of men and their secret motives of action, was unable to discover them in society. He was altogether wanting in experience of the world; and was so full of confidence and candour, that it was as easy to deceive him as a child. His life was frequently troubled in consequence.

Jaques Lenfant (1661-1728) and Isaac de Beausobre (1659-1738), are two names which ought to remain united in the pages of history, since they have figured in joint works. They were both pastors at Berlin, and had the same turn of mind, the same taste for historical and critical studies, the same belief, [and lived] the same religious life; whilst contemporary memoirs attribute to both the same amiable character.

Lenfant has written the history of the councils of Constance, Pisa, and Basle—books dictated by science and conscience. Voltaire says of him, that he contributed more than any one to spread the grace and strength of the French language to the furthermost parts of Germany. Beausobre, for his part, has made for himself a name justly celebrated by his history of Manichæism.

The two authors were associated in the publication of a new edition of the New Testament, with critical notes. To Beausobre were allotted the Epistles of Saint Paul, and to Lenfant all the other books of the New Testament. The task of the former was more difficult, that of the other of greater extent. The biographer of Beausobre says: “This distribution of the work did not prevent their working in concert. When one was of a different opinion to the other, they discussed and criticised, but each cheerfully submitted to the strongest evidence.”

The successors of this illustrious generation of refugee pastors and theologians belong to us no more. Born and educated out of France, their glory is the property of the countries that sustained them on their hospitable soil.

IX.

We left the Reformed zealously labouring for the re-organization of their churches. They restored vigorous action to many of the articles of ancient discipline. The newly-established consistories watched over the maintenance of good order among the flocks. The meetings approached the great centres of the Protestant population, and were held more frequently by day. In a word, the period from 1730 to 1744 was a time of calm when compared with the horrible tempest, which had dispersed and scattered everything but a few years before.

The religious movement extended. A young pastor, who joined great prudence to ardent faith, Michel Viala, traversed Upper Languedoc, and held assemblies in the neighbourhoods of Castres and Montauban. The county of Foix received Pierre Corteis; Béarn, Etienne Deffère; and Poitou and Normandy, Jean Loire and André Migault. We see that the pastors, whose number was always limited, were compelled to discharge the duties of missionaries; their fields of labour were far more extensive than dioceses.

With a view to the introduction of greater regularity into their teaching and their maxims of conduct, they resolved to convoke a general or national synod, and this assembly was opened, on the 18th of August, 1744, in a secluded spot in Lower Languedoc, under the presidency of Michel Viala. The majority of the old Protestant provinces, from Cevennes to Normandy, were represented at this meeting; but there was no delegate from the Isle of France or Paris.

The moment was well chosen in one respect, and badly in another. The Protestants could collect with greater facility, because the war engaged all the attention of the government and all the forces of the country abroad. But this very war was certain to inspire the council with greater displeasure at such an assembly.

The first step of the synod was to declare its inviolable fidelity to the king. It ordered the celebration, before the end of the year, of a solemn fast in all the Reformed flocks of the kingdom, “for the preservation of the sacred person of his majesty, for the success of his arms, for the cessation of war, and for the deliverance of the Church.” The pastors were exhorted to preach at least once a year upon the submission due to “the powers that be.”

This meeting took wise measures for the observation of discipline and the correction of manners. It invited the pastors to abstain from treating of points of controversy in the pulpit, and not to speak without circumspection of the sufferings of the Reformed people. It recommended to the flocks to celebrate their worship as much as possible in open day. The tenth article of the resolutions stated, “As there are many provinces, where the religious services are still performed during the night, the synod, in order to manifest still more the purity of our intentions as well as to preserve uniformity, has directed the pastors and elders of the different provinces to conform, as far as prudence will permit, to the churches, which perform their service in daylight.”

Antoine Court came from Lausanne to be present at this great meeting, and after appeasing a difference which had arisen with regard to a pastor who had been falsely accused, he had the joy of preaching to an audience of ten thousand persons.

This assembly of so many of the faithful, this general synod, of which the members came from the extremities of the realm, this semi-publicity given to acts that the law considered as criminal and rebellious, disturbed and irritated the council, who began to fear that the Protestants maintained a secret intelligence with foreigners.

Nothing was more false. From the sixteenth century, in the very times of the most bloody persecutions, the mass of the Reformed had never once forgotten their duty to their sovereign and their country. If in the wars of the Camisards, some of the Cévenoles had looked to England or Holland for assistance, it was only a local and partial affair. But the apprehensions of the court, which continually broke out afresh after the Edict of Revocation, prove the great truth, that it is not possible to persecute with impunity. When public authority ignores every condition of justice, morality, and order, it is the first victim of its attempt; and in default of the remorse, from which fanaticism or corruption may relieve it, it expiates its crime by unceasing and invincible terrors.

Calumny played its part in these deplorable circumstances; and opinion, ignorant of the true sentiments of a proscribed population, easily adopted the grossest falsehoods. It was pretended that the pastor Jacques Roger had read a false Edict of Toleration at the religious meetings, in order to drive the Protestants to rebellion; that those who were present were armed; that they had sung a hymn imploring God to bless the English with victory; that their collections for the poor were military taxes; that twenty-five thousand Camisards held themselves in readiness to join the enemy, who blockaded the ports of Provence; that the convents were to be pillaged, the priests and the monks massacred, and the whole south of France put to fire and sword.

These popular rumours were still more extravagant than odious, and had not even a shadow of truth. Yet they were believed at court, and the Baron Lenain d’Asfeld, intendant of Languedoc, was directed to ascertain indirectly from the consistories and pastors of the desert, if it were true that the religionists had understandings with the enemy. He wished, moreover, to know if, in case of an invasion, the government might count upon a rising of Protestant volunteers. This was a new example of the effects of intolerance; they thought themselves obliged to treat with Frenchmen as if they were foreigners; and because they would not consider them citizens, they were no longer trusted in their country’s day of misfortune.

The Protestants answered, that not one of their co-religionists would join the English armies, that they were all ready to perform their duty for the service of the king; that the pastors never ceased to recommend obedience, and that if they contravened the laws in matters of religion, it was under an obligation superior to all human authority.

The intendant Lenain, who had had many occasions of studying the [character of the] Protestants, did not distrust their assurances of fidelity. But it was not so at Versailles, where objects were distorted by fear and distance. The news of the national synod of 1744 produced those acts, which seemed allied to madness.

Louis XV. was made to sign, in February, 1745, two ordinances still more cruel, if that were possible, than any that had preceded them. In addition to the penalty of death against the pastors, and of perpetual imprisonment at the galleys against those who harboured them, a fine of three thousand livres was pronounced against all the Protestants of the place where a pastor should be arrested. As for the meetings, it was no longer necessary to have been present at them in order to be doomed to the galleys and [to suffer] forfeiture of property; it was sufficient not to have denounced them. Everything was a crime according to these laws; and out of fifteen hundred thousand Reformed, one-half might have been condemned, at the end of six months, to row in convict vessels, and the other half to beg their bread.

Although it was impossible to execute these ordinances literally, and although the very men, who had drawn them up, would not have suffered it, they were followed by cruel disasters. The Protestants might send petitions upon petitions to the king, to the ministers, to the intendants, to every one who had power to help them; these requests, wherein they stated in the humblest language their sufferings and their unalterable sentiments of fidelity, did not reach their address, and if they did arrive there, were never read. Some were burned or fixed to the pillory by the hand of the executioner, as if their complaints were less just because they were stamped with ignominy.

Antoine Court has written an historical memoir upon the persecutions that recommenced after the synod of 1744. His integrity is as free from suspicion as his perfect acquaintance with the events, and we therefore borrow from him the facts we are about to relate.

The abduction of children multiplied in the provinces, and particularly in Normandy. Court gives a list, and it is very lengthy, name by name. This kidnapping was usually carried on at night, like a brigand’s descent, by companies of archers headed by the parish curates. When there was a delay in opening the doors of the houses, they were burst in, and then the soldiers, sabre in hand, with oaths upon their lips, overthrowing everything in the search after their prey, insulting the despair no less than the shrieks of the mothers, and beating the fathers who dared to complain, carried off the children, the young girls in preference, and dragged them away to the convents. The parents were obliged to furnish a pension for their maintenance, and if one of the victims escaped, they were made responsible for it. These horrors provoked a fresh emigration. Six hundred families of Normandy profited by their proximity to the sea to fly from the kingdom with everything they could take with them.

_Lettres de cachet_ were again used against the people of importance. The religionists of less consideration underwent the sentences of the judiciary or administrative sentences. The Parliaments of Grenoble, Bordeaux, Toulouse, and the intendants of Saintonge, Guienne, Dauphiny, Quercy, and Languedoc, relentlessly pursued the Reformed, who had had their children baptized, or their marriages blessed in the desert.

The religious meetings were spied, and attacked most unmercilessly. On the 17th of March, 1745, two troops of dragoons fell upon an assembly in the neighbourhood of Mazamet, killed several persons, wounded a greater number, and carried off many prisoners. Scenes of the same kind were enacted near Montauban, Uzès, Saint Hippolyte, Saint Ambroix, and in other places. It was again necessary to have recourse to night meetings.

From 1744 to 1746 we count three hundred persons who were condemned to be flogged, to be degraded from the nobility, to be imprisoned for life, to the galleys, or to death, by the single Parliament of Grenoble, which showed a most pitiless spirit, because it administered justice in a border province, and at only a few steps from the enemy’s camp upon the Alps. The fines were enormous. In a petition addressed to the king in 1750, the Protestants of Dauphiny stated that they had been obliged to pay more than two hundred thousand livres, and that from the depth of their prisons, they heard their goods and their inheritances sold by auction.

The same things happened in the provinces of the south, though to a less extent. Nismes paid upwards of sixty thousand livres. The intendants coined money out of heresy, as was afterwards done in 1793 out of the aristocracy.

“I could produce here,” says Antoine Court, “first a list of more than six hundred prisoners arrested since 1744 (he wrote in 1753), in the provinces of Languedoc, the Upper and Lower Alps, Vivarais, Dauphiny, Provence, the county of Foix, Saintonge, and Poitou; among whom were many gentlemen, advocates, physicians, substantial burghers, and rich tradesmen, who have suffered long and cruel imprisonment, out of which they have escaped by arbitrary and ruinous fines alone. I could produce another catalogue of more than eight hundred prisoners who have been condemned to divers punishments, among whom more than eighty were gentlemen.”

Some of the condemned obtained their pardon through the intervention of powerful protectors, or by means of pecuniary sacrifices, after having passed a certain time in confinement; and this explains how it was that, in 1753, there remained at Toulouse more than forty-eight convicts on account of religion. Allowances must also be made for the mortality which struck a great number of these unfortunate persons, [who had been] suddenly degraded from a position of competency to a condition so abject.

The glass-makers of the county of Foix were condemned by the intendant of Auch, to perpetual imprisonment at the galleys, and forfeiture of all their property. One of them, Grenier de Lastermes, was a venerable old man of seventy-six years. He underwent his sentence at the hulks of Toulon: his two sons died, one near him, the other upon the galleys of Marseilles. We have read a letter of this once opulent old man, in which he thanks the consistory of Marseilles for having allowed him two sous a day to alleviate his misery! He wrote: “We are engaged upon the labours marked out for us, having only bread and water for our nourishment, without the opportunity of exemption, but by payment of a _sol_ every morning to the under-gaolers; otherwise we are exposed to remain fastened to a beam with a great chain, night and day.”

The _dragonnades_ were renewed at Milhau, Saint Affrique, and at other places in Rouergue, Languedoc, and Dauphiny. This was the punishment of the lower ranks of the people for being present at the assemblies.

These sentences, if they had been less barbarous, would have been laughable. Not only were the religionists persecuted for having introduced Bibles and pious books into the realm, but a poor man, named Etienne Arnaud, of Dieu-le-Fit, was sentenced, in 1744, to imprisonment for life and the pillory. For what? Because he had taught some young folks to sing psalms. His psalter and a copy of the New Testament were nailed to the pillory beside him.

X.

The pastors, however, continued to be the object of the most implacable persecutions. If the government had reflected, it would have seen, on one side, that the Reformed were invincibly attached to their creeds, whether with their pastors or without them; on the other, that their ministers of religion did more good than harm, even in a political point of view, since they restrained the explosion of the popular resentment, and always recommended order, patience, and respect for the law. But neither the intendants nor the Parliaments were able to comprehend that these men were among the number of the most useful citizens, and three pastors were put to death in 1745 and 1746.

The first, Louis Rang, or Ranc, was twenty-six years of age. He was arrested at an inn of Levron, condemned to capital punishment by the Parliament of Grenoble, and executed at Die, in March, 1745.

A contemporary historian says: “At Crest, the minister asked permission to be shaved, and to have his hair arranged. This neatness appeared to him requisite the better to show the serenity which reigned in his soul, and the contempt with which he treated the unjust death he was about to suffer. He met his end like a hero, and never did Christian exhibit a more elevated calmness at such a moment. On his way to execution, he chanted the verse of the 118th psalm: ‘_This is the day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it_,’ which he repeated several times. The speech he attempted to make could not be heard, on account of the noise of the drums, which were beaten purposely to smother his voice. He would not hearken to the Jesuits who accompanied him, but kept his eyes continually raised to heaven, and gave signs of feelings of the most lively and earnest piety. When he arrived at the foot of the ladder, he knelt, prayed, and then mounted the scaffold courageously.”[119]

His corpse was insulted by the populace; but a (Roman) Catholic lady, who must have blushed for her faith, provided a sepulchre for his wretched remains.

After this youthful servant of the Gospel, died the veteran of the assemblies of the wilderness, Jacques Roger—who had restored the churches with Antoine Court—an aged minister, seventy years old. He was taken in the neighbourhood of Crest. “Who are you?” demanded the officer of the patrol. “I am,” he answered, “he whom you have long sought for, and it is time that you should find me.” Like Ignatius of Antioch, Jacques Roger sighed for the crown of martyrdom.

Confined with other Protestant prisoners, he exhorted them to remain firm in the faith. When the executioner came to summon him, he exclaimed: “This is the blessed day, this is the glad moment I have so long yearned for. Let us rejoice, my soul, for this is the happy day when thou shalt enter into the joy of thy Lord.”

He beseeched the Jesuits, who importuned him, to cease from troubling his mind in its repose, and walked to the scaffold in the midst of the crash of the drums that were continually beaten. “There was no one,” says Armand de la Chapelle, “who did not read upon the countenance of this holy confessor, the profound calmness, the sincere piety, and the ardent zeal of his soul. Even the Jesuits spoke of him with praise, and many persons of the Romish communion could not refrain from showing how much they were touched. When he had prayed on his knees at the foot of the ladder, he mounted the steps with the same air of modest confidence, which he had all along displayed.” His body was thrown into the Isère, after it had been suspended twenty-four hours on the gibbet.

The third victim, who excited the warmest sympathy, was executed on the 2nd of February, 1746. His name was Matthieu Majal, and he bore, according to the custom of the desert pastors, the surname of Désubas. His age also was twenty-six.

Having been surprised at Saint Agrève, in Vivarais, he was taken to Vernoux. The news of his arrest spread universal grief. When he passed through a village on the way, some unarmed peasants supplicated the commanding officer to release their pastor; and one of them, throwing himself upon Désubas, closely embraced him, imploring his liberty. The only reply was an order to fire upon the peasants, and six were slain.

The next day—one of religious service—a more numerous gathering, but similarly unarmed, penetrated into the town of Vernoux. The officer, who dreaded a rising, ordered his soldiers to fire from the houses against this crowd, whose wailings and prayers were their only weapons. Thirty of these unfortunates fell dead, and two or three hundred were wounded.

Then the mountaineers of Vivarais flew to arms, and prepared to avenge the murder of their brethren. Fortunately the pastors hastened to intercede, and to beseech them, in the name of their faith, their families, their country, in the name of their common salvation, to refrain. “It is only on this condition,” said the most revered of these pastors to them, “that I will continue my ministry among you.”

Désubas himself wrote this note from his prison. “I implore you, gentlemen, to retire. The king’s people are here in strong numbers; and too much blood has been spilled already. I am calm, and entirely resigned to the Divine will.”

The peasants yielded, and threw their arms away. But along the road by which the pastor passed, from Vernoux to Montpellier, they stood grief-stricken and indignant, with difficulty repressing the promptings of their desire to rescue him. All their ministers were there, hidden in the multitude, and striving to appease it with the sacred words of the Evangelist.

Désubas reached Montpellier at the time of holding the States. The whole body of the clergy hastened around him, soliciting but one word, one single word of abjuration. Vain efforts! The pastor of the desert was more firm before the seductions of his persecutors than before the tears of his people: he had long devoted himself to death.

The intendant Lenain asked him, not for his own information, but to acquit himself of the forms of his duty, if the Protestants had not a common treasury, if they were not collecting arms, and if they were not in correspondence with England. “There is not a word of truth in it,” answered the prisoner, “the ministers preach nothing but patience and fidelity to the king.” “I know it, sir,” said the intendant, deeply moved.

When sentence of death was pronounced against Désubas, both the judges and the intendant wept. “It is,” he said, “with sorrow that we condemn you, but such are the orders of the king.” “I know it, sir,” replied the pastor of the desert, in his turn.

The scaffold was erected upon the esplanade of Montpellier, whither Désubas was conducted, bareheaded and barefoot, in the midst of an innumerable concourse of spectators. The papers and books which had been found upon him, were burnt before his face; and when he sought to address the multitude, the din of fourteen drums drowned his words. He preserved a placid countenance, repulsed the Jesuits, who held a crucifix to him, pronounced a short prayer, and ascending the fatal ladder, gave up his soul to God.

We may here recognise the profound opposition that existed between the laws and the manners of the period. The magistrates, while they sentenced [Désubas], revolted against the legal text, whilst their hearts acknowledged him to be innocent whom they were compelled to condemn as guilty. All the (Roman) Catholics of any moral or intellectual education, were thunderstruck at the execution of Désubas. The Protestants, on the contrary, thanked God for having given them so heroic a martyr, and his name is still heard in the popular legends, beneath the cottage roof of the peasantry of Vivarais and Languedoc.

Yet this renewal of the persecutions had exhausted the patience of many of the Reformed. Seeing that they were absolutely denied any approximation to religious liberty, they demanded permission to sell their property and quit the kingdom. They wrote to Louis XV.: “We cannot live without following our religion, and we are compelled, however unwillingly, to supplicate your majesty, with the most profound humility and respect, that you may please to allow us to leave the realm with our wives, our children, and our effects, to retire into foreign countries, where we may freely worship God in the form we believe to be indispensable, and on which depends our eternal happiness or misery.”

Instead of granting this authority, the council replied by an aggravation of severity, particularly after the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, in 1748. The troops required employment; the court had leisure; it remembered the uneasiness which the heretics had caused it during the war, and it resolved to attempt a decisive blow that should, if possible, put an end once for all to this proscribed people.

It is painful continually to discover the hand of the (Roman) Catholic clergy in these scenes of violence, spoliation, and death. The venerable Malesherbes, the Baron de Breteuil, Rulhières, Joly de Fleury, Gilbert de Voisins, Rippert de Monclar, the gravest statesmen, the most eminent magistrates, who have written upon the religious affairs of this epoch, all proclaim this with unanimous voice. They agree in characterizing the conduct of the priests as obstinate, unrelenting, sometimes haughty, sometimes supple and humble, but ever exacting the use of extreme measures of compulsion and severity for the re-establishment of religious unity.

What is still more intolerable is, that at the very time when the clergy demanded the strict execution of the horrible ordinances of 1724 and 1745, they never ceased to declare that the Church was always adverse to all means that were not charitable and paternal. Is it possible to conceive, imagine, or dream of the possibility of so flagrant a contradiction?

What! knock at every door, besiege the offices of all the ministers, address the sovereign, threaten, solicit, pray, even offer money; and for what purpose? To oppress the conscience of more than a million of Protestants; to persecute them even in the sanctuary of domestic worship; to constrain them to have their children baptized by a priest under pain of bastardy; to compel married people to ask for the (Roman) Catholic benediction under pain of being denied any civil condition; to send soldiers, in a word, against the meetings, gaolers and hangmen against the pastors; and all this as only a labour of charity, goodness, and fraternal love!

There was a bishop of Castres, who applied for a regiment of dragoons in order to dissolve the meetings, taking care at the same time to add that the soldiers should not injure his flock, among whom he counted the re-united brethren. The bishop of Aire forwarded complaints that the custom of establishing the refusal of the sacraments at the death-bed of heretics had fallen into desuetude, and he wanted to renew the suits for the ignominious treatment of their corpses. The Count de Saint Florentin, secretary of state for religious affairs, who was not without complaisance for the clergy, was obliged to address a very severe admonition to this prelate.

The notion of religious freedom, or even of simple toleration, seems to have been absolutely unknown to the Romish ecclesiastics of the time: they did not understand it; and if they beheld an inkling of it in others, they combatted it as an act of impiety. We have a proof of this in a letter which made considerable noise in 1751. It bore the signature of Chabannes, bishop of Agen.

There had fallen into his possession a paper containing the following matter: “It is the intention of the comptroller-general to grant every kind of protection to the Sieur Frontin, a Huguenot trader, and that he should be treated with such consideration as may induce the merchants of his sect to return to the kingdom.” In fact, the object was to afford the opportunity to some of the industrious refugees of again peacefully residing in France.

The bishop immediately took pen in hand to express his _astonishment_ and _grief_ to the comptroller-general, Machault. His letter is lengthy, and skilfully written. He avoided all mention of dogma, well aware that this kind of argument would be of no avail with unbelievers; but he developed in his own way the political side of the question. According to him the Calvinists were the enemies of the king, rebels on principle, republicans by system; they had on many occasions brought the country within an inch of its ruin, and would do so again if they were recalled. Louis XIV. had the wisdom to free the body politic of the state from these vicious and peccant humours, which had caused so many disorders in it (we follow the text); Louis XV. will pursue the same course. As for the thought of permitting the Huguenot pastors to carry on their ministry in France, it was an enormity to which the bishop would on no account agree. “Heaven, which has ever protected the monarchy,” he says in conclusion, “heaven, which has until now united religion with it by a bond that has not been broken, inspired him with this confidence. We will not witness the free exercise of Calvinism. No, the son, the heir, the imitator of Louis the Great, will not re-establish the Huguenots.”

The comptroller-general, who had no affection for the priests, but who feared their intrigues and denunciations, hastened to disavow the more or less apochryphal paper, which had stirred up the bile of the bishop of Agen, and the matter dropped. The difference of opinions and times was here again apparent. In our days, a prelate who should utter the sentiments of Chabannes, would be accused of insanity; in the middle of the eighteenth century, the Bishop Chabannes was taxed with excessive indulgence by his brethren; he was considered much too moderate a man!

Monclus, bishop of Alais, indeed carried his exactions a great deal farther. Although he confessed that persecution does not change the heart, and that conversion is only a work of grace, he, at the same time, in 1751, publicly solicited a new declaration against the Protestants. He required the entire abolition of judicial forms. The Huguenots, who should refuse to perform the acts of Catholicity, ought to be, according to this prelate’s notions, summarily tried by the commandant of the province, or by the intendant. He accused the magistrates of having relaxed the severity of the ordinances, which was an act of unfaithfulness, which had been the cause of all the misfortunes of the realm. He demanded that the intervention of the Parliaments should cease; that the military or administrative power should be wholly uncontrolled; and that the judgments should be arbitrary and absolute.

The procurator-general, at the Parliament of Aix, Rippert de Monclar, defended religion, justice, morality, and humanity, which had been so greatly outraged by this priest. He replied, in a _Political and Theological Memoir_, published in 1755, that the sentiments of the prelate were as irreligious as they were inhuman, and tended to the total destruction of society. “If the bishops have any reason to complain,” he adds, “of the profanation of the sacraments by the Protestants, and of the uselessness of the proofs they have exacted for seventy years past, why are they bent upon continuing the same acts of Catholicism, by soliciting against them a continuous and rigorous execution of royal ordinances? Why force them in this manner to repeat this horrible impiety which is complained of? Is it imagined that it is preferable to tread our holy religion underfoot, than not to profess it at all? Who believes that it is possible to force a person, against his inclination and belief, to receive mysteries so dread that faith alone with love and ardour ought to lead us to approach them, and which should be avoided by Catholics themselves, who feel the slightest coldness or indifference? The profanations that have happened have appalled both heaven and earth, and yet it is sought to renew the hideous sight.”[120]

Rippert de Monclar says that these heretics were, after all, not worse than the Jews, who were allowed not only liberty of marriage, independently of the Church, but also the free exercise of their religion. He asks if it were right to embrace in one condemnation, with the hundred and fifty thousand fathers and mothers who had contracted clandestine marriages, the whole multitude of children born or to be born? “What wrong have they done,” he exclaimed, “that they were made the opprobrium of the land?”

He proves, moreover, that the persecutions sought by the bishop of Alais, would not be more efficacious than those which had already taken place. “If this prelate,” he says, “were to have a correct list of all the Protestant ministers, who have been put to death; of all the persons of every age and degree, who have been sent to the galleys; of all the taxes, fines, and other contributions, which have been exacted; of all the children, who have been torn from their parents; of all the marriages, which have been annulled and declared public concubinages; of all the property, which has been thereupon awarded to collateral relations; of all the individuals, who have been imprisoned and kept in long captivity; of all the decrees, that have been passed against an infinity of others; even of all the excesses, and of all the frightful massacres committed by the king’s troops, and in opposition to the intention of his majesty; alas! this list would fill volumes. Every corner of France re-echoes with the cries of these miserable people; they attract the very compassion of those who glory, I will not say in being Christians, but in being men; and yet a bishop is insensible to all this, and would fain redouble them! Would it not better become him, to plant and nourish [measures] in their behalf, and to weep between the porch and the altar for them?”[121]

This lesson of morality and public reproof, given by the magistracy to the clergy, was as deserved as it was severe; it was not the only one, as we shall have occasion to show.

XI.

The government did not accede on all points to the demands of the bishops; it neither dared nor wished [to do so]. Nevertheless it complied with a great deal, and all the more in that it required to recruit its finances, [which had been] exhausted by the war. The prelates consented to increase their voluntary donations, but under the express condition that the extirpation of heresy should be prosecuted with more rigour.

The Protestants, for their part, did not cease by every peaceable means to petition for the redress of their grievances. Seven pastors of the desert addressed to Louis XV., on the 21st December, 1750, a new and respectful petition, in which, after having stated that they regarded the aggregate worship, baptisms, marriages, and sacraments of their communion as a matter of conscience, they said: “Your troops pursue us in the deserts as if we were wild beasts; our property is confiscated; our children are torn from us; we are condemned to the galleys; and although our ministers continually exhort us to discharge our duty as good citizens and faithful subjects, a price is set upon their heads, and when they are taken, they are cruelly executed.”

Louis XV. and his council gave no heed to this petition any more than they had done to the others. The Protestants were in the depth of the provinces; they had neither voluntary donations to offer to the government, nor powerful protectors to invoke. They were regarded with suspicion from the very fact of their being proscribed, and the injury, which had been inflicted, was the best reason for inflicting greater severity upon them.

These details of the sentiments of the court, and the incessant provocations of the clergy, serve to explain the renewal of the persecutions, which the Protestants endured from 1750 to 1755. The intendant Lenain, who was naturally a rigid man, but had treated the Protestants more mildly, as he had become better acquainted with them, was replaced in Languedoc by the Viscount Guignard de Saint Priest, who, without being either fanatically or cruelly disposed, unhesitatingly executed the most violent measures. The meetings near Cayla, Vigan, and Anduze, were again attacked. In the last of these encounters, three men were killed, others wounded, and many led to prison; whilst the pursuit was carried on with such bitter determination, that it became necessary to renounce religious service on the Sabbath.

The intendant received orders to proceed to a general _re-baptism_ of children, and to a _re-benediction_ of marriages throughout the whole Reformed population. The words [of this order] were as barbarous as the thing itself. With this view, he convoked the notables at Nismes and elsewhere, in 1751, and commanded them to take their children to the parochial churches within a fortnight’s time; in default of which they would be punished with the utmost rigour of the ordinances; and the curates and (Roman) Catholic consuls were directed to prepare lists of the recusants. Guignard de Saint Priest took the trouble, ridiculous under the circumstances, to start a chapter of controversy, like a doctor of the Sorbonne, and to establish that (Roman) Catholic baptism being recognised by the religionists as effective, their rejection of it would be a _senseless obstinacy_.

The Protestants replied to this military controversialist, that the curates interpreted the question quite differently; that they exacted the promise to rear the children in the Romish faith, that they treated and punished those of the baptized as having relapsed, who did not remain (Roman) Catholics, and that the clergy had made use of the following maxim: “The Church has power over those, who receive baptism, just as the king, neither more nor less, has full right over the coin which he issues from his mint.”

Finding his reasons fail, the Viscount de Saint Priest resumed a part better suited to his character, and pronounced the most fearful threats against the obstinate. The oppressed were terrified. They abandoned their houses, fields, workshops, and factories, and fled for safety to the woods and mountain caverns.

The intendants anger increased; and on the 1st of September, 1751, he wrote to one of his subordinates: “They are mistaken if they hope that the king’s mind will change, or that I shall omit to execute the precise orders which his majesty has given me on the subject. I am willing, however, to grant them a short delay.” But the desertion went on increasing, and Saint Priest had recommenced the _dragonnades_ with billets conceived in these terms: “The Sieur N., cavalier of the _maréchaussée_, will remain in garrison at the house of * * *, until he has taken his children to the church to undergo the ceremony of baptism by the curate of the place; and he will exact, for his pay, four livres a day, until perfect obedience has been shown, at the same time informing him that the garrison will be reinforced.”

A commandant of the name of Pontuan, or Pontual, shouted in the streets of Cayla: “Let nobody deceive himself; all the Huguenots shall obey or perish, if I die myself!” The soldiers, aided by some of the [Roman] Catholics, and frequently accompanied by the local priests, tracked the children about the country, seized them as if they were malefactors, and dragged them to the church.

“Some,” says Antoine Court, “ten, twelve, and fourteen years old, absolutely refused to be led to the church, and it was necessary to drag them there by main force; some uttered piercing shrieks that went to the heart; others threw themselves like young lions upon those who tried to seize them; others, again, who had no other means of showing their despite, turned the ceremony into ridicule which they were forced to undergo: when they were covered with a white cloth, and the water was about to be sprinkled upon their heads, they exclaimed: ‘Are they going to shave us?’ The curate and the garrison of Lussan so greatly tortured the children of the village in dragging them to the church, where they shut them up under lock and key, that some of them told the curate they seemed to see the devil whenever they looked upon him, and others, still more desperate, spat in his face.”[122]

In such a state, in the midst of these brutal and degrading scenes, baptism was administered to them by force! If we were told that such acts had been committed by a horde of savages, we should scarcely believe it; and yet these things took place in France within a century of our time!

When he had effected the re-baptism of Cayla, the commandant Pontual, whose zeal increased with the gratification he experienced in the capture of the children, continued his expeditions throughout Vaunage, the whole length of the coast, placing sometimes as many as fifteen or twenty garrison soldiers in the houses of the absentees and the obstinate, whose property they sacked and demolished.

The court of Versailles was rejoiced at the news of so many re-baptized children, and ordered the work to be prosecuted in the mountains. But this was the limit of Pontual’s exploits. The old recollections of the Camisards were awakened; and some of the peasantry, rather encouraged than restrained by their minister Coste, resumed the musket, declaring that on the first act of violence against their children, blood should be spilled. Neither the curates nor the soldiers heeded the menace; and in an ambush of the Cévenoles, three priests fell on the 10th of August, 1752, two mortally wounded, as they guided the military in an expedition into Lédignan, on the banks of the Gardon.

These gunshots produced an extraordinary effect. The soldiers evacuated the hills; the intendant stopped short; Versailles took alarm; people remembered the war of the Camisards; the re-baptisms were instantly abandoned, and for ever. If the ministers of state had been fanatics, civil war would have broken out again with all its horrors; but they were only unbelievers who parodied, while they laughed at, the passions of bygone generations, and they halted at the first symptoms of a serious conflict.

Emigration also, which had been renewed upon a large scale, contributed to calm their factitious anger. It was true that the same precautions had been taken to guard the passes as in 1685; but the Protestants had used the same means to escape the vigilance of the soldiers. Languedoc, Dauphiny, Saintonge, already impoverished by the Edict of Revocation, were threatened with the loss of the last remains of their industry and commerce. The frivolity of Versailles retreated before this prospect.

A few weeks after this exhibition of insurgency, the Marquis de Paulmy, the minister of war, visited the fortresses of Languedoc. Being a man of prudence and integrity, he received the complaints of the Protestants with kindness, and forbade the subaltern officers to maltreat them.

A pastor, François Benezet, had been condemned to death during the persecutions; he was executed at Montpellier, on the 27th March, 1752. Harassed by the importunities of an abbé, who continually cried, “You are damned; hell will be your lot if you do not abjure;” he replied, “If you were persuaded that there is a hell, would you persecute me as you do? And should I have been condemned to lose my life upon the gallows, merely because I have addressed a few exhortations to my brethren?”

He endeavoured to speak at the foot of the gibbet; as usual, his voice was drowned by the noise of drums. He died singing the 51st Psalm. Benezet left behind him a child of two years old, and a pregnant wife. Like Louis Ranc and Désubas, he was only twenty-six years old.

Another pastor, Jean Molines, did not display the same courage. He abjured before the scaffold; but until his last moment he repented his weakness. He withdrew, inconsolable, to Holland; and although he was reinstated in the communion of the faithful, after having given proofs of profound remorse, he never forgave himself. An eyewitness relates, that his countenance, furrowed with wrinkles, bore the imprint of despair. His sight was dimmed with tears; and his head hung heavily upon his breast. For thirty years he wandered about insensible to everything around him, as one who reckoned himself no longer among the living, and died with the one regret of not having won the crown of martyrdom.

While he was in prison, some priests published a _Letter and Abjuration of the Sieur Molines_, in his name. The Protestants answered this work of pious fraud: “We cannot conceive how his converters can have let him date his abjuration from the citadel of Montpellier. A fortress has never yet been a school of enlightenment, or a means of convincing people of the truth of religion. Every retractation that comes from a fettered hand is so eminently suspicious, that no one would dare to adduce it before a tribunal.”

XII.

We have yet to traverse the epoch of general persecutions, particularly in the province of Languedoc; happily, it was but of short duration, and it was the last.

The author of these new persecutions was a nobleman celebrated for adventures of gallantry, the most brilliant epicurean of the eighteenth century, an unbeliever, who protected Voltaire, and whom Voltaire extolled,—in a word, the Marshal de Richelieu. Assuredly, of all the parts he could play, not one became him so little as that of an inquisitor of faith.

As governor of Languedoc he had for some time shown a degree of kindness to the religionists; but on a sudden, in the month of February, 1754, he ordered a proclamation, or instruction to the military commandants, to be placarded in the principal towns and villages of the dioceses of Montpellier, Nismes, Uzès, and Alais, which re-awakened all the alarms of the Protestants. The marshal did not mention re-baptism; that affair had been too unsuccessful in its results; but he pointed now at the meetings of the desert, and threatened to apply the most rigorous dispositions of the Edict of 1724 against them.

Orders were issued to arrest the new converts, and refugees or suspected persons, who came from foreign countries without an express authorization. The meetings were to be watched with the greatest tenacity, and dispersed by force. As many prisoners were to be made as possible; particularly the preachers were to be seized, and shot if they attempted to fly, and no one was to be released until further orders. A reward of a thousand crowns was promised to any one who should capture a minister, and orders were given to arrest whomsoever should be found in the same house with him.

When this proclamation appeared, people asked what had provoked it. A tacit toleration had been established since the affair of Lédignan. The confidence of the Reformed had returned. They assembled peaceably, with very little mystery, but without ostentation, in the depth of some valley, or upon the heights of their mountains. Their relations with the [Roman] Catholics became more easy; agriculture, industry, commerce, the revenues of the states, everything gained by it. Wherefore, then, this new appeal to brutal force?

This has never been well known. The ill humour of a minister of state, some pressing letters of the clergy, the caprice or the vanity of a governor, who flattered himself that he would by ingenious combinations terminate a struggle that had lasted eighty years,—any of these things sufficed in those times to renew the persecution. But if the Duke de Richelieu had hoped to terminate the struggle by means of a strategetical plan, he was deceived. The courtier of Louis XV. judged of the conscience of the Protestants by his own.

Some meetings were immediately suspended, others were attacked. The prisons were filled; the tower of Aigues-Mortes received a further number of unfortunate females; but the greater number of the people would not submit. Richelieu reported his difficulties at Versailles, and the Count de Saint Florentin sent him an answer, that “The king’s judgment was, that it was absolutely imperative they should be sickened of their taste for assemblies.” This was an easy sentence to pen in a despatch; but the _taste for assemblies_, inherent in every sincere faith, was even stronger than the will of Louis XV.

The Protestants simply redoubled the precautions, with which they sought to hold their religious meetings. They procured information as to the days and hours of the troops’ excursions, the direction they took, the number of the soldiers on service, and the character, more or less rigorous, of the commanding officer. The faithful were warned even by (Roman) Catholics, who were ashamed of these brutalities, or, on the first signal of alarm, they dispersed. If, however, they were surprised, despite their precautious measures to ensure safety, their hearts accepted the suffering as a divine trial.

It was in one of these attacks upon the meetings that Jean Fabre, a Protestant of Nismes, supplicated a commander of a detachment to put him in prison in the stead of his father, an old man of seventy-eight. The governor of the province sent the pious son off to the convict prison of Toulon, considering, it would seem, that the Huguenots did not belong to the human race; and it was only when the drama of the _Honest Convict_ informed the court, the ministers, France, and Europe, of this act of treason against humanity, and when Jean Fabre had worn the chains of the galley-slave for seven weary years, that he was restored to his family.

All the other surprises of meetings offer a repetition of the same enormities, and we will cite that only which happened in Lower Languedoc on the 8th of August, 1756. Three young men were to be ordained to the ministry of the Gospel at this assembly. The solemnity had collected several pastors, and attracted a vast concourse of people; as many as from ten to twelve thousand had come from the whole surrounding country. They were singing a psalm, when a detachment of fifteen or eighteen soldiers made their appearance, hastening musket in hand to the spot. The multitude, although unarmed, might have crushed this handful of assailants by their very weight; but the pastors always preached patience and submission. The crowd leaped to their feet, and precipitately fled in all directions. The troop fired upon them,—every shot told; and while some fell dead, and others wounded, the rest escaped uttering shrieks of terror and grief; only a few stood their ground, and endeavoured to defend their wives and children with stones. The murderers remained masters of the field, and a long track of blood marked the locality of this prayer-meeting. Do we relate a scene of the age of Louis XV., or one of the time of Innocent III. and Simon de Montfort?

Another pastor perished in this deplorable epoch. Etienne Teissier, whose surname of the desert was Lafage, was arrested near Castres, at the farmhouse of a Protestant named Jacques Novis. On the approach of the troops, he endeavoured to escape over the roof; but a gun-shot broke his arm and wounded him in the chin. All the persons in the house were arrested with him, and among them a woman and two young girls. The prisoners followed the guards singing the psalms of the desert-meetings.

Lafage was taken to the prison of Alais. “The Abbé Ricard, canon of Alais, after showing the prisoner the greatest marks of politeness, thought proper to lead off a controversial discussion; and it was not until the unfortunate minister declared that he had not the strength to discuss, that he was nearly mortally wounded, and that his only desire was to prepare himself for his approaching end, that he was relieved from the importunities of the priest. Several of the faithful, however, were admitted to the consolation of visiting the martyr. Even his father and one of his brothers were allowed to see him; and he implored them, to pray for him, but to submit themselves with holy resignation to the decrees of Providence; he assured them, besides, that he was resolved to suffer everything for the cause of the Gospel.... On his arrival at Montpellier, the trial of the minister was arranged and consummated with barbarous rapidity. The unhappy pastor, already dangerously wounded by the fire of the troops, was fastened to the gibbet, which did not, any more than the preparations for the execution, disturb the serenity of his soul. The soldiers who encompassed the scaffold, could not restrain their tears at the aspect of this last sacrifice of a faith so intrepid. The sentence of death was pronounced by Guignard de Saint Priest, the intendant.”[123]

This administrator condemned also, upon his own authority, Jacques Novis as contumacious, sentenced him to perpetual imprisonment at the galleys, confiscated two-thirds of his property, ordered that his house should be razed to the ground (a house razed in 1754 for having sheltered a pastor!), and released his wife and three children, who were well-nigh reduced to beg their bread. All this was done without the intervention of any judge, by the mere sentence of a commissioner; the form of justice was not less outraged than justice itself.

And this act, which would now rouse the indignation of all France,[124] was not an isolated or exceptional iniquity. The other provinces, although treated with more caution than Languedoc, because they did not contain so many religionists, were not without their share of sufferings and victims.

In Saintonge, the Protestants assembled in barns or remote buildings, because the inclemency of the climate would not easily permit them to celebrate their worship in the open air. Whereupon, one day, the intendant ordered the demolition of these places of service to the very last, and sentenced to detention for life at the galleys a poor man, who had allowed meetings to be held in his house. A woman was condemned to perpetual confinement on the bare suspicion of having given asylum to the pastor Gibert; and this very pastor, happily contumacious, was condemned, on the sentence of the intendant, to be hanged, after humbly kneeling before the principal door of a (Roman) Catholic church. His nephew, compelled to be present at the execution, was then sent to the galleys, with a number of Protestants, who had been convicted of having accompanied the minister in his excursions. This took place in 1756.

In the county of Montauban, the soldiers committed brutalities, which did not always pass without an effusion of blood, and the Parliament of Toulouse conceived the idea of enjoining all persons who had been married in the desert, to separate immediately, under pain of fine and corporal punishment. This wrought the dissolution of thousands of families at a single blow, or constrained them to purchase the benediction of the priest by sacrilegious acts of (Roman) Catholicism. The Protestants refused to submit, but they had to suffer every kind of trouble and anguish in their homes. The decree of the Parliament made hundreds of people miserable, but none of them (Roman) Catholics.

The province of Béarn, once so oppressed, the first of the provinces where Louis XIII. had forcibly reinstalled the (Roman) Catholic religion, and where Louvois organized the expeditions of the _dragonnades_, encountered fresh calamities in 1757 and 1758. The governor put his troops at the disposal of the clergy. The Protestants of Orthez, Salies, and Bellocq fled to the mountains, and more than one hundred persons were proclaimed for capture dead or alive. The curates were generally extremely exacting in the proofs they required from the religionists. Those of Orthez, besides the gifts of large amount, which it was necessary to guarantee in the presence of the notary, made those who had been espoused wait one year, and sometimes two years, before they would give the nuptial benediction. In one case the curate imposed a delay of twelve years.

In Guienne, the Reformed of Sainte Foy, Bergerac, Tonneins, Clairac, and other places, were forced to maintain dragoons, to pay fines, to suffer vexations of every kind; nor were the ideas of re-baptism and re-benediction yet abandoned there in 1758.

The Parliament of Bordeaux (it is true that Montesquieu was there no longer), reprinted the declaration of 1724, sent it to all the curates of the district to be publicly read, and in the month of November, 1757, passed a decree commanding all those who had been married by ministers, _or even by any other ecclesiastics than their own curates_, to separate immediately; prohibiting them from conversing under pain of exemplary punishment; branding their cohabitation with the name of concubinage; declaring their children illegitimate, and, as such, incapable of direct succession; lastly, commanding fathers, mothers, and guardians to send their children to the (Roman) Catholic schools, and to be catechized until they were fourteen years old, and to the Sunday and feast-day teachings until the age of twenty.[125]

To crown these tyrannical proceedings, this decree was published for several days on the Exchange of Bordeaux, where the most eminent of the Protestants were met: “a circumstance,” says a petition which we have before us, “that materially injured their credit in their commercial transactions on one hand; and that, on the other, tended to make them an object of hatred or of contempt to the lower orders of the people, always extreme in their opinions and heedless in their proceedings.”

The petitioners further said, “We do not regret either office or honours; it is with your majesty to dispense them to whomsoever you please; but we claim the rights that we derive from nature, and which every religion should hold sacred. It must be no longer hidden from you: there are, sire, more than fifty thousand marriages that will fall within the scope of the decree of the Parliament of Bordeaux; and among these marriages, there are some of so old a date as to have given birth to ten or twelve children. Behold, sire, what a multitude of citizens are reduced in one instant to despair!”

Lastly, the Protestants took up the political question: “When a neighbouring state, jealous of the prosperity of our armies, vainly sought, last September, to penetrate into Saintonge and Aunis, what class of your subjects showed more zeal than the Protestants to repel the presumptuous enemy? Your generals did them justice in this respect. Are not your armies and your navy at this present moment filled with soldiers, officers, and sailors of the Reformed religion, distinguished not less for their unshaken fidelity than for their bravery?” (3rd January, 1758.)

This petition did not prevent the decree of the Parliament of Bordeaux from being followed by cruel iniquities. The seneschal of Nérac condemned five Protestants to the galleys, one of whom was an old man of eighty. Numbers of others were thrust into the prisons of Guienne, Périgord, and Agenois. The Reformed of Sainte Foy and Bergerac had to pay upwards of forty thousand livres, besides the losses they sustained through the soldiers billeted upon them. And yet the authorities had not the courage to execute the decree in its entirety; the rich merchants of Bordeaux had pronounced the word “emigration” in their complaints, and the interest of the treasury procured for them that which had been refused by the fanatic bigotry of the priests and the despotism of the court.

XIII.

Until now we have delayed to mention the venerable pastor Paul Rabaut, because he belongs to two epochs, and his long career connects him both with the times of persecution and those of toleration. During half a century, Paul Rabaut has afforded the most elevated, and the most perfect type of a true servant of Jesus Christ. He was firm and courageous, yet cautious, and as inflexible in matters of religion as he was submissive in purely civil affairs; and this rare union of qualities justly entitled him to the greatest influence over the churches of the desert.

Paul Rabaut was born on the 9th of January, 1718, at Bédarieux, near Montpellier, of an honest family of traders, who delighted in sheltering the proscribed pastors. It was in his conversations with them that he felt himself animated with a desire for the evangelical ministry, or, as Antoine Court would have said, for the vocation of martyrdom. He was grave, studious, and, beyond all, pious, which procured him the surname of “_the minister of Charenton_” from his schoolmaster.

From the age of sixteen he became, with his friend Jean Pradel, the companion of the desert ministers. He shared their labours, and imitated their patience. Rejoiced that he suffered with them for the sake of his Divine Master, he undertook, without having the title or the office of pastor, to instruct his brethren, reading the Bible at the meetings, exhorting the faithful in their domestic circles, encouraging some, comforting others, and setting an example to all.

But this noviciate, however dear it might be, was insufficient. The churches wanted pastors capable of opposing the aberrations within and the objections without, with a sound and intelligent theology. Paul Rabaut perceived this, and in 1740 he went to study in the seminary at Lausanne. Antoine Court received him as a son, and his discernment soon marked the young disciple out as the man most fitted to succeed him in the government of the flocks of the wilderness.

On his return in 1743 he was appointed pastor of Nismes, and from this early moment, he took the lofty position which he occupied until his death in 1795. His colleagues reposed implicit confidence in him, and never failed to consult him on all difficult occasions. His abode, which was often but a hut of piled stones, became the centre of Protestant affairs. All the faithful respected him, and when persecution began to rage anew, they instinctively turned towards him, as sailors fix their look upon the lighthouse signal in a storm.

Every one knew the devotion with which he had embraced the pastoral office, and that he had no other object than the welfare of religion. A letter, which he addressed to the intendant Lenain in 1746, will show how he himself explained this: “When I resolved upon exercising the ministry in this kingdom, I knew well to what I exposed myself; and, indeed, I have always considered myself a victim destined to death. I believed that I was doing the greatest good in my power, by devoting myself to the pastor’s calling. Since the Protestants are deprived of the free exercise of their religion, since they think it wrong for them to attend the services of the (Roman) Catholic religion, since they cannot procure the books they require for their instruction, you may judge, sir, what would be their condition, if they were absolutely deprived of pastors. They would forget their most essential duties; they would fall, either into fanaticism—that fruitful source of extravagance and disorders—or into indifference and contempt for religion altogether.”

Paul Rabaut, whom the law condemned to death, contributed more than any one to dissuade the Protestant population from desperate counsels, and, perhaps, no Frenchman throughout the whole eighteenth century has been more useful to his country. Not only in the synods, where he maintained the authority of a wise discipline, but also in private interviews and conversations with individuals, he continually and unceasingly recommended obedience to the laws and the magistrates, never admitting an exception whatsoever but the conscientious worship of God.

We read in his letters that he always, and with all his power, strove to prevent the religionists from bringing weapons to the assemblies. In the melancholy affair of the pastor Désubas, when thousands of the peasantry vowed to avenge the blood of their brethren slaughtered at Vernoux, he invoked religion, humanity, the duty of submission, and whatever is of most avail in faith and Christian law, to induce them to disarm. He did this again in the insurrection that had begun on the borders of the Gardon, at the time of the general re-baptizement.

He wrote to the leaders in the province, on this head: “When I desired to know whence the evil proceeded, I found that divers persons, seeing themselves threatened either with loss of their property and their freedom, or by compulsion to perform acts opposed to their conscience, with reference to their marriages or the baptism of their children, and perceiving no opportunity of quitting the kingdom and freeing their conscience, gave themselves up to despair and attacked some priests, because they regarded them as the first and principal cause of their troubles. Once again, I blame these folks, but I thought it my duty to explain to you the cause of their despair. If it be thought that my ministry is necessary to calm the minds of the people, I will undertake the task with pleasure. Above all, if I could satisfy the Protestants of these parts that they will not be molested in their conscience, I would earnestly recommend the mass to stop those who are bent on rising, should there be any so minded.” (21st August, 1752.)

It is thus that he obtained the esteem of the (Roman) Catholics as well as the respect of the Reformed. People were confident that he would decide all religious questions with that wise moderation, which, without detracting from the obligations of faith, would never unreasonably provoke the severity of power.

When the minister of war passed through Languedoc, Rabaut had the boldness to present a petition to him for the king. This happened on the 19th September, 1752, between Nismes and Montpellier. While he waited at a post-house for a change of horses, the Marquis de Paulmy perceived a stranger respectfully approaching him, with a paper in his hand. Rabaut introduced himself by name: the minister knew him to be the proscribed pastor, and might have ordered his arrest, and even summary execution, according to the letter of the ordinances. But impressed with admiration at the noble bearing of the pastor, he bowed and accepted the petition, which he promised to lay before the king. It is ascertained that he kept his word.

The intendant of Languedoc also refused to seize the person of Rabaut, for the reason that the trial and execution of the venerated pastor would have convulsed the whole province. As this officer, however, entertained the idea, that the religious meetings would cease to be held, on the departure of the minister, he used every effort to make him quit the realm: sometimes he offered to release a certain number of prisoners, as the price of his expatriation; sometimes he persecuted his wife, Madeleine Gaidan, whose name deserves to be associated with that of her husband. She never gave such advice as might be expected from the weakness of her sex, and preferred leading a wandering and uncertain life with her aged mother and her children, rather than urge Rabaut to quit the post, which God had allotted to him. The Duke de Mirepoix was ashamed of these unworthy molestations, and allowed Madeleine Gaidan to return to Nismes, after a lapse of two years of persecution.

Paul Rabaut, however, was not the less liable to the rigour of the ordinances, which decreed sentence of death against the pastors. “For more than thirty years,” says one of his biographers, “caverns and huts, whence he was unearthed like a wild animal, were his only habitation. For a long time lie dwelt in a safe hiding-place that one of his faithful guides had provided for him, under a pile of stones and thorn-bushes. It was discovered at length by a shepherd, and such was the wretchedness of his condition, that when he was forced to abandon the place, he still regretted this retreat [which was] more fit for savage beasts than men.”[126]

He assumed all sorts of disguises and names, like the (Roman) Catholic priests during the Reign of Terror. At one time it was M. Paul, at another, M. Denis, or M. Pastourel, or M. Théophile, on his way to perform the functions of his ministry under the garb of a trader, or a journeyman baker.

It is difficult to picture to oneself the extent of his labours. He wrote to one of his friends at Geneva, in 1755, that being occupied all day with a multitude of affairs, he was often obliged to work far into the night; then, he said, with that humility which characterizes eminent men: “When I fix my attention upon the divine fire with which, I will not say Jesus Christ and the apostles, but the Reformed and their immediate successors, burned for the salvation of souls, it seems to me that, in comparison with them, we are ice. Their immense works astound me, and at the same time cover me with confusion. What would I not give to resemble them in everything laudable!”

What was indeed a singular novelty in this time of disorder—he entered into a correspondence with a prince of the blood, from the depth of his retreat. The influence of philosophical ideas, the desire of taking one of the causes of the opposition in hand, or perhaps the mere heaviness of idleness, engaged the Prince de Conti to interest himself in the fate of the Protestants. He sought information from Paul Rabaut, and invited him to a conference. The pastor of the desert started secretly for Paris, in the month of July, 1755.

He had two interviews with the prince, and stated the following points: “That the galley convicts and prisoners sentenced on account of their religion, and the children of both sexes shut up in the convents and seminaries, should be set at liberty; that baptisms and marriages celebrated by the (Protestant) ministers should be valid, under condition of being registered in offices established by the king; that the exercise of religion should be permitted, if not in the places of worship, at least in private houses at some distance from the towns and villages; finally, that every one should be allowed to sell his property without any special authority, and that the refugees should have the right of returning to the realm.”

These demands were assuredly moderate enough. [What they asked for] was far from full freedom of religion; it was not even toleration to any great extent. The (Roman) Catholics of Ireland have never at any time had less; and they already enjoyed much more in the eighteenth century. The Prince de Conti, however, did not consider that there was any chance of obtaining so much from the council and the clergy, and these negotiations had no result.

Paul Rabaut returned to his labours in Languedoc. The author from whom we have already quoted, gives the following description of him: “He was short of stature; his complexion was dark; his physiognomy and demeanour mild; lois manner grave, yet affable; and his habits simple and patriarchal. His food was of the most sober kind. His powers of endurance were remarkable. The hard and wandering life he had been forced to lead from his youth upwards, in following a proscribed faith, had strengthened his constitution; but his unceasing devotion to his flock had injured and undermined his vigour, and seriously affected him in his old age.”

People flocked from all parts to hear him preach. Another biographer says: “We are told that his audience sometimes comprised from ten to twelve thousand of the faithful. But his voice was so distinct and sonorous that although [he preached] in the open air, it reached those at the greatest distance, and all could take home with them the useful lessons of the pastor. He prayed with a fervour and an unction that penetrated every bosom, and disposed hearts the least prepared to listen to the sermon. He frequently preached without preparation, and his wild and uncultured eloquence seemed even to grow in sublimity.”[127]

Some of the manuscript sermons of Paul Rabaut have been preserved. It is said that they are not distinguished either for oratorical genius or for studious finish: the venerable pastor had neither leisure nor opportunity. But they are remarkable for order, mildness, perspicuity, and unction: his style was of that simple and paternal kind which suited the meetings of the wilderness.[128]

XIV.

The approach of the year 1760 witnessed a sensible relaxation of persecution. The laws of intolerance were not, indeed, abrogated, but they were relaxed by desuetude; for knowledge, public opinion, the interest of the state, the relations of commerce and society, tended every day to approximate the (Roman) Catholics to the Protestants. The differences of confession were rapidly disappearing before the common name and quality of Frenchmen.

The clergy perceived this with dismay, and in their general assembly of 1760, they addressed urgent remonstrances to the king against this remission of the laws: “Nearly every barrier opposed to Calvinism,” they said, “has been successively broken down. Ministers and preachers, reared in heretical schools and foreign nations, have inundated some of our provinces. They have held consistories and synods, and are constantly presiding over assemblies, sometimes secret, sometimes solemn. They baptize, administer the [the Lord’s] supper, preach their erroneous doctrines, and perform the marriage ceremony. At first the Calvinists only demanded the power of celebrating their marriages in a purely civil and profane form; and although they feigned to limit themselves to this permission, it was evident that it would, of itself, lead to the entire toleration of Calvinism. Now this toleration is openly and loudly preached!”

Toleration, it would hence appear, was in the eyes of the priests, an impious and immoral maxim. Their sayings were unheeded, and the nation kept the even tenor of its new way.

Military and civil authorities, governors, intendants, subordinates, officers, magistrates, were alike ashamed, both before the tribunal of their own conscience and that of public opinion, of persecuting individuals whom they were compelled to esteem as men of honour and good citizens. Rulhières cites some curious instances of this: “Even the troops,” he says “softened the inhumanity of the orders they had to execute. The officers slackened the march of their detachments, that the assembled religionists might have time to escape. They took care that a sufficient warning should precede their approach; and they purposely followed circuitous roads, to throw their soldiers off the scent.”[129]

Sometimes the Protestants were still summoned by official means, to return to the strict execution of the edicts: but this was nothing more than the last discharge of artillery after a lost battle.

Thus, in 1761, the Marshal de Thomond, who had been appointed to the government of Languedoc, commanded the religionists to reverse their marriages and the baptisms of their children within six days. This order caused much astonishment, but no dismay. No one feared any serious conflict, and the simple force of _inertia_ effectively defeated the measure; whilst the marshal himself undertook the charge of transmitting the petitions of the pastors to Louis XV. In three months the whole affair was forgotten.

Two synods were convoked in Lower Languedoc, in the year 1760. One comprised twenty pastors and fifty-four elders; the other fifteen pastors and thirty-eight elders. These gatherings were not publicly announced, but neither were they held in secret; appearances were preserved, though the law was disregarded.

Gradually, as persecution relaxed, the language of the leaders of the churches became more resolute, as might be expected. Paul Rabaut and his colleague, Paul Vincent, in 1761, addressed a pastoral letter to the Reformed of Nismes, exhorting them to abstain from the _slightest act of adhesion to the Church of Rome_. They were no longer to assist at mass, to have their marriages blessed by the priest, or their children baptized at the (Roman) Catholic church, even when the curates remitted altogether their exactions; they were enjoined to be entirely and constantly faithful to the practices of the Reformed faith. The pastors were true to their duty in imposing these injunctions; they could not require less, since it is of the essence of every religion to be sufficient for the wants of its own members. The Romish clergy did the same thing after the 9th Thermidor.

The meetings became more regular; they were held nearer and nearer to the towns and villages; for _proximity_, to use the customary phrase, largely increased the number of assistants. These meetings were held in some places under the eye of the magistrates. The Protestants of Nismes performed their religious services within cannon-shot of the citadel, and those of Montauban in the suburbs.

Dating from 1755, the religionists confined at Toulon, the captives detained in the different provinces of the kingdom, and the prisoners of the tower of Constance, began to be set at liberty with greater facility, but only one by one, and frequently, it must be confessed, through the intervention of foreign influences, or by means of ransom. The liberation of a religious convict was effected for nothing, on a letter from Voltaire, or some Protestant prince; otherwise, it cost a thousand crowns; and afterwards, two thousand livres; the rate of ransom gradually lowering with the advance of public morals. Yet in 1759 there were forty-one prisoners still confined at the galleys, whose only crime was that they had been present at a desert meeting, or had sheltered a pastor.

This improved condition was, however, disturbed in a horrible manner by the capital execution of four persons in one case, and of a venerable old man in another. It was the sad privilege of the town of Toulouse, which had erected the first scaffold against the disciples of the Reformation in 1532, to spill the last blood on account of an heretical offence in 1762.

Toulouse, which has made a considerable advance in enlightenment since this period, was at that time almost altogether wanting in intelligence and commercial spirit. It was filled with nobles and Parliament men, who had bent beneath the servile yoke of their traditional prejudices. By their side swarmed legions of priests and monks, more Spanish than French, who kept up an abject superstition by then processions, their relics, and their confraternities. Below them vegetated an ignorant and fanatic people. Every year the Church pompously celebrated at Toulouse the commemoration of the great southern massacre of Saint Bartholomew in 1562; and Toulouse was the stage of the last executions.

François Rochette, a pastor, aged twenty-five years, who performed the service of the numerous churches of Quercy, had gone to recruit his exhausted health by means of the mineral waters of Saint Antonin. He was invited, on the road, to administer baptism, and while crossing the country in the neighbourhood of Caussade, during the night of the 13th of September, 1761, was arrested with the two peasants who were acting as his guides. They were suspected of belonging to a band of robbers who infested the province. The mistake was soon perceived; and as Rochette was not surprised in the exercise of his functions, he might easily have escaped by concealing his profession. Those, who interrogated him went even so far as to point out to him this means of acquittal, but he refused to buy his deliverance by the least disavowal of truth.

The morning spread the news of his arrest with the rapidity of lightning through the whole country. The sorrowing and anxious Protestants assembled together, and urgently solicited the liberation of their pastor. A fair was held that day at Caussade, and the town was crowded with people. The (Roman) Catholics conceived the notion that the Huguenots had flown to arms, and intended a universal massacre. The tocsin was sounded on every side; the villages rose _en masse_, and the (Roman) Catholic peasantry stuck a white cross in their hats, in imitation of the assassins of Saint Bartholomew. The night of the 14th was spent in casting bullets, preparing cartouches, and many a curate joined in and hastened the arming. The next day, the whole population was on the alert, ready for the direst excesses, and it was with the utmost difficulty the magistrates could restrain them.

Three brothers named Grenier, glass-manufacturers in the county of Foix, happened to be at this time in Montauban. Hearing that the pastor Rochette had been arrested, that the Protestants were threatened with attack, and that a terrible contest was imminent, they hastened to the spot of danger, with the first arms they could snatch up in their haste, a sword and two guns. They were pursued, butchers’ dogs were put upon their track, and at length they were captured and dragged to the prison of Rochette.

The Parliament of Toulouse took cognizance of the matter, as if it were an affair of state, and the trial was conducted with the most glaring partiality. Paul Rabaut and his companions, astounded with a severity so long forgotten, fruitlessly petitioned the Duke de Richelieu, the Duke de Fitz-James, and Marie-Adelaide de France. The accused sent long justificatory memorials to the court in vain. A sentence, passed on the 18th of February, 1762, condemned François Rochette to death, as convicted of having exercised the functions of a Protestant minister, and the three brothers Grenier, as guilty of armed sedition. The other accused, who were poor peasants that had never committed the shadow of a crime, were condemned to the galleys.

When the sentence was read to Rochette and his three fellow-sufferers, they exclaimed with one voice, “Well! since we must die, let us beseech God to accept the sacrifice we offer Him.” The pastor prayed with his friends, and the court wept at the sight.

Four curates came to exhort them to abjure, and one of them threatened the religionists with hell, if they persisted in their heresy. “We are about to appear,” replied the pastor, “before a more equitable judge than you, even before Him who shed His blood for our salvation.”

They spent their time in prayer and pious exhortations, and encouraged each other for the final struggle. All the assistants, sentries, and gaolers, were moved at their calm and noble resignation. Rochette, seeing a soldier more concerned than the rest of his comrades, said to him, “My friend, are you not ready to die for the king; why then should you grieve that I should die for God?”

The curates renewed their efforts to proselytize. “It is for your salvation,” said they, “that we are here.” The answer of one of the prisoners was, “If you were at Geneva, ready to die in your bed (for no one is slain there on account of his religion), would you be pleased if four ministers came, under the pretence of zeal, to persecute you until your last breath? Do not, then, unto others that which you would not wish to be done unto yourselves.”

On the 19th of February, at two o’clock in the afternoon, the mournful procession started on its way. Rochette was, according to the terms of the sentence, bareheaded, barefooted, with a halter hung about his neck, from which, before and behind, labels were suspended, with these words, _Minister of the pretended Reformed religion_.

When the array passed before the church of Saint Etienne, an attempt was made to force him, in pursuance of the terms of the Parliament’s condemnation, to kneel with a torch of yellow wax in his hand, and to ask pardon of God, the king, and justice, for all his crimes and misdeeds.

Rochette stepped down from the tumbril, and instead of abjuring or making a confession which his heart denied, he pronounced on his knees the following words: “I beseech God to pardon me for all my sins, and I firmly believe that they have been washed away by the blood of Jesus Christ, who has redeemed us so dearly. I have no pardon to ask of the king, whom I have ever honoured as the Lord’s anointed, and loved as the father of my native land; I have ever been a good and faithful subject, and of this I believe my judges to be convinced. I have always preached to my flock patience, obedience, and submission; and my sermons, which you possess, are summed up in these words, ‘_Fear God, honour the king_.’ If I have contravened the law touching religious assemblies, it was by God’s commandments I contravened them; God must be obeyed before men. As for justice and the law, I am guilty of no offence against them, and I pray God may pardon my judges.”

Every door, balcony, window, roof, and approach near to the place of execution, was covered with spectators. “Toulouse,” says Count de Gébelin, an eyewitness, who related these circumstances, “Toulouse, that city drunk with the blood of martyrs, seemed a Protestant town. People asked what was the creed of these heretics; and when they heard our martyrs speak of Jesus Christ and of his death, every one was surprised and afflicted. They were infinitely touched, also, with the lofty, yet mild bearing of the three brothers, which compelled their admiration almost as much as the inexpressible serenity of the minister, whose graceful and spiritual physiognomy, whose words full of firmness and courage, and whose youth, filled every beholder with interest, knowing, as all did, that he only died because he disdained to save his life by a lie.”[130]

Rochette was executed first. He exhorted his companions until the end, and sang the canticle of the Protestant martyrs: _This is the blessed day_. “Die a Catholic,” said the executioner, moved with pity. “Judge which is the better religion,” replied Rochette, “that which persecutes, or that which is persecuted.”

The youngest of the three brothers (he was only twenty-two years of age), hid his face in his hands to shut out this tragic scene. The two others contemplated it with calmness. As they were gentlemen,[131] their sentence was, to be beheaded They embraced each other, recommending their souls to God. The eldest offered his head to the axe first. When it came to the turn of the last, the executioner said: “You have seen your brothers die; change, lest you perish like them.” “Do thy duty,” said the martyr, and his head rolled upon the scaffold.

Count de Gébelin adds, as he concludes his recital: “Every one present returned home in silence, in a state of consternation, and unable to persuade themselves that there could be such courage and such cruelty in the world; and I, who describe it, cannot refrain from tears of joy and sadness, as I contemplate their blessed lot, and that our church should be still capable of affording examples of piety and firmness that will compare with the most illustrious monuments of the primitive church.”

Eighteen days afterwards, on the 9th of March, 1762, the scaffold rose again at Toulouse for the execution of Jean Calas, an old man of sixty-eight. The whole world is familiar with his trial, and all its circumstances. Every one knows that the unfortunate Calas was accused of having murdered his son, Marc-Anthony, in order to prevent him, it was said, from embracing (Roman) Catholicism. Every one knows that the priests of Toulouse inflamed the fanaticism of the populace by carrying the body of this young man in procession, who had really committed suicide, and by representing him upon a funereal bier as a skeleton holding in one hand a scroll, on which was written, _abjuration of heresy_, and in the other the palm-branch of the martyr. Every one, in short, knows that the magistracy and the clergy accused Calvin and his disciples of declaring abjuration a lawful cause of infanticide, and pretended that the assassination of Calas had been decided in a conventicle of Protestants.

These calumnies, which were not less stupid than detestable, were so credited by the fanatic people, that the advocate of Calas thought it necessary to procure from Geneva a solemn declaration, signed by the pastors and professors, attesting that neither synod nor any assembly whatsoever of the Reformation had ever approved of the doctrine that a father has the right of killing his child to prevent his changing his religion. Paul Rabaut published under this head, _La Calumnie confondue_ (“Calumny Confounded”), a work in which he denied these execrable allegations with all the vehemence of a mind profoundly indignant. The Parliament of Toulouse answered it by ordering that the book should be torn and burned by the hand of the hangman.

In the most horrible agonies of the torture, Calas made no avowal, for he had none to make. He continually repeated: “Where there is no crime, there are no accomplices.” He suffered death with the serenity of innocence and the firmness of faith. His execution lasted two hours, his sentence having been to be broken on the wheel. He uttered all the while no words but those of piety and charity, breathing pardon to his judges, and expressive of his pain that the young Lavaïsse should have been implicated in his misfortunes.

Father Bourges said to him: “My dear brother, you have but a moment to live. By that God whom you invoke, in whom you hope, and who died for you, I conjure you to glorify the truth.” “I have said it,” answered Calas; “I die innocent. Jesus Christ, innocence himself, was willing to die a more cruel death.”

“Unhappy man,” cried one of his judges, “see the faggot that shall reduce thy body to ashes; confess the truth.” The old man gave him no answer; he turned away his head, and received the final blow.

“The Fathers Bourges and Caldaguès,” writes Count de Gébelin, in his twenty-third _Toulousaine_, “were honourable persons. These two monks have conferred the highest praises upon his memory. Although Calas died a Protestant, they have fearlessly said—_Thus died our martyrs of old_.”

The widow and children of Calas demanded the repeal of this iniquitous sentence. Voltaire supported their cause with his powerful voice. The most celebrated advocates, Elie de Beaumont, Mariette, Loyseau de Mauléon, interfered; and on the 9th of March, 1765, three years exactly, day for day, after the fatal execution, a decree of the council reversed the judgment of the Parliament of Toulouse, with the unanimity of fifty votes. The sentence that restored the family of Calas, tore its bloody axe from the hands of fanaticism, and branded its forehead with an ignominy that will never be effaced.

XV.

The end of this period is the counterpart of the last years which preceded it. A century before, from 1660 to 1685, each day witnessed new acts of tyranny, and laid a heavier yoke upon the neck of the Reformed people. From 1760 to 1787, on the contrary, each day lightened their burden. Four generations of persecutors and of victims had perished in the interval.

The sanguinary executions that we have just related, far from injuring the Reformed churches, turned to their advantage. Respectable people blushed to resemble, in the most distant degree, the judges and priests of Toulouse. They became tolerant as much upon a point of honour, as through a sentiment of justice. The Prince de Beauveau, who succeeded the Marshal de Thomond in the government of Languedoc, was loyal, generous, and also religious. He had several interviews with the patriarch of the desert, Paul Rabaut, and granted to the Protestants all he could under the existing _régime_ of the laws of intolerance.

Fifteen months after the death of Rochette and Calas, in June, 1763, a national synod was held in Languedoc. All the provinces, with the exception of those of the north, were represented at it. The pastors and elders, emboldened by public opinion, addressed a new petition to the king, and held firmer language in speaking to their co-religionists. “All the members of the synod,” they said, “have renewed with a holy alacrity, as well in their own name, as in that of their provinces, the solemn promise to maintain with all their power ... that union so just and so advantageous, by persevering in the profession of the same faith, in the celebration of the same worship, the practice of the same morality, the exercise of the same discipline, and in rendering each other the mutual help and services which show that, like the first Christians, they are only of one heart and one soul.”

Local or personal vexations annoyed the churches, but without intimidating them, or disturbing their tranquillity. In Poitou and elsewhere, the faithful had prepared houses of prayer, which were demolished by order of the public authorities, and some soldiers were even billeted upon a few families. The same was also done in Béarn, which was a puerile parody of the _dragonnades_.

In the county of Poix, the Protestants had opened schools: they were suppressed. At Nismes, they carried seats to the places of service, and went thither in bodies: this was forbidden them. These unworthy molestations were the last breath of expiring intolerance.

The last religious meeting, said to have been surprised and attacked, was one near Orange, in 1767. Eight Protestants of respectable station allowed themselves to be sensed, and held responsible for the remainder. The officer who arrested them was more embarrassed than his captives, and offered the opportunity of evasion. They answered, however, “No; it is for the public authorities to liberate us.” They were released at the expiration of two months.

The pastor Berenger was also condemned to capital punishment in the same year, 1767, by the Parliament of Grenoble, as contumacious. He was executed in effigy in the town of Mens. Lastly, two pastors were arrested in Brie in 1774, and thrown into prison. One died there at the end of nine days; the other was set at liberty, but sent to Guienne by a _lettre de cachet_.

There were Protestant convicts confined at Toulon so late as 1769; exemplifying the shocking contradiction of people detained in chains for acts, which the government had ceased to punish. This was in the end understood, and they were all liberated. At the same time, too, the old tower of Constance, at Argues-Mortes, was set open. Some of the women confined there had reached extreme old age, and had passed more than half their lives in this confinement.

But the treasury was the most difficult oppressor to overcome. If there were no longer imprisonments, it was still compulsory to pay heavy fines, and suffer ruinous extortions. The religionists were squeezed at one time by the judiciary bodies, at another by the administrative power, and paid in a manner double taxes, of which a very small proportion found its way into the treasury.

Many flocks, unknown until this time, because they hid themselves in the sanctuary of the domestic roof; began to show themselves. Lyons and Marseilles had their pastors. Sancerre, Orleans, Nanteuil en Brie, Asnières, and the Protestants of Picardy and Artois, endeavoured to reconstitute their respective churches.

Normandy was more advanced. It possessed two or three pastors, Louis Campredon, Jean Godefroy, and a minister of Dauphiny, Alexandre Ranc, who established himself in the province for a couple of years. The little town of Bolbec was the centre of this Protestant population. It would appear that the abduction of young girls continued there after the year 1760; for we read in a petition of the inhabitants of Bolbec, to whom Louis XV. had granted an exemption from taxes, to help them to rebuild their town, which had been destroyed by fire: “Sire, to what purpose shall we build houses, if we are not sure of dwelling in them with our families?” (1763.)

At Paris, the Reformed attended the service of the Dutch chapel, a neutral ground, which enabled them to discharge their duties towards God, without openly contravening the ordinances.

The Protestants maintained at their common charge one or two general agents in Paris, whose official character was not, indeed, and could not be recognised by the ministers of state, but their intervention was publicly accepted, and they proffered their advice in all important affairs. This mission was confided, in 1763, to Court de Gébelin, son of the pastor Antoine Court.

He inherited from his father a great devotion for the cause of the Reformed churches. Upright, laborious, intimately connected with men of letters, and known for his philological works, he brought to the service of his co-religionists an indefatigable activity and numerous social relations. He was esteemed at court; he was sought after in the world; and if he died too soon to witness the abolition of the edicts of Louis XIV., he contributed powerfully to their abandonment.

Still, the position of the Protestants at the time we have reached, was singularly anomalous. There was [in it] nothing definitive, or regular: moral order was enforced by means of legal disorder. The arbitrary principle appeared at every turn; long circumlocutions [were used] to avoid the letter of the laws without directly violating them; the pastors [were] half-recognised, half-proscribed, being neither public nor private persons; the civil condition of so large a number of French people [was] delivered up to uncertain chances; justice [was] wavering and contradictory; royalty soliloquized that it must do something, and did nothing; the subordinate agents of Church and State turned this precarious and disordered establishment to their profit by infamous bargains—a position which it is to be hoped, for the honour of France, will never be witnessed again.

The political and philosophical writers of the eighteenth century contributed largely to the triumph of toleration; but, it must be avowed, they were influenced neither by zeal nor sympathy for the fate of the French Protestants. Although they were so prompt in raising bold and delicate questions, they did not attack the cruel ordinances of Louis XIV., and never seemed to have heard of the lengthened sorrows of more than a million of their fellow-citizens.

Montesquieu, who has something to say on every subject in his _Lettres Persanes_, does not mention the oppressed Huguenots. In his _Spirit of the Laws_, he seems to be rather adverse than favourable to them; for he accuses the Calvinists of inclining to republican institutions; and when he would recommend toleration, he pleads through the lips of a Lisbon Jewess. He says, in another place: “This is the fundamental principle of political laws in the matter of religion. When it is optional in a state to receive a new religion, or not to receive it, it ought not to be established; but when it is established, it ought to be tolerated.”[132]

This left the question as regards the Reformed of France, entirely undecided; for the laws precisely denied that they had yet been established in the kingdom.

Helvetius, Diderot, and D’Alembert vouchsafed them not a word of benevolence. Rousseau, the child of the town of Geneva, displayed much greater desire to attack (Roman) Catholicism than to defend Protestantism, and his correspondence shows that when he was invited by some of his friends to write in favour of the victims of the laws of Louis XIV., he refused. He thought it enough to sketch in a few lines the argument of a plea, which he never resumed; and in his _Social Contract_ he supported the principles of a state religion.

Voltaire did the Protestants a service in the affair of Calas, and by his treatise on toleration; but further than this, he never made himself exactly acquainted with the sufferings of this greatly oppressed people, or showed any care to advocate a remedy for them. In his book upon the _Siècle de Louis XIV._, he speaks of Calvinism in a slighting tone, and dwells upon petty curious details, rather than upon useful matters. In his _Précis du Siècle de Louis XIV._, he explains at great length the quarrels with regard to the bull _Unigenitus_, the refusal of the sacraments, and the expulsion of the Jesuits; but says not a word about the Protestants.

There are many causes that will explain this indifference. The Huguenots, as we believe we have remarked before, have borne the penalty, not of the evil they had done, but of that which had been inflicted upon them. After being violently cut off from the rest of the French nation, they were treated as strangers, whose misfortunes deserved no sympathy; and their isolation enabled their adversaries to assail them, from generation to generation, with calumnies which have found a ready credence in the minds of even cultivated men.

Let this be added, that the writers of the philosophic school regarded the Calvinistic doctrines with no affection. They entertained a repugnance for the austere principles and rigid discipline maintained by the Reformed churches. (Roman) Catholicism and Protestantism were for them nothing more than two forms of the same superstitions. There is a saying of Voltaire that denotes exactly what he thought thereon. When a Protestant was presented to him, who had been released from the hulks of Toulon through his intercession with the Duke de Choiseul, he said to him: “What would they have done with you? How could they find it in their conscience to chain and place a man at the oar, who had committed no crime, but that of praying to God in bad French!”

It may be conceived that the pastors of the desert were not very anxious to have recourse to the assistance of the philosophers; they feared the influence such auxiliaries might exercise upon their flocks, and perhaps over themselves. The pastor Pierre Encontre wrote to Paul Rabaut upon the subject of the treatise on toleration: “As for myself, who have read it very hastily, I have found in it much good, but sadly mixed with poison!” And the veteran defender of the Protestant faith observed in his turn: “Penetrated with grief at the sight of the ravages made by the books of the infidels, I can only moderate it by the thought that so dire a situation cannot endure.” (1769.)

But if the philosophers could consign the condition of the Protestants to oblivion, they compelled the attention of the legists, the parliament men and statesmen. The fiction of the new converts had become untenable. Not a single honest magistrate persisted in believing, according to the letter of the law, that there were none but (Roman) Catholics in France; and the expectation of bringing the children to (Roman) Catholicism by the constraint exercised upon the parents, had been too completely deceived for any to appeal to this course again.

As the century advanced, the baptisms and marriages of the desert multiplied. Whether the priests were exacting or not in their proofs, this question, so grave in the first fifty years of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, had lost all its importance. The Protestants rejected at any price the intrusion of the (Roman) Catholic clergy into their religious duties.

What course then was to be taken? Births, marriages, burials, were all without rule, and without guarantee, for a considerable part of the nation, whilst a shocking contradiction of jurisprudence prevailed in these matters. One Parliament accepted the pastor’s certificate, and treated the marriages contracted in the desert as valid; another Parliament nullified them; and shameless collateral relations disgraced the tribunals by claiming a succession to possessions, to which, according to eternal justice, that spoke with a louder voice than iniquitous ordinances, they had no right. The confusion was intolerable.

Yet an issue must be found. It is true that the problem was more difficult than might be thought or even imagined in our days. Only complete and absolute principles can resolve questions with trenchant conciseness. Full religious liberty, and perfect equality of sects, would have cleared away every difficulty: but no politician before 1789, would have dared to make the proposition. The efforts of the times, then, were exhausted in devising middle measures and laborious compromises, which, without granting to the Protestants rights common to their fellow-citizens, should restore to them their civil condition.

The magistracy, the hierarchy of the Romish church, the superior public administrative authority, and royalty itself interposed, each distinctly and apart in this matter, until the promulgation of the Edict of 1787.

XVI.

The magistrates, as we have elsewhere seen, took a different view of the measure relating to the new converts, and also of the nature of the proofs, to which they were submitted. This misunderstanding increased with the growing struggle between the judicial and the sacerdotal orders upon other subjects. When the Parliaments commanded the burning of the bishops’ mandates, directed their temporalities to be seized, and decreed the imprisonment of curates, who molested the (Roman) Catholics by their fanatical exactions, it is clear that they would be less severe towards the Protestants, who defended the sacred rights of their domestic hearth.

It has been thought that the disputes between the Parliament and the clergy had produced a contrary effect, because the magistrates desired to establish, by the rigour of their sentences against the Protestants, the sincerity of their (Roman) Catholic faith, which had been compromised by their contests with the priests. This view is correct, if confined to certain limits, and a certain period. The general fact, however, is different. The magistracy, in their war with the clergy, were constrained to reflect upon the boundaries of ecclesiastical power, to define them, to circumscribe them in a manner constantly more precise, and from that time to fix them also in regard to dissentient creeds. Tactics sometimes prevailed over the idea of right; but right ended in obtaining the mastery.

The procurator-general, Joly de Fleury, addressed a memorial to the Council in 1752, in which he constituted himself the organ of the Parliamentary spirit, all the while that he was subordinating his thoughts to the fiction of the ordinances. “Let the priest,” said this illustrious magistrate, “be simply an officer of the civil state for the registration of baptisms and marriages; let him add no injurious qualifications to the information furnished to him; let him in respect of the nuptial benediction be content with a simple exhortation, without exacting any verbal or written abjuration, or any act specially applying to the religionists. All Frenchmen are Catholics according to law; all should be treated as such, and in the same manner.”

In 1755, another procurator-general, whom we have already named, Rippert de Monclar, went farther. Shaking off the legal fiction, he confessed that there still were Protestants in the realm, and shuddered at the idea that a hundred and fifty thousand greedy collaterals might claim the inheritance of these families, whose marriages had been blessed in the desert. He proposed, as a remedy, the publication of bans by a tribunal of justice, and the celebration of marriages before a magistrate, “according to the practice in Holland,” says he, “with regard to Catholics.” This was tantamount to asking for a separation of the civil and the spiritual authority in respect of the Protestants. Rippert de Monclar could not foresee that, thirty-five years subsequently, the measure would be applied to all citizens without distinction of creed.

In 1766, the advocate-general, Servan, maintained before the Parliament of Grenoble the rights of a wife, whose husband sought to desert her and his children, under the pretext that the marriage of the desert was null and void. “This cause,” said the eloquent lawyer, “does not strike us much at the first view. We see only a weeping woman, who interests us, without doubt; but in her cause are involved a host of other interests; her cause is that of all the other persons of her sect.... Every Protestant is aware of the misfortunes, which this female has suffered for her religion, and awaits a decision with anxiety that will perhaps influence his own destiny as well as hers. Scarcely will a decree be uttered, before it will be re-echoed among the rocks of Cevennes, and repeated from mouth to mouth, becoming a canticle of peace or an order of proscription.” The Parliament of Grenoble only granted damages and interest, the sole remedy that a deserted woman could claim; but the principle had made one further step in advance.

In the same year, Gilbert de Voisins, formerly advocate-general, and a councillor of state, drew up, at the request of Louis XV., certain memorials upon the means of restoring a civil condition to the Protestants of France. He proposed, among other things, to give some of the ministry revocable safe-conducts, and to authorize them to perform private services. The baptisms and marriages of the Reformed would thus have obtained the double sanction of a civil contract and a religious benediction, without in any way affecting the uniformity of public worship in the kingdom.

The magistracy after this never quitted the course they had adopted; and although they continued to devise strange or impracticable arrangements, in order to reconcile the civil state of the Protestants with the maintenance of external religious unity, they advanced year by year in their memorials for the legal reversal of the [laws against the] oppressed.

What line did the clergy pursue in the face of the progress of toleration? Some of their members (it is apparent that throughout the whole course of this history, we have joyfully adduced whatever was favourable to them), fell in with public opinion; and we do not speak merely of the philosophical bishops and abbés, who affected to be tolerant through _bon ton_ or indifference, for the worthy head of the diocese which counted the greatest number of Reformed, M. de Becdelièvre, during forty-five years exhibited a praiseworthy moderation, and merited the eulogy bestowed upon him by Rabaut Saint Etienne, at his death. The abbé and doctor of theology Bourlet-Vauxelles, says in his panegyric of Saint Louis, which he pronounced before the French Academy in 1762: “The god of peace does not permit us to massacre those, who do not know Him.” The abbé Audra used his influence with the Parliament of Toulouse to legitimize a Protestant marriage. The curate Bastide opened his own house to the pastor Paul Vincent, whom soldiers were pursuing. Lastly, the bishop of Langres, M. De la Luzerne, spoke in favour of the Protestants in the assembly of Notables in 1787. “I prefer places of worship to open-air preachings,” said he, “and ministers to preachers.”

We collect all the evidence of toleration that it is possible to find in the acts of the (Roman) Catholic clergy, and doubtless many similar facts have escaped our researches. But we must add that the majority of the sacerdotal body obstinately resisted the generous views of the court, the Parliaments, and the country.

The clergy administered to Louis XVI., at his coronation, the ancient oath for the extermination of the heretics denounced by the Church, and M. Loménie de Brienne, archbishop of Toulouse, said to the monarch, “Sire, you will reprobate the counsels of a hollow peace, and the systems of a criminal toleration. We conjure you, sire, do not delay to dispel the hope, which error has conceived of having places of worship and altars among us.... It is reserved for you to strike the final blow against Calvinism in your dominions. Command the dissipation of the schismatic assemblies of the Protestants; exclude sectarians without distinction from all offices of the public administration, and you will insure among your subjects the unity of the true Christian religion.”

In 1780, the General Assembly of the clergy presented a long memorial to the king upon _the enterprises of the Protestants_. They complained that heresy lacerated the bosom of the Church, _that tender and afflicted mother_; and demanded that recourse should be had to the _salutary means and repressive measures of the good days of Louis XIV._ “Formerly,” said the priests, “the religionists were rigorously excluded from offices, public employments, and municipal places; now infractions of all kinds increase. Formerly they held no religious meetings; now the holding of assemblies is notorious. Formerly they were not allowed to dogmatize in public; now every day witnesses some fresh irreverence against our ceremonies and our mysteries.... We have felt it to be our duty to deposit these alarms in the paternal and religious breast of your majesty. The source of the evil can never be seriously attacked, unless the foreign preachers be for ever banished, and unless measures be taken to prevent the natives from assuming for the future these functions of pretended pastors.”

Thus they required the exclusion of the Protestants from all public charges, the banishment of the pastors, the dispersion of the assemblies; that is to say, the execution of the most odious ordinances of Louis XIV.; and after having preferred these requests, the prelates added: “The erring will ever be our fellow-citizens, our brothers, and even our children in the order of religion. Ever shall we love and cherish them. Far from us be the thought of the axe and the sword!”

It is difficult to comprehend how the conclusion of this memorial agreed with the premises, since it was absolutely impossible—impossible as proved by the experience of more than a century—to prevent fifteen hundred thousand of the French people from exercising their worship, unless they were all to be drowned in their own blood. But we will not let a word of bitterness escape us here. We will, on the contrary, express our commiseration and our sympathy for these bishops and these priests. Alas! how many of them were destined to perish in the storms of the Revolution. Their misfortunes excite our pity!

An ex-Jesuit, Father Lenfant, in 1787 published “_A Discourse for the perusal of the Council upon the project of granting a civil condition to the Protestants_.” His language was much less guarded than that of the episcopacy, and before reading this tract, we could never have imagined that even the blindest of fanatics could have heaped up in a few pages so many infamous libels. The Reformed became, under the pen of this ex-Jesuit, impious wretches, rebels, monsters, enemies of all laws, human and divine. We may deplore also the lot of this miserable madman; he was murdered in the prison of the Abbaye, on the 3rd of September, 1792, and it was not a Protestant hand that wielded the homicidal axe.

This opposition of the clergy did not arrest [the purposes of] the magistracy; nor was it a barrier for the statesman, who, less influenced by legal traditions than the members of the Parliaments, and more struck with the damage, which the ordinances of Louis XIV. had inflicted upon public interest, therefore went still further than the others in their propositions in favour of the Reformed.

From the year 1754, Turgot, who in many points was in advance of the times in which he lived, demanded the separation of the spiritual and civil powers for all creeds. He put these words into the king’s mouth: “Although you be in error, I will not the less treat you as my children. Show yourselves obedient to the laws, continue to be useful to the state, and you shall receive from me the same protection as my other subjects. My mission is to render you all happy.” Then, asking himself the question whether the assemblies of the dissenting creeds would not be dangerous, he answered it by saying: Yes, so long as they are interdicted; not, when they shall be authorized.

The Baron de Breteuil, a minister of the king’s household, gave instructions to Rulhières to draw up “_The Historical Evidences concerning the cause of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes_,” which have helped us so often in our researches; and in 1786 he presented, under his own name, a memorial to Louis XVI., upon the necessity of restoring their civil condition to the Protestants.

Nevertheless, royalty was loth to take a definitive step. Louis XV., indifferent to everything that did not concern his debasing pleasures, had constantly adjourned the serious examination of this subject. Louis XVI. was animated with generous intentions, but his intellect was narrow, his conscience easily alarmed by petty scruples of devotion, his will feeble, and he was greatly governed by a childish superstitious fear at the bare idea of touching the laws of his predecessors. Louis XIV. had contemptuously cast aside “_the perpetual and irrevocable_” edict of Henry IV., and Louis XVI. trembled to correct in the slightest degree that monstrous iniquity of Louis XIV.

Rulhières and the Baron de Breteuil were compelled to invent subtle distinctions to prove that Louis XIV. did not intend to deprive the Protestants of their civil rights; and that they might better quiet the conscience of the new king, they represented toleration as the best means of converting the heretics. They said, “We do not abandon the hope of reuniting the French Calvinists to the Church; we would rather aim at it by a more secure way; we would return to the true course, which has been too long neglected and disregarded.”

While Louis XVI. hesitated, public opinion assumed a higher tone. The close relations of France with North America contributed to spread ideas of civil and religious liberty. General Lafayette, on his return from the War of Independence, went to Nismes and visited Paul Rabaut, embraced the old man cordially, and invited his son Rabaut Saint Etienne to follow him to Paris and plead the cause of his brethren.

The upright Malesherbes gave the Reformed the assistance of his knowledge and his virtue. He composed, in 1785 and 1786, two memoirs upon the marriage of Protestants, and annexed to them a _projet de loi_ upon the subject. “It is but right,” said he, “that I should do the Protestants some good service, since my father did them so much injury!” Lamoignon de Malesherbes was a descendant of the ferocious Lamoignon de Bâville.

All these feelings broke out in the assembly of the Notables held in 1787. In the records of the proceedings of that meeting, we read, “The Marquis de la Fayette proposed to petition his majesty to grant the same civil condition to the Protestants as to the (Roman) Catholics, and to order the reformation of the criminal laws. He asked permission to read a proposition on this subject. This having been read, the Count d’Artois observed that the object being wholly foreign to those which had been submitted to the assembly, it would be going beyond the powers of the Notables to take cognizance of it; that he would, however, willingly undertake to mention it to the king, if the meeting desired it. Consequently, he asked for the opinions of the members, and they were unanimous for adopting the motion of the Marquis de la Fayette.” A suitable address was drawn up, appealing to the king’s goodness on behalf of “this numerous portion of his subjects, who groaned under a _régime_ of proscription that was alike injurious to the general interests of religion, to morality, to the whole population of the country, to the national industry, and to every principle of politics and morals.”

The Edict of Toleration was signed, at length, in the month of November, 1787, a hundred and two years after the Revocation, not in the form that would have been required by the principle of well-understood religious freedom, but restricted within the limits of the opinions of Louis XVI. and his most influential advisers. The name of Protestant does not occur in it; the law only spoke of non-Catholics. The preamble even announced that the king “would always countenance and favour with all his power, the means of instruction and persuasion, which should tend to bind all his subjects by a common profession of the ancient faith of the kingdom.” The 1st article states that “The Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman religion _alone_ shall continue to enjoy the right of public worship in our realm.”

The new edict granted these four things only to the non-Catholics. The right of living in France, and of exercising a profession or a trade in the kingdom, without being disturbed on account of religion; the permission to marry legally before the officers of justice; the authority to record the births of their children before the local judge; and a regulation for the interment of those, who could not be buried according to the Roman Catholic ritual.

But these concessions, which were strict and narrow enough according to the letter of the law, necessarily involved much more in the practice. The legal existence of the Protestants was recognised. How could they be prohibited thenceforth from having pastors, at least to bless their marriages, to baptize their children, and to console the faithful on their death-bed? How could they he forbidden to assemble for the service of their worship, since they had done this under the severest tyranny? Finally, who was to distinguish between the private worship authorized by the edict, and the public worship, which it still persisted in interdicting? Moreover, there was no penal sanction whatever against the delinquents.

If this incomplete law gave but little, it allowed of everything being taken. The Protestants were not deceived in this. “The Edict of 1787,” says the younger Rabaut, “spread joy and consolation throughout the families of the Reformed, and their religious assemblies resounded with thanksgivings to God, and blessings on the king and his ministers. The execution of this beneficent edict followed close upon its promulgation, and the Reformed were soon seen hastening in crowds to the royal judges for the registration of their marriages and the births of their children.... Old men might be seen registering, together with their own marriages, those of their children and their grandchildren.”[133]

The edict raised some difficulties in the Parliament of Paris. The impetuous D’Espremenil was one of its opponents. M. de Lacretelle says that he had been initiated into the sect of the _Martinists_ or _Illuminati_, and that he imagined he heard the voice of the Virgin Mary, who commanded him to speak against the Protestants. In fact, D’Espremenil exclaimed, as he displayed to his colleagues an image of Christ, “Will you crucify the Saviour again?” This oratorical incident was out of season, and after addressing some representations to Louis XVI., the Parliament registered the Edict of Toleration.

All the churches laboured from this moment to reconstitute themselves upon the bases of the ancient discipline: and we may convince ourselves that Protestantism had preserved a strong hold in the north as well as in the south, and that the blasts of the storm, however they might have bent it to the earth, had neither broken, nor uprooted it.

The last consideration that forces itself upon us, is not the least important. The Reformed people of France had suffered more and longer than any others in the world. From 1660 to 1787 they had been deprived of all favours, excluded from all employments, fettered in every liberal career, expelled from the corporations of arts and trades, and violently driven back in agriculture and commerce. At the Revocation, France lost its most illustrious men, the most opulent, the most industrious, and the most energetic and active [of its people]; the rest, overburdened with garrisoned soldiers, crushed with taxes and fines, chased to the woods and mountains, without schools, without legitimate family, without assured or certain inheritance, without civil rights, had been treated like a race of Pariahs; and yet, wonderful to behold! astonishing to relate! it was found in 1787 that the Reformed people of France had lost nothing either in intellectual and moral vigour, or in industrial power. Far from sinking into degradation, like the Irish under a _régime_ incomparably less oppressive, it had not only maintained itself on a level with the Roman Catholic population, but had, in the main, attained a loftier step in the social scale, and possessed a more extensive and a higher degree of intelligence and instruction. This fact, which is beyond all serious doubt, offers one of the grandest spectacles in the history of mankind.