The Huguenots in France

The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes was signed by Louis XIV. of France, on the 18th of October, 1685, and published four days afterwards.

Although the Revocation was the personal act of the King, it was nevertheless a popular measure, approved by the Catholic Church of France, and by the great body of the French people.

The King had solemnly sworn, at the beginning of his reign, to maintain, the tolerating Edict of Henry IV.-the Huguenots being amongst the most industrious, enterprising, and loyal of his subjects. But the advocacy of the King's then Catholic mistress, Madame de Maintenon, and of his Jesuit Confessor, Père la Chaise, overcame his scruples, and the deed of Revocation of the Edict was at length signed and published.

The aged Chancellor, Le Tellier, was so overjoyed at the measure, that on affixing the great seal of France to the deed, he exclaimed, in the words of Simeon, "Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen the salvation."

Three months later, the great Bossuet, the eagle of Meaux, preached the funeral sermon of Le Tellier; in the course of which he testified to the immense joy of the Church at the Revocation of the Edict. "Let us," said he, "expand our hearts in praises of the piety of Louis. Let our acclamations ascend to heaven, and let us say to this new Constantine, this new Theodosius, this new Marcian, this new Charlemagne, what the thirty-six fathers formerly said in the Council of Chalcedon: 'You have affirmed the faith, you have exterminated the heretics; it is a work worthy of your reign, whose proper character it is. Thanks to you, heresy is no more. God alone can have worked this marvel. King of heaven, preserve the King of earth: it is the prayer of the Church, it is the prayer of the Bishops.'"[2]

Madame de Maintenon also received the praises of the Church. "All good people," said the Abbé de Choisy, "the Pope, the bishops, and all the clergy, rejoice at the victory of Madame de Maintenon." Madame enjoyed the surname of Director of the Affairs of the Clergy; and it was said by the ladies of St. Cyr (an institution founded by her), that "the cardinals and the bishops knew no other way of approaching the King save through her."

It is generally believed that her price for obtaining the King's consent to the Act of Revocation, was the withdrawal by the clergy of their opposition to her marriage with the King; and that the two were privately united by the Archbishop of Paris at Versailles, a few days after, in the presence of Père la Chaise and two more witnesses. But Louis XIV. never publicly recognised De Maintenon as his wife-never rescued her from the ignominious position in which she originally stood related to him.

People at court all spoke with immense praises of the King's intentions with respect to destroying the Huguenots. "Killing them off" was a matter of badinage with the courtiers. Madame de Maintenon wrote to the Duc de Noailles, "The soldiers are killing numbers of the fanatics-they hope soon to free Languedoc of them."

That picquante letter-writer, Madame de Sévigné, often referred to the Huguenots. She seems to have classed them with criminals or wild beasts. When residing in Low Brittany during a revolt against the Gabelle, a friend wrote to her, "How dull you must be!" "No," replied Madame de Sévigné, "we are not so dull-hanging is quite a refreshment to me! They have just taken twenty-four or thirty of these men, and are going to throw them off."

A few days after the Edict had been revoked, she wrote to her cousin Bussy, at Paris: "You have doubtless seen the Edict by which the King revokes that of Nantes. There is nothing so fine as that which it contains, and never has any King done, or ever will do, a more memorable act." Bussy replied to her: "I immensely admire the conduct of the King in destroying the Huguenots. The wars which have been waged against them, and the St. Bartholomew, have given some reputation to the sect. His Majesty has gradually undermined it; and the edict he has just published, maintained by the dragoons and by Bourdaloue,[3] will soon give them the coup de grace."

In a future letter to Count Bussy, Madame de Sévigné informed him of "a dreadfully fatiguing journey which her son-in-law M. de Grignan had made in the mountains of Dauphiny, to pursue and punish the miserable Huguenots, who issued from their holes, and vanished like ghosts to avoid extermination."

De Baville, however, the Lieutenant of Languedoc, kept her in good heart. In one of his letters, he said, "I have this morning condemned seventy-six of these wretches (Huguenots), and sent them to the galleys." All this was very pleasant to Madame de Sévigné.

Madame de Scuderi, also, more moderately rejoiced in the Act of Revocation. "The King," she wrote to Bussy, "has worked great marvels against the Huguenots; and the authority which he has employed to unite them to the Church will be most salutary to themselves and to their children, who will be educated in the purity of the faith; all this will bring upon him the benedictions of Heaven."

Even the French Academy, though originally founded by a Huguenot, publicly approved the deed of Revocation. In a discourse uttered before it, the Abbé Tallemand exclaimed, when speaking of the Huguenot temple at Charenton, which had just been destroyed by the mob, "Happy ruins, the finest trophy France ever beheld!" La Fontaine described heresy as now "reduced to the last gasp." Thomas Corneille also eulogized the zeal of the King in "throttling the Reformation." Barbier D'Aucourt heedlessly, but truly, compared the emigration of the Protestants "to the departure of the Israelites from Egypt." The Academy afterwards proposed, as the subject of a poem, the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and Fontenelle had the fortune, good or bad, of winning the prize.

The philosophic La Bruyère contributed a maxim in praise of the Revocation. Quinault wrote a poem on the subject; and Madame Deshoulières felt inspired to sing "The Destruction of Heresy." The Abbé de Rancé spoke of the whole affair as a prodigy: "The Temple of Charenton destroyed, and no exercise of Protestantism, within the kingdom; it is a kind of miracle, such as we had never hoped to have seen in our day."

The Revocation was popular with the lower class, who went about sacking and pulling down the Protestant churches. They also tracked the Huguenots and their pastors, where they found them evading or breaking the Edict of Revocation; thus earning the praises of the Church and the fines offered by the King for their apprehension. The provosts and sheriffs of Paris represented the popular feeling, by erecting a brazen statue of the King who had rooted out heresy; and they struck and distributed medals in honour of the great event.

The Revocation was also popular with the dragoons. In order to "convert" the Protestants, the dragoons were unduly billeted upon them. As both officers and soldiers were then very badly paid, they were thereby enabled to live at free quarters. They treated everything in the houses they occupied as if it were their own, and an assignment of billets was little loss than the consignment of the premises to the military, to use for their own purposes, during the time they occupied them.[4]

The Revocation was also approved by those who wished to buy land cheap. As the Huguenots were prevented holding their estates unless they conformed to the Catholic religion, and as many estates were accordingly confiscated and sold, land speculators, as well as grand seigneurs who wished to increase their estates, were constantly on the look-out for good bargains. Even before the Revocation, when the Huguenots were selling their land in order to leave the country, Madame de Maintenon wrote to her nephew, for whom she had obtained from the King a grant of 800,000 francs, "I beg of you carefully to use the money you are about to receive. Estates in Poitou may be got for nothing; the desolation of the Huguenots will drive them to sell more. You may easily acquire extensive possessions in Poitou."

The Revocation was especially gratifying to the French Catholic Church. The Pope, of course, approved of it. Te Deums were sung at Rome in thanksgiving for the forced conversion of the Huguenots. Pope Innocent XI. sent a brief to Louis XIV., in which he promised him the unanimous praises of the Church, "Amongst all the proofs," said he, "which your Majesty has given of natural piety, not the least brilliant is the zeal, truly worthy of the most Christian King, which has induced you to revoke all the ordinances issued in favour of the heretics of your kingdom."[5]

The Jesuits were especially elated by the Revocation. It had been brought about by the intrigues of their party, acting on the King's mind through Madame de Maintenon and Père la Chaise. It enabled them to fill their schools and nunneries with the children of Protestants, who were compelled by law to pay for their education by Jesuit priests. To furnish the required accommodation, nearly the whole of the Protestant temples that had not been pulled down were made over to the Jesuits, to be converted into monastic schools and nunneries. Even Bossuet, the "last father of the Church," shared in the spoils of the Huguenots. A few days after the Edict had been revoked, Bossuet applied for the materials of the temples of Nauteuil and Morcerf, situated in his diocese; and his Majesty ordered that they should be granted to him.[6]

Now that Protestantism had been put down, and the officers of Louis announced from all parts of the kingdom that the Huguenots were becoming converted by thousands, there was nothing but a clear course before the Jesuits in France. For their religion was now the favoured religion of the State.

It is true there were the Jansenists-declared to be heretical by the Popes, and distinguished for their opposition to the doctrines and moral teaching of the Jesuits-who were suffering from a persecution which then drove some of the members of Port Royal into exile, and eventually destroyed them. But even the Jansenists approved the persecution of the Protestants. The great Arnault, their most illustrious interpreter, though in exile in the Low Countries, declared that though the means which Louis XIV. had employed had been "rather violent, they had in nowise been unjust."

But Protestantism being declared destroyed, and Jansenism being in disgrace, there was virtually no legal religion in France but one-that of the Roman Catholic Church. Atheism, it is true, was tolerated, but then Atheism was not a religion. The Atheists did not, like the Protestants, set up rival churches, or appoint rival ministers, and seek to draw people to their assemblies. The Atheists, though they tacitly approved the religion of the King, had no opposition to offer to it-only neglect, and perhaps concealed contempt.

Hence it followed that the Court and the clergy had far more toleration for Atheism than for either Protestantism or Jansenism. It is authentically related that Louis XIV. on one occasion objected to the appointment of a representative on a foreign mission on account of the person being supposed to be a Jansenist; but on its being discovered that the nominee was only an Atheist, the objection was at once withdrawn.[7]

At the time of the Revocation, when the King and the Catholic Church were resolved to tolerate no religion other than itself, the Church had never seemed so powerful in France. It had a strong hold upon the minds of the people. It was powerful in its leaders and its great preachers; in fact, France has never, either before or since, exhibited such an array of preaching genius as Bossuet, Bourdaloue, Fléchier, and Massillon.

Yet the uncontrolled and enormously increased power conferred upon the French Church at that time, most probably proved its greatest calamity. Less than a hundred years after the Revocation, the Church had lost its influence over the people, and was despised. The Deists and Atheists, sprung from the Church's bosom, were in the ascendant; and Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, and Mirabeau, were regarded as greater men than either Bossuet, Bourdaloue, Fléchier, or Massillon.

Not one of the clergy we have named, powerful orators though they were, ever ventured to call in question the cruelties with which the King sought to compel the Protestants to embrace the dogmas of their Church. There were no doubt many Catholics who deplored the force practised on the Huguenots; but they were greatly in the minority, and had no power to make their opposition felt. Some of them considered it an impious sacrilege to compel the Protestants to take the Catholic sacrament-to force them to accept the host, which Catholics believed to be the veritable body of Christ, but which the Huguenots could only accept as bread, over which some function had been performed by the priests, in whose miraculous power of conversion they did not believe.

Fénélon took this view of the forcible course employed by the Jesuits; but he was in disgrace as a Jansenist, and what he wrote on the subject remained for a long time unknown, and was only first published in 1825. The Duc de Saint-Simon, also a Jansenist, took the same view, which he embodied in his "Memoirs;" but these were kept secret by his family, and were not published for nearly a century after his death.

Thus the Catholic Church remained triumphant. The Revocation was apparently approved by all, excepting the Huguenots. The King was flattered by the perpetual conversions reported to be going on throughout the country-five thousand persons in one place, ten thousand in another, who had abjured and taken the communion-at once, and sometimes "instantly."

"The King," says Saint-Simon, "congratulated himself on his power and his piety. He believed himself to have renewed the days of the preaching of the Apostles, and attributed to himself all the honour. The Bishops wrote panegyrics of him; the Jesuits made the pulpits resound with his praises.... He swallowed their poison in deep draughts."[8]

Louis XIV. lived for thirty years after the Edict of Nantes had been revoked. He had therefore the fullest opportunity of observing the results of the policy he had pursued. He died in the hands of the Jesuits, his body covered with relics of the true cross. Madame de Maintenon, the "famous and fatal witch," as Saint-Simon called her, abandoned him at last; and the King died, lamented by no one.

He had banished, or destroyed, during-his reign, about a million of his subjects, and those who remained did not respect him. Many regarded him as a self-conceited tyrant, who sought to save his own soul by inflicting penance on the backs of others. He loaded his kingdom with debt, and overwhelmed his people with taxes. He destroyed the industry of France, which had been mainly supported by the Huguenots. Towards the end of his life he became generally hated; and while his heart was conveyed to the Grand Jesuits, his body, which was buried at St. Denis, was hurried to the grave accompanied by the execrations of the people.

Yet the Church remained faithful to him to the last. The great Massillon preached his funeral sermon; though the message was draped in the livery of the Court. "How far," said he, "did Louis XIV. carry his zeal for the Church, that virtue of sovereigns who have received power and the sword only that they may be props of the altar and defenders of its doctrine! Specious reasons of State! In vain did you oppose to Louis the timid views of human wisdom, the body of the monarchy enfeebled by the flight of so many citizens, the course of trade slackened, either by the deprivation of their industry, or by the furtive removal of their wealth! Dangers fortify his zeal. The work of God fears not man. He believes even that he strengthens his throne by overthrowing that of error. The profane temples are destroyed, the pulpits of seduction are cast down. The prophets of falsehood are torn from their flocks. At the first blow dealt to it by Louis, heresy falls, disappears, and is reduced either to hide itself in the obscurity whence it issued, or to cross the seas, and to bear with it into foreign lands its false gods, its bitterness, and its rage."[9]

Whatever may have been the temper which the Huguenots displayed when they were driven from France by persecution, they certainly carried with them something far more valuable than rage. They carried with them their virtue, piety, industry, and valour, which proved the source of wealth, spirit, freedom, and character, in all those countries-Holland, Prussia, England, and America-in which these noble exiles took refuge.

We shall next see whether the Huguenots had any occasion for entertaining the "rage" which the great Massillon attributed to them.[Back to Contents]