The
History of Protestantism |
Chapter 1 | LOUIS XIII. AND THE WARS OF
RELIGION. Henry IV – Dies in the Midst of his Great Schemes – Louis XIII – Maria de Medici Regent – Alarm of the Protestants – Character of Maria de Medici – Astrology – Governs her Son – Protestants hold a Political Convocation – Henri de Rohan – Degeneracy of the Huguenots – Synods of the French Protestant Church – New Policy of Louis XIII – The Jesuits – Toleration – Invasion of Bearn – Its Protestantism Suppressed – Jesuit Logic – Shall the Sword be Drawn? – War – Saumur – Death of Duplessis-Mornay – Siege of Montauban – of St. Jean d'Angely – A Scotch Pastor on the Ramparts – Peace – Question of the Distinct Autonomy of the Huguenots. |
Chapter 2 | FALL OF LA ROCHELLE, AND END OF THE WARS OF
RELIGION. Cardinal Richelieu – His Genius – His Schemes – Resolves to Crush the Huguenots – Siege of La Rochelle – Importance of the Town – English Fleet Sent to Succor it – Treachery of Charles I – The Fleet Returns – A Second and Third Fleet – Famine in La Rochelle – Fall of the City – End of the Religious Wars – Despotism Established in France – Fruitless Efforts of Rohan to Rouse the Huguenots – Policy of Richelieu – His Death – Louis XIII Dies. |
Chapter 3 | INDUSTRIAL AND LITERARY EHINENCE OF THE
FRENCH PROTESTANTS. Liberty Falls with the Huguenots – Louis XIV – Mazarin at the Helm – His Character – The Nobles and the Mob – The Protestants – They Excel in Agriculture – Their Eminence in Trade and Manufactures – Their Superior Probity – Foreign Commerce in their Hands – Their Professional and Literary Eminence – Pulpit Eloquence – French Synods – Mere Shadows of Former Assemblies – French Protestant Seminaries – Montauban – Saumur – Sedan – Nimes – Eminent Protestant Pastors – Chamier – Dumoulin – Petit – Rivet – Basnage – Blondel – Bochart – Drelincourt. |
Chapter 4 | THE DRAGONNADES. The War of the Fronde – Mazarin adopts the Foreign Policy of Richelieu – Dies at the Height of his Power – Louis XIV now Absolute – "The State, it is I" – His Error as a King – His Error as a Man – Alternate Sinning and Repenting – Extermination of the Huguenots – Confiscation of their Churches – Arrets against Protestants – Fund for the Purchase of Consciences – Father la Chaise – Madame de Maintenon – The Dragonnades – Conversions and Persecutions. |
Chapter 5 | REVOCATION OF THE EDICT OF
NANTES. Edict of Revocation – Summary of its Enactments – The Protestant Churches Demolished – Charenton, etc. – The Pastors Banished – Severe Penalties – No Burial without the Sacrament – Lay Protestants Forbidden to Emigrate – Schomberg and Admiral Duquesne – The Ports and Outlets from France Closed – The Flight of the Huguenots – Their Disguises – Flight of Women – Their Sufferings on the Way – Probable Numbers of the Refugees – Disastrous Influence of the Revocation on Science and Literature – on Trade and Manufactures – on the Army and Navy – France Weakened and Other Countries Enriched – Panegyrics of the Clergy – Approval of the Pope – A Te Deum at Rome – Medals in Commemoration of the Event. |
Chapter 6 | THE PRISONS AND THE GALLEYS. "New Catholics" – Suspected and Watched – New and Terrible Persecutions – Described by Quick – The Dungeons – Their Horrors – M. de Marolles, and other Prisoners – Other Modes of Punishment – Transportation – Sold into Foreign Slavery – Martyrdom of Fulcran Rey – Claude Brousson – his Preaching – His Martyrdom – Drums round the Scaffold – The Galley Chain – Chateau de la Tournelle – The Galleys. |
Chapter 7 | THE "CHURCH OF THE
DESERT." Secessions – Rise of the "Church of the Desert" – Her Places of Meeting – Her Worship – Pastors – Communion "Tokens" – Night Assemblies – Simplicity yet Sublimity of her Worship – Renewed Persecutions – War of the Camisards – Last Armed Struggle of French Protestantism – No Voice – Bossuet – Antoine Court – The "Restorer of Protestantism" – Death of Louis XIV – Theological Seminary at Lausanne – Paul Rabaut – The Edict of Malesherbes – The Revolution. |
BOOK
TWENTY-SECOND
PROTESTANTISM IN FRANCE FROM DEATH OF HENRY IV (1610) TO
THE REVOLUTION (1789).
CHAPTER 1 Back to
Top
LOUIS XIII. AND THE WARS OF
RELIGION.
Henry IV – Dies in the Midst of his Great Schemes – Louis
XIII – Maria de Medici Regent – Alarm of the Protestants – Character of Maria de
Medici – Astrology – Governs her Son – Protestants hold a Political Convocation
– Henri de Rohan – Degeneracy of the Huguenots – Synods of the French Protestant
Church – New Policy of Louis XIII – The Jesuits – Toleration – Invasion of Bearn
– Its Protestantism Suppressed – Jesuit Logic – Shall the Sword be Drawn? – War
– Saumur – Death of Duplessis-Mornay – Siege of Montauban – of St. Jean d'Angely
– A Scotch Pastor on the Ramparts – Peace – Question of the Distinct Autonomy of
the Huguenots.
WE resume our history of Protestantism in France at
the death-bed of Henry IV. The dagger of Ravaillac arrested that monarch in the
midst of his great schemes.[1] Henry had abjured his
mother's faith, in the hope of thereby purchasing from Rome the sure tenure of
his crown and the peaceful possession of his kingdom. He fancied that he had got
what he bargained for; and being, as he supposed, firmly seated on the throne,
he was making prodigious efforts to lift France out of the abyss in which he
found her. He was laboring to re-establish order, to plant confidence, and to
get rid of the immense debts which prodigality and dishonesty had accumulated,
and which weighed so heavily upon the kingdom. He was taking the legitimate
means to quicken commerce and agriculture – in short, to efface all those
frightful traces which had been left on the country by what are known in history
as the "civil wars," but which were, in fact, crusades organized by the
Government on a great scale, in violation of sworn treaties and of natural
rights, for the extirpation of its Protestant subjects. Henry, moreover, was
meditating great schemes of foreign policy, and had already dispatched an army
to Germany in order to humble the House of Austria, and reduce the Spanish
influence in Europe, so menacing to 'the liberties and peace of Christendom. It
did seem as if the king would succeed; but his Austrian project too nearly
touched the Papal interests. There were eyes watching Henry which he knew not
of. His heretical foreign policy excited a suspicion that, although he was
outwardly a Roman Catholic, he was at heart a Huguenot. In a moment, a Hand was
stretched forth from the darkness, and all was changed. The policy of Henry IV
perished with him.
He was succeeded on the throne by his son, Louis XIII,
a youth of eight and a half years. That same evening, an edict of the Parliament
of Paris made his mother, Maria de Medici, regent. The consternation of the
Huguenots was great. Their hands instinctively grasped their sword-hilts. The
court hastened to calm their fears by publishing a decree ratifying all the
former edicts of toleration, and assuring the Protestants that the death of
Henry IV would bring with it no change of the national policy; but with so many
torn treaties and violated oaths, which they could not banish from their memory,
what reliance could the Huguenots place on these assurances? Was it not but a
spreading of the old snare around their feet? In the regent and her son they
saw, under a change of names, a second Catherine de Medici and Charles IX, to be
followed, it might be, by a second St. Bartholomew.
The boy of eight
years who wore the crown could do only what his mother, the regent, counseled,
or rather commanded. Maria de Medici was the real sovereign. That ill-fated
marriage with the Pope's niece, alas! of how many wars was it destined to be the
prolific source to France! Maria de Medici lacked the talent of her famous
predecessor, Catherine de Medici, but she possessed all her treachery, bigotry,
and baseness. She was a profound believer in witchcraft, and guided the vessel
of the State by her astrological calculations. When divination failed her she
had recourse to the advice of the Pope's nuncio, of the Spanish ambassador, and
of Concini, a man of obscure birth from her native city of Florence, on whom she
heaped high titles, though she could not impart to him noble qualities. Under
such guidance the vessel of the State was drawn farther and farther every day
into the old whirlpool. When Louis XIII grew to be a few years older, he strove
to break the trammels in which he was held, by banishing his mother to Blois,
and instigating men to murder Concini, but he only fell under the influence of a
favorite as worthless and profligate as the man he had employed assassins to rid
him of. Intrigue, blood, and peculation disgraced the court. The great nobles,
contemning the power of the sovereign, retired to their estates, where, at the
head of their encampments, they lived like independent kings, and gave sad
presage of the distractions and civil broils yet awaiting the unhappy land. But
it is the Protestant thread, now becoming somewhat obscure, that we wish to
follow.
The year after the king's accession (1611) the Protestant nobles
met at Saumur, and held one of those political assemblies which they had planned
for the regulation of religious interests after the abjuration of Henry
IV.
The illustrious Duplessis-Mornay was elected president, and the
famous Pastor Chaumier was made vice-president. The convocation consisted of
seventy persons in all – noblemen, ministers, delegates from the Tiers Etat, and
deputies from the town of La Rochelle: in short, a Huguenot Parliament. The
Government, though reluctantly, had granted permission for their meeting; and
their chief business was to elect two deputies-general, to be accepted by the
court as the recognized heads of the Protestant body. The assembly met. They
refused simply to inscribe two names in a bulletin and break up as the court
wished; they sat four months, discussed the matters affecting their interests as
Protestants, and asked of the Government redress of their grievances. They
renewed their oath of union, which consisted in swearing fidelity to the king,
always reserving their duty to "the sovereign empire of God." It was at this
assembly that the talents of Henri de Rohan as a statesman and orator began to
display themselves, and to give promise of the prominent place he was afterwards
to fill in the ranks of the Reformed. He strongly urged union among themselves,
he exhorted them to show concern for the welfare of the humblest as well as of
the highest in their body, and to display a firm spirit in dealing with
Government in the way of exacting all the rights which had been guaranteed by
treaty. "We are not come," he said, "to four cross-roads, but to a point where
safety can be found in only one path. Let our object be the glory of God, and
the security of the churches he has so miraculously established in this kingdom,
providing eagerly for each other's benefit by every legitimate means. Let us
religiously demand only what is necessary. Let us be firm in order to get
it."
The want of union was painfully manifested at this assembly at
Saumur, thanks to their enemies, who had done all in their power beforehand to
sow jealousies among them. The fervent piety which characterized their fathers
no longer distinguished their sons; the St. Bartholomew had inflicted worse
evils than the blood it spilt, great as that was; many now cleaved to the
Huguenots, whose religion was only a pretext for the advancement of their
ambition; others were timid and afraid to urge even the most moderate demands
lest they should be crushed outright. There was, too, a marked difference
between the spirit of the Protestants in the north and in the south of France.
The former were not able to shake off the terror of the turbulent and Popish
capital, in the neighborhood of which they lived; the latter bore about them the
free air of the mountains, and the bold spirit of the Protestant cities of the
south, and when they spoke in the assembly it was with their swords half drawn
from the scabbards. Similar political assemblies were held in subsequent years
at Grenoble, at Nimes, at La Rochelle, and at other towns. Meetings of their
National Synod were, too, of frequent occurrence during this period, the
Moderator's chair being occupied not infrequently by men whose names were then,
and are still, famous in the annals of Protestant literature – Chamier and
Dumoulin. These Synods sought to rebuild the French Protestant Church, almost
fallen into ruins during the wars of the foregoing era, by restoring the
exercise of piety in congregations, cutting off unworthy members, and composing
differences and strifes among the Protestant nobles. Gathered from the
battle-fields and the deserts of France, bitter memories behind and darkening
prospects before them, these men were weary in heart and broken in spirit, and
were without the love and zeal which had animated their fathers who sat in the
Synod of La Rochelle forty years before, when the French Protestant Church was
in the prime and flower of her days.
The Huguenots were warned by many
signs of the sure approach of evil times. One ominous prognostic was the
reversal of the foreign policy of Henry IV. His last years were devoted to the
maturing of a great scheme for humbling the Austrian and Spanish Powers; and for
this end the monarch had allied himself, as we have already related, with the
northern Protestant nations. Louis XIII disconnected himself from his father's
allies, and joined himself to his father's enemies, by the project of a double
marriage; for while he solicited for himself the hand of the Spanish Infanta, he
offered his sister in marriage to the Prince of the Asturias. This boded the
ascendency of Spain and of Rome once more in France – in other words, of
persecution and war. Sinister reports were circulated through the kingdom that
the price to be paid for this double alliance was the suppression of heresy.
Soft words continued to come from the court, but the acts of its agents in the
provinces were not in correspondence therewith. These were hard enough. The
sword was not brought forth, it is true, but every other weapon of assault was
vigorously plied. The priests incessantly importuned the king to forbid the
Protestants from calling in question, by voice or by pen, the authority of the
Church or of the Pope. He was solicited not to let them open a school in any
city, not to let any of their ministers enter a hospital, or administer
religious consolation to any of their sick; not to let any one from abroad teach
any faith save the Roman; not to let them perform their religious rites; in
short, the monarch was to abrogate one by one all the rights secured by treaty
to the Protestants, and disannul and make void by a process of evacuation the
Edict of Nantes. The poor king did not need any importuning; it was not the will
but the power that was wanting to him to fulfill the oath sworn at his
coronation, to expel from the lands under his sway every man and woman denounced
by the Church. At this time (1614) the States-General, or Supreme Parliament, of
France met, the last ever convoked until that memorable meeting of 1789, the
precursor of the Revolution. A deputy of the Tiers, or Commons, rose in that
assembly to plead for toleration. His words sounded like blasphemy in the ears
of the clergy and nobles; he was reminded of the king's oath to exterminate
heretics, and told that the treaties sworn to the Huguenots were only
provisional; in other words, that it was the duty of the Government always to
persecute and slay the Protestants, except in one case – namely, when it was not
able to do it.
Of these destructive maxims – destructive to the Huguenots
in the first instance, but still more destructive to France in the long run –
two terrible exemplifications were about to be given. The territory of Lower
Navarre and Bearn, in the mountains of the Pyrenees, was the hereditary kingdom
of Jeanne d'Albret, and we have already spoken of her efforts to plant in it the
Protestant faith. She established churches, schools, and hospitals; she endowed
these from the national property, and soon her little kingdom, in point of
intelligence and wealth, became one of the most flourishing spots in all
Christendom. Under her son (Henry IV) this kingdom became virtually a part of
the French monarchy; but now (1617) it was wished more thoroughly to incorporate
it with France. Of its inhabitants, two thirds – some say nine tenths – were
Protestants. This appeared no obstacle whatever to the projected incorporation.
The Bearnese had no right to be of any but the king's religion. A decree was
issued, restoring the Roman Catholic faith in Bearn, and giving back to the
Romish clergy the entire ecclesiastical property, which had for a half-century
been in possession of the Protestants. "These estates," so reasoned the Jesuit
Arnoux, a disciple of the school of Escobar, "belong to God, who is the
Proprietor of them, and may not be lawfully held by any save his priests."[2] Consternation reigned in
Bearn; all classes united in remonstrating against this tyrannical decree, which
swept away at once their consciences and their property. Their remonstrance was
unheeded, and the king put himself at the head of an army to compel the Bearnese
to submission. The soldiers led against this heretical territory, which they
burned with zeal to purge and convert, were not very scrupulous as to the means.
They broke open the doors of the churches, they burned the Protestant books,
compelled the citizens to kneel when the Host passed, and drove them to mass
with the cudgel. They dealt the more obstinate a thrust with the saber; the
women dared not show themselves :in the street, dreading worse violences.[3] In this manner was the
Popish religion re-established in Bearn. This was the first of the dragonnades.
Louis XIV was afterwards to repeat on the greater theater of France the bloody
tragedy now enacted on the little stage of Bearn.
This was what even now
the Protestants feared. Accordingly, at a political assembly held in La
Rochelle, 1621, they made preparations for the worst. They divided Protestant
France into eight departments or circles; they appointed a governor over each,
with power to impose taxes, raise soldiers, and engage in battle. The supreme
military power was lodged in the Duke de Bouillon, the assembly reserving to
itself the power of making war or concluding peace. The question was put to the
several circles, whether they should declare war, or wait the measures of the
court? The majority were averse to hostilities. They felt the feeble tenure on
which hung their rights, and even their lives; but they shuddered when they
remembered the miseries which previous wars had brought in their
train.
They counseled, therefore, that the sword should not be drawn till
they were compelled to unsheathe it in sell defense. This necessity had, in
fact, already arisen. The king was advancing against them at the head of his
army, his Jesuit confessor, Arnoux, having removed all moral impediments from
his path. "The king's promises," said his confessor, "are either matters of
conscience or matters of State. Those made to the Huguenots are not promises of
conscience, for they are contrary to the precepts of the Church; and if they are
promises of State they ought to be referred to the Privy Council, which is of
opinion they ought not to be kept."[4] The Pope and cardinals
united to smooth the king's way financially, by contributing between them
400,000 crowns, while the other clergy offered not less than a million of crowns
to defray the war expenses.
The royal army crossed the Loire and opened
the campaign, which they prosecuted with various but, on the whole, successful
fortune. Some places surrendered, others were taken by siege, and the
inhabitants, men and women, were often put to the sword. The Castle of Saumur,
of which Duplessis-Mornay was governor, and which he held as one of the
cautionary fortresses granted by the edicts, was taken by perfidy. The king
pledged his word that, if Mornay would admit the royal troops, the immunities of
the place should be maintained. No sooner had the king entered than he declared
that he took definite possession of the castle. To give this act of ill-faith
the semblance of an amicable arrangement, the king offered Mornay, in addition
to the arrears of his salary, 100,000 crowns and a marshal's baton. "I cannot,"
replied the patriot, "in conscience or in honor sell the liberty and security of
others;" adding that, "as to dignities, he had ever been more desirous to render
himself worthy of them, than to obtain them." This great man died two years
afterwards. His end was like his life. "We saw him," says Jean Daille, his
private chaplain, "in the midst of death firmly laying hold on life, and
enjoying full satisfaction where men are generally terrified." He was the last
representative of that noble generation which had been molded by the
instructions of Calvin and the example of Beza.
The next exploit of the
king's arms was the taking of St. Jean d'Angely. The besiegers were in great
force around the walls, their shot was falling in an incessant shower upon the
city, and the inhabitants, when not on duty on the ramparts, were forced to seek
refuge in the cellars of their houses. Provisions were beginning to fail, and
the citizens were now worn out by the fatigue of fighting night and day on the
walls. In these circumstances, they sent a deputation to Mr. John Welsh, a
Scottish minister, who had been exiled from his native land, and was now acting
as pastor of the Protestant congregation in St. Jean d'Angely. They told him
that one in particular of the enemy's guns, which was of great size, and
moreover was very advantageously placed, being mounted on a rising ground, was
sweeping that entire portion of the walls which was most essential to the
defense, and had silenced their guns. What were they to do? they asked. Welsh
exhorted them to defend the city to the last, and to encourage them he
accompanied them through the streets, "in which the bullets were falling as
plentifully as hail,"[5] and mounted the ramparts.
Going up to one of the silent guns, he bade the cannonier resume firing; but the
man had no powder. Welsh, seizing a ladle, hastened to the magazine and filled
it with powder. As he was returning, a shot tore it out of his hand. 'Using his
hat instead of a ladle, he filled it with powder, and going up to the gunner,
made him load his piece. "Level well," said Welsh, "and God will direct the
shot." The man fired, and the first shot dismounted the gun which had inflicted
so much damage upon the defenders. The incident re-rived the courage of the
citizens, and they resumed the defense, and continued it till they had extorted
from their besiegers favorable terms of capitulation.[6]
Montauban withstood
the royal arms, despite the prophecy of a Carmelite monk, who had come from
Bohemia, with the reputation of working miracles, and who assured the king that
the city would, without doubt, fall on the firing of the four-hundredth gun. The
mystic :number had long since been completed, but Montauban still stood, and at
the end of two months and a half, the king, with tears in his eyes, retired from
before its walls. It is related that the besieged were apprised of the
approaching departure of the army by a soldier of the Reformed religion, who, on
the evening before the siege was raised, was playing on his flute the beginning
of the sixty-eighth Psalm, "Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered, and
let them also that hate him flee before him," etc.[7] The king had better
success at Montpellier, on the taking of which he judged it prudent to close the
campaign by signing terms of peace on the 19th October, 1622. The peace
indicated a loss of position on the part of the Protestants. The Edict of Nantes
was confirmed, but of the cautionary towns which that edict had put into the
hands of the Protestants, only two were now left them – Montauban and La
Rochelle.
The French Protestants at this stage of their history are seen
withdrawing to a certain extent from the rest of the nation, constituting
themselves into a distinct civil community, and taking independent political and
military action. This was a strong step, but the attitude of the Government, and
its whole procedure towards them for a century previous, may perhaps be held as
justifying it. It appeared to them the only means left them of defending their
natural rights. We are disposed to think, however, that it would have been well
had the French Protestants drawn more strongly the line which separated their
action as citizens from their action as church members – in other words, given
more prominence to their church organization. The theory which they had received
from Calvin, and on which they professed to act, was that while society is one,
it is divided into the two great spheres of Church and State; that as members of
the first – that is, of the Church – they formed an organization distinct from
that of the State; that this organization was constituted upon a distinct basis,
that of Revelation; that it was placed under a distinct Head, namely, Christ;
that it had distinct rights and laws given it by God; and that in the exercise
of these rights and laws, for its own proper ends, it was not dependence upon,
or accountable to, the State. This view of the Church's origin and constitution
makes her claims and jurisdiction perfectly intelligible; and gives, as the
French style it, her raison d'etre. It may not be assented to by all, but even
where it is not admitted it can be understood, and the independent jurisdiction
of the Church, whether right or wrong in fact, on which we are here pronouncing
no opinion, will be seen to be in logical consistency with at least this theory
of her constitution. This theory was embraced in Scotland as well as in France,
but in the former country it was more consistently carried out than in the
latter. While the French Protestants were" the Religion," the Scots were "the
Church ;" while the former demanded "freedom of worship," the latter claimed
"liberty to administer their ecclesiastical constitution." The weakness of the
French Protestants was that they failed to put prominently before the nation
their rights as a divinely chartered society, and in their action largely
blended things civil and things ecclesiastical. The idea of "Headship," which is
but a summary phrase for their whole conception of a Church, enabled the Scots
to keep the two more completely separate than perhaps anywhere else in
Christendom. In Germany the magistrate has continued to be the chief bishop; in
Geneva the Church tended towards being the supreme magistrate; the Scots have
aimed at keeping in the middle path between Erastianism and a theocracy. Yet, as
a proof that the higher law will always rule, while nowhere has the action of
the Church been so little directly political as in Scotland, nowhere has the
Church so deeply molded the genius of the people, or so strongly influenced the
action of the State.
CHAPTER 2
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FALL OF LA ROCHELLE,
AND END OF THE WARS OF RELIGION.
Cardinal Richelieu – His Genius –
His Schemes – Resolves to Crush the Huguenots – Siege of La Rochelle –
Importance of the Town – English Fleet Sent to Succor it – Treachery of Charles
I – The Fleet Returns – A Second and Third Fleet – Famine in La Rochelle – Fall
of the City – End of the Religious Wars – Despotism Established in France –
Fruitless Efforts of Rohan to Rouse the Huguenots – Policy of Richelieu – His
Death – Louis XIII Dies.
THERE was now about to appear on the scene a man who
was destined to act a great part in the affairs of Europe. The Bishop of Lucon
was a member of the States-General which, as we have already said, assembled in
1614; and there he first showed that aptitude for business which gave him such
unrivalled influence and unbounded fame as Cardinal Richelieu. He was a man of
profound penetration, of versatile genius, and of unconquerable activity. The
queen-mother introduced him to the council-table of her son Louis XIII, and
there the force of his character soon raised him to the first place. He put down
every rival, became the master of his sovereign, and governed France as he
pleased. It vas about this time (1624) that his power blossomed. He was
continually revolving great schemes, but, great as they were, his genius and
activity were equal to the execution of them. Although a churchman, the aim of
his ambition was rather to aggrandize France than to serve Rome. The Roman
purple was to him a garment, and nothing more; or, if he valued it in any
degree, it was because of the aid it brought him in the accomplishment of his
political projects.
Once and again in the pursuit of these projects he
crossed the Pope's path, without paying much regard to the anger or alarm his
policy might awaken in the Vatican. His projects were mainly three. He found the
throne weak – in fact contemned – and he wished to raise it up, and make it a
power in France. he found the nobles turbulent, and all but ungovernable, and he
wished to break their power and curb their pride. In the third place, he revived
the policy of Henry IV, which sought to reduce the power of Austria, in both the
Imperial and Spanish branches, and with this view the cardinal courted alliances
with England and the German States. So far well, as regarded the great cause of
Protestantism; but, unfortunately, Richelieu accounted it a necessary step
toward the accomplishment of these three leading objects of his ambition, that
he should first subdue the Huguenots. They had come to be a powerful' political
body in the State, with a government of their own, thus dividing the kingdom,
and weakening the throne, which it was one of his main objects to strengthen.
The Protestants, on the other hand, regarded their political organization as
their only safeguard – the bulwark behind which they fought for their religious
liberties. How feeble a defense were royal promises and oaths, was a matter on
which they had but too ample an experience; and, provided their political
combinations were broken up, and their cautionary towns wrested from them, they
would be entirely, they felt, at the mercy of their enemies. But this was what
the powerful cardinal had resolved upon. The political rights of the Huguenots
were an obstacle in his path, which, postponing every other project, he now
turned the whole resources of the crown, and the whole might of his genius, to
sweep away.
About this time all incident happened at court which is worth
recording. One day Father Arnoux, the king's confessor, was preaching before his
Majesty and courtiers. The Jesuit pronounced a strong condemnation on regicide,
and affirmed solemnly that the Order of Jesus allowed no such practice, but, on
the contrary, repudiated it. Louis XIII, in whose memory the murder of his
father was still fresh, felt this doctrine to be reassuring, and expressed his
satisfaction with it. A Scottish minister of the name of Primrose chanced on
that day to be among the auditors of Father Arnoux, and easily saw through the
sophism with which he was befooling the king.
Primrose made the Jesuit be
asked if Jacques Clement had killed his king, or even a king, when he stabbed a
prince excommunicated by the Pope? And further, in the event of the Pope
excommunicating Louis XIII, would the Jesuits then acknowledge him as tacit
king, or even as a king? And, finally, were they disposed to condemn their
disciple Ravaillac as guilty of high treason? These were embarrassing questions,
and the only response which they drew forth from Arnoux was an order of
banishment against the man who had put them.[1]
The Huguenot body
at this period had, to use the old classic figure, but one neck – that neck was
their stronghold of La Rochelle, and the cardinal resolved to strike it through
at a blow. La Rochelle was perhaps, after Paris, the most famous of the cities
of France. It enjoyed a charter of civic independence, which dated from the
twelfth century. It was governed by a mayor and council of 100. Its citizens
amounted at this time to 30,000. They were industrious, rich, intelligent, and
strongly attached to the Protestant faith, which they had early embraced. Not
once throughout the long struggle had La Rochelle succumbed to the royal arms,
though often besieged.[2] This virgin fortress was
the strongest rampart of the Huguenots.
The great chiefs – Conde,
Coligny, Henry of Navarre – had often :made it their head-quarters. Within its
gates had assembled the famous Synod of 1571, which comprised so much that was
illustrious in rank, profound in erudition, and venerable in piety, and which
marks the culminating epoch of the French Reformed Church. La Rochelle was the
basis of the Huguenots; it was the symbol of their power, and while it stood
their political and religious existence could not be crushed. On that very
account Richelieu, who had resolved to erect a monarchical despotism in France,
was all the more determined to overthrow it.
The first attempt of the
cardinal against this redoubtable city was made in 1625. Arising under the Dukes
of Rohan and Soubise, the two military leaders of the Protestants, disconcerted
the plans which Richelieu was carrying out against Austria. He instantly dropped
his schemes abroad to strike a blow at home. Sending the French fleet to La
Rochelle, a great naval battle, in which Richelieu was completely victorious,
was fought off the coast. La Rochelle seemed at the mercy of the victor; but the
discovery of a plot against his life called the cardinal suddenly to court, and
the doomed city escaped. Richelieu crushed his enemies at Paris, grasped power
more firmly than ever, and again turned his thoughts to the reduction of the
stronghold of the Protestants. The taking of La Rochelle was the key of his
whole policy, home and foreign, and he made prodigious efforts to bring the
enterprise to a successful issue. He raised vast land and naval armaments, and
opened the siege in October, 1627.
The eyes of all Europe were fixed on
the city, now enclosed both by sea and land, by the French armies. All felt how
momentous was the issue of the conflict about to open. The, spirit of the
Rochellois was worthy of the brave men from whom they were sprung, and of the
place their city held in the great cause in which it had embarked. The mayor,
Guiton, to an earnest Protestantism added all iron will and a dauntless courage.
With nothing around them but armed enemies, the ships of the foe covering the
sea, and the lines of his infantry occupying the land, the citizens were of one
mind, to resist to the last. The attitude of the brave city, and the greatness
of the issue that hung upon its standing or falling, as regarded the Protestant
cause, awakened the sympathies of the Puritans of England. They raised a
powerful army for the relief of their brethren of La Rochelle; but their efforts
were frustrated by the treachery of the court. Charles I, influenced by his
wife, Henrietta of France, wrote to Pennington, the commander of the fleet, "to
dispose of those ships as he should be directed by the French king, and to sink
or fire such as should refuse to obey these orders." When the sailors discovered
that they were to act not for, but against the Rochellois, they returned to
England, declaring that they "would rather be hanged at home for disobedience,
than either desert their ships, or give themselves up to the French like slaves,
to fight against their own religion."
Next year, after the Duke of
Soubise, who commanded in La Rochelle, had visited England, the king was
prevailed upon again to declare himself the protector of the Rochellois, and an
army of about 7,000 marines was raised for that service. The English squadron
set sail under the command of Buckingham, an incompetent and unprincipled man.
Its appearance off La Rochelle, 100 sail strong, gladdened the eyes of the
Rochellois; but it was only for a moment. There now commenced on the part of
Buckingham a series of blunders and disasters, which, whether owing to
incompetency or perfidy, tarnished the naval glory of England, and bitterly
mocked the hopes of those to whom it had held out the delusive prospect of
deliverance. Better, in truth, it had never come, for its appearance suggested
to Richelieu the expedient which led inevitably to the fall of the city. La
Rochelle might be victualled by sea, and so long as it was so, its reduction,
the cardinal felt, was impracticable. To prevent this, Richelieu bethought him
of the same expedient by which a conqueror of early times had laid a yet prouder
city, Tyre, level with the waters. The cardinal raised a dyke or mole across the
channel of about a mile's breadth, by which La Rochelle is approached, and so
closed the gates of the sea against its succor. The English fleet assailed this
dyke in vain. Baffled in all their attempts, they returned to their own shores,
and left the beleaguered city to its fate. Famine now set in, and soon became
sore in the city; but it 'would be too harrowing to dwell on its horrors. The
deaths were 300 daily. The most revolting garbage was cooked and eaten.
Specters, rather than men, clad in armor, moved through the streets. The houses
were full of dead, which the living had not strength to bury. Crowds of old
women and children went out at the gate, at times, in the hope that the sight of
their great misery might move their enemies to pity, or that they might :find
something by the way to assuage their hunger; but they were dealt with as the
caprice or cruelty of the besiegers prompted. Sometimes they were strangled on
gibbets, and sometimes they were stripped naked and scourged back into the city.
Still no thought of a surrender was entertained.
For more than a year had
the Rochellois waited, if haply from any quarter – the Protestants of other
countries, or their brethren in the provinces – deliverance might arise. In no
quarter could they descry sign or token of help; not a voice was raised to
cheer, not a hand was stretched out to aid. Fifteen terrible months had passed
over them. Two-thirds of the population were dead. Of the fighting men not more
than 150 remained. Around their walls was assembled the whole power of France.
There seemed no alternative, and on October 28th, 1628, La Rochelle surrendered
at discretion. So fell the Huguenots as a political power in France. The chief
obstacle in the path of Richelieu was now out of his way. The despotism which he
strove to rear went on growing apace. The throne became stronger every year,
gradually drawing to itself all rights, and stretching its absolute sway over
all classes, the nobles as well as the peasants, till at last Louis XIV could
say, "The State, it is I." And so continued matters till the Revolution of 1789
came to cast down this overgrown autocracy.
But one is curious to know
how it came to pass that the great body of the Protestants in the south of
France looked quietly on, while their brethren and their own political rights
were so perilously endangered in the fall of La Rochelle. While the siege was in
progress, the Duke of Rohan, the last great military chief of the Protestants,
traversed the whole of the Cevennes, where the Huguenots were numerous,
appealing to their patriotism, to the memory of their fathers, to their own
political and religious privileges – all suspended upon the issue at La Rochelle
– in the hope of rousing them to succor their brethren. But his words fell on
cold hearts. The ancient spirit was dead.
All the ancient privileges of
La Rochelle were annulled, and the Roman Catholic religion was re-established in
that city. The first mass was sung by Cardinal Richelieu himself. One cannot but
admire the versatility of his genius. During the siege he had shown himself the
ablest and most resolute soldier in the whole camp. All the operations of the
siege were of his planning; the construction of the mole, the lines of
circumvallation, all were prepared by his instructions, and executed under his
superintendence; and now, the bloody work at an end, he put off his coat of
mail, washed his hands, and appearing before the altar in his priestly robes, he
inaugurated the Roman worship in La Rochelle by celebrating the most solemn
service of his Church. A Te Deum, by Pope Urban VIII, for the fall of the
stronghold of the Huguenots, showed how the matter was viewed at
Rome.
After this the Protestants could offer no organized resistance, and
the king, by way of setting up a monument to commemorate his triumph, placed the
Huguenots under an edict of grace. This was a virtual revocation of the Edict of
Nantes; the father, however, left it to the son, Louis XIV., to complete
formally what he had begun; but henceforward the French Protestants held their
lives, and what of their political and religious rights was left them, of grace
and not of fight. Had the nation of France rest now that the wars of religion
were ended? No; the wars of prerogative immediately opened. The Roman Catholic
nobles had assisted Richelieu to put down the Huguenots, and now they found that
they had cleared the way for the tempest to reach themselves. They were humbled
in their turn, and the throne rose above all classes and interests of the State.
The cardinal next gave his genius and energy to affairs abroad. He took part, as
we have seen, in the Thirty Years' War, uniting his arms with those of the
heroic Gustavus Adolphus, not because he wished to lift up the Protestants, but
because he sought to humble the House of Austria and the Catholic League.
Personal enemies the cardinal readily forgave, for, said he, it is a duty to
pardon and forget offenses; but the enemies of his policy, whom he styled the
enemies of Church and State, he did not pardon, "for," said he, "to forget these
offenses is not to forgive them, it is to repeat them."
It was the design
of God to humble one class of his enemies by the instrumentality of another, and
so Richelieu prospered in all he undertook, lie weakened the emperor; he
mightily raised the prestige of the French arms, and he made the throne the one
power in the kingdom. But these brilliant successes added little to the personal
happiness of either the king or his minister. Louis XIII was of gloomy temper,
of feeble intellect, of no capacity for business; and his energetic minister,
who did all himself, permitted his sovereign little or no share in the
management of affairs.
Louis lived apart, submitting painfully to the
control of the man who governed both the king and the kingdom. As regards the
cardinal, while passing from one victory to another he was constantly followed
by a menacing shadow. Ever and anon conspiracies were formed to take away his
life. He triumphed over them all, and held power to the last, but neither he nor
the king lived to enjoy what it took such a vast amount of toil and talent and
blood to achieve. The cardinal first, and six months after, the king, were both
stricken, in the mid-time of their days and in the height of their career. They
returned to their dust, and that day their thoughts perished.
CHAPTER 3
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INDUSTRIAL AND
LITERARY EHINENCE OF THE FRENCH PROTESTANTS.
Liberty Falls with the
Huguenots – Louis XIV – Mazarin at the Helm – His Character – The Nobles and the
Mob – The Protestants – They Excel in Agriculture – Their Eminence in Trade and
Manufactures – Their Superior Probity – Foreign Commerce in their Hands – Their
Professional and Literary Eminence – Pulpit Eloquence – French Synods – Mere
Shadows of Former Assemblies – French Protestant Seminaries – Montauban – Saumur
– Sedan – Nimes – Eminent Protestant Pastors – Chamier – Dumoulin – Petit –
Rivet – Basnage – Blondel – Bochart – Drelincourt.
THE mob and the nobles took part with the French
court in its efforts to extinguish Protestantism. With their help the court
triumphed. The seeds of Protestantism were still in the soil of France, covered
up by a million of corpses, and these the very men who, had their lives been
spared, would have enriched the nation with their industry, glorified it with
their genius, and defended it with their arms. We are now arrived at the end of
the religious wars. What has France gained by her vast expenditure of blood and
treasure? Peace? No; despotism. The close of the reign of Louis XIII shows us
the nobles and the mob crushed in their turn, and the throne rising in
autocratic supremacy above all rights and classes. One class, however, is exempt
from the general serfdom. The Church shares the triumph of the throne. The hand
of a priest has been laid upon the helm of the State, and the king and the
clergy together sway the destinies of a prostrate people. This ill-omened
alliance is destined to continue for, though one cardinal minister is dead,
another is about to take his place – and the tyranny which has grown out of it
is destined to go on, adding year by year to its own prerogatives and the
people's burdens, until its existence and exactions shall terminate together by
the arrival of the Revolution, which will mingle all four the throne, the
priesthood, the aristocracy, and the commonalty – in one great
ruin.
Louis XIV, now king, was a child of four and a half years. His
father on his death-bed had named a council of regency to assist the
queen-mother in governing the kingdom during the minority of his son. The, first
act of Anne of Austria was to cancel the, will of her husband, and to assume the
reins of government as sole regent, calling to her aid as prime minister
Cardinal Mazarin, the disciple of Richelieu. There fell to him an easier task
than that which had taxed the energies and genius of his great
predecessor.
Richelieu had fought the battle of the crown, and subjected
to it both the nobles and the people: the work expected of Mazarin was that he
should keep what Richelieu had won. This he found, however, no easy matter.
Richelieu had carefully husbanded the revenues of the State; Mazarin wasted
them. Extravagance created debts; debts necessitated new taxes; the taxes were
felt to be grievous burdens by the people. First murmurs were heard; then,
finally, insurrection broke out. The nobles, now that Richelieu was in his
grave, were attempting to throw off the yoke. An oppressed, turbulent, and
insurrectionary people were parading the streets of the capital, and carrying
their threats to the very gates of the palace. Both nobles and mob thought the
time favorable for reducing the power of the throne, and recovering those
privileges and that influence of which the great minister of Louis XIII had
stripped them. They did not succeed. The yoke which themselves had so large a
share in fitting upon their own necks they were compelled to wear; but the
troubles in which they plunged the country were a shield for the time over the
small remnant of Protestantism which had been spared in France.
That
remnant began again to flourish. Shut out from the honors of the court, and the
offices of the State, the great body of the Protestants transferred their
talents and activity to the pursuits of agriculture, of trade, and of
manufactures. In these they eminently excelled. The districts where they lived
were precisely those where the richest harvests were seen to wave. The farms
they owned in Bearn became proverbial for their fertility and beauty. The
Protestant portions of Languedoc were known by their richer vines, and more
luxuriant wheat. The mountains of the Cevennes were covered with noble forests
of chestnuts, which, in harvest-time, let fall their nuts in a rain as plenteous
as that of the manna of the desert, to which the inhabitants compared it. In
those forests wandered numerous herds, which fed on the rich grasses that
flourished underneath the great trees. Era-bosomed :in one of the mountains, the
Eperon, was a plain which the traveler found green and enameled with flowers at
all seasons. It abounded in springs, and when the summer had wasted the
neighboring herbage, the sun touched the pastures of this plain with a brighter
green, and tinted its blossoms with a livelier hue. It was not unworthy of the
name given it, the Hort-Dieu, or garden of the Lord. The Vivrais produced more
corn than the inhabitants could consume. The diocese of Uzes overflowed with oil
and wine. The valley of the Vaunage, in the district of Nimes, became famous for
the luxuriance of its fields and the riches of its gardens. The Protestants, to
whose skill and industry it largely owed the exuberance that gave it renown, had
more than sixty churches within its limits, and marked their appreciation of its
happy conditions by calling it the "Little Canaan." Everywhere France boasts a
fertile soil and a sunny air, but wherever the Huguenot had settled, there the
earth opened her bosom in a seven-fold increase, and nature seemed to smile on a
faith which the Government had anathematized, and which it pursued with
persecuting edicts.
The Protestants of France were marked by the same
superiority in trade which distinguished them in agriculture. Here their
superior intelligence and application were, perhaps, even more apparent, and
were rewarded with a yet greater measure of success. The wine trade of many
districts, especially that of Guienne, was almost entirely in their hands. The
goods of the linen and cloth weavers of Vire, Falaise, and Argentine, in
Normandy, they sold to the English and Dutch merchants, thus nourishing the home
industry while they enriched the foreign market. They were the main carriers
between Metz and Germany. The Mimes merchants were famous all over the south of
France, and by their skill and capital they provided employment and food for
innumerable families who otherwise would have been sunk in idleness and poverty.
"If the Nimes merchants," wrote Baville, the Intendant of the province, in 1699,
"are still bad Catholics, at any rate they have not ceased to be very good
traders."[1] In the center of France,
at Tours, on the banks of the Rhone, at Lyons, they worked in silks and velvets,
and bore off the palm from every other country for the quality of their fabrics
and the originality and beauty of their designs. They excelled in the
manufacture of woolen cloths. In the mountainous parts of the Cevennes, families
often passed their summers a-field, and their winters at the loom. They
displayed not less skill in the manufacture of paper. The paper-mills of Ambert
were unrivalled in Europe. They produced the paper on which the best printing of
Pads, Amsterdam, and London was executed. They were workers in iron, and
fabricated with skill and elegance weapons of war and implements of husbandry.
In all these industries large and flourishing factories might be seen in all
parts of France. If the mercantile marine flourished along the western and
northern sea. board, and the towns of Bordeaux, La Rochelle, and the Norman
ports rapidly grew in population and wealth, it was mainly owing to the energy
and enterprise of the Huguenots. After the horrid din of battle which had so
long shaken France, it was sweet to hear only the clang of the hammer; and after
the fearful conflagration of burning cities which had so often lit up the
midnight skies of that country, it was pleasant to see no more startling
spectacle than the blaze of the forge reflected from the overhanging
cloud.
The probity of the French Protestants was not less conspicuous
than their intelligence. This quality could not be hidden from the quick eyes of
foreign merchants, and they selected as their medium of communication with
France those in whose honesty they could thoroughly confide, in preference to
those whom they deemed of doubtful integrity. This tended to their further
importance and wealth, by placing the foreign trade of the country in their
hands. The commercial correspondents of the Dutch and English merchants were
almost exclusively Huguenots. Their word was taken where the bond of a Romanist
would be hesitatingly accepted or, it might be, declined. The cause of this
superior integrity is to be found not only in their higher religious code, but
also in the fact that, being continually and malignantly watched by their
countrymen, they found their safety to lie in Unremitting circumspection and
unimpeachable integrity. There was, moreover, a flexibility about their minds
which was wanting in their Romanist countrymen. Their religion taught them to
inquire and reason, it awoke them from the torpor and emancipated them from the
stiffness that weighed upon others, and this greater versatility and Power they
easily transferred to the avocations of their daily life. The young Huguenot not
infrequently visited foreign countries, sometimes in the character of a traveler
impelled by thirst for knowledge, and sometimes in the character of an exile
whom the storms of persecution had cast on an alien shore; but in whatever
capacity he mingled with foreigners, he always carried with him a mind keen to
observe, and open to :receive new ideas. On his return he improved or perfected
the manufactures of his own land, by grafting upon them the better methods he
had seen abroad. Thus, partly by studying in foreign schools, partly by their
own undoubted inventive powers, the French Protestants carried the arts and
manufactures of France to a pitch of perfection which few countries have
reached, perhaps none excelled, and their numbers, their wealth, and their
importance increased despite all the efforts of the Government to degrade and
even to exterminate them. As an additional element of their prosperity, we must
add that the year of the Huguenot contained a good many more working days than
that of the Romanist. The fete-days of the Church abridged the working year of
the latter to 260 days; whereas that of the Protestant contained 50 days more,
or 310 in all.
Agriculture, manufactures, and art did not exclusively
engross the French Protestants. Not a few aspired to a higher sphere, and there
their genius shed even a greater glory on their country, and diffused a brighter
luster around their own names. Protestants took a foremost place among the
learned physicians, the great lawyers, and the illustrious orators of France.
Their intellectual achievements largely contributed to the splendor which
irradiated the era of Louis XIV. A Protestant advocate, Henry Basnage, led for
fifty years the Rouen bar.[2] His friend, Lemery, father
of the illustrious chemist, of whose birth within her walls Rouen is to this day
proud, discharged with rare distinction, in the Parliament so hostile to the
Huguenots, the duties of Procureur.[3] The glory of founding the
French Academy is clue to a Protestant, Valentine Conrart, a man of fine
literary genius. A little company of illustrious men, who met at Conrart's
house, first suggested the idea of the Academy to Richelieu. The statesman gave
it a charter, but Conrart gave it rules, and continued to be its life and soul
until the day of his death. In this list of Protestants who adorned the country
that knew so in to appreciate their faith, was Guy Pantin. He was distinguished
as a man of letters, and not less distinguished as a philosopher and a
physician. Another great name is that of Pierre Dumoulin, who is entitled to
rank with the best of the classical prose writers of France. "With more respect
for the proprieties," says Weiss, "and less harshness of character, his style
reminded the reader of the great qualities of that of Calvin, whose Institutes
of Christianity had supplied France with its first model of a lucid, ingenious,
and vehement prose, such as the author of the Provincial Letters would not have
disowned."[4]
With the Huguenots
came the era of pulpit eloquence in France. In the worship of the Church of
Rome, the sermon was but the mere accessory. In the Protestant Church the sermon
became not indeed the essential, but the central part of the service. The
Reformation removed the sacrifice of the mass and restored the Word of God, it
banished the priest and brought back the preacher. Thus the pulpit, which had
played a prominent part in the early Church, but had long been forgotten, was
again set up, and men gathered round it, as being almost solely the font of
Divine knowledge so long as the Bible in the vernacular was scarcely accessible.
The preacher had to study that he might teach. His office was to instruct, to
convince, to exhort; and the more than human grandeur of his topics, and the
more than temporary issues of his preaching, tended to beget a sublimity both of
thought and utterance that reached the loftiest oratory. The audiences daily
grew: the preacher excelled more and more in his noble art, and the Protestant
pulpit became the grand pioneer of modern eloquence.
Rome soon saw that
she could not with safety to herself despise an instrumentality so powerful.
Hence arose a rivalship between the two Churches, which elevated the pulpits of
both, but in the end the Popish seemed to distance the Protestant pulpit. The
Protestant preacher gave more attention to the truth he delivered than to the
words in which he expressed it, or the gestures with which he set it forth. The
preachers who filled the Roman pulpits brought to their aid the arts of a
brilliant rhetoric, and the graces of an impassioned delivery, and thus it came
to pass that, towards the end of the century, the Church of Rome bore off the
palm of pulpit oratory in France. The Protestant preachers of that day had much
to dishearten and depress them; the great orators of the Romish Church –
Bossuet, Massillon, Flechier, Bourdaloue, and Fenelon – had, on the contrary,
everything to awaken and reward their efforts; but it was the preachers formed
in the school of Calvin that paved the way for those who so successfully and so
brilliantly succeeded them. "If France had never had her Saurins," said one of
the great orators of the English pulpit, "her Claudes, her Du Plessis-Mornays,
her national Church had never boasted the genius of Bossuet, and the virtues of
Fenelon."[5]
From the pulpit we
turn to the Protestant Synods of France. During the wars which the ambition of
Richelieu carried on in the latter end of the reign of Louis XIII, and the
troubles which distracted the nation in the opening years of the reign of Louis
XIV, several National Synods of the Protestant Church were held. These were but
mere shadows of the numerous and majestic assemblies of the better days of the
French Church, and the hearts of the members could not but be sad when they
thought how glory and power had departed from them since the days of the Queen
of Navarre and of Admiral Coligny, illustrious as a warrior and statesman, but
not less illustrious as a Christian. The right of meeting had to be solicited
from the court; it was always obtained with difficulty; and the interval between
each successive Synod was longer and longer, preparatory to their final
suppression. The royal commissioner brought with him from court most commonly an
ungrateful message; it was delivered in an imperious tone, and was heard in
obsequious silence. The members of Synod were reminded that if the throne was
powerful its authority was their shield, and that it was their wisdom to uphold,
as it was their duty to be thankful for, a prerogative which in its exercise was
so benignant towards them. Men who, like these French pastors, met under the
shadow of a tyrannical king, with the sword of persecution hanging by a single
thread above their heads, could not be expected to show much life or courage, or
devise large and effective measures for the building up of their ancient Church.
They were entirely in the power of their enemy, and any bold step would have
been eagerly laid hold of by the Government as a pretext for crushing them
outright. They were spared because they were weak, but their final extinction
was ever kept in view.
Still all glory had not departed from the
Protestant Church of France. Among its pastors, as we have just seen, were men
of great genius, of profound erudition, and of decided piety; and these, finding
all corporate action jealously denied them by the Government, turned their
energies into other channels. If Protestantism was decaying and passing from
view, there were individual Protestants who stood nobly out, and whose names and
labors were renowned in foreign countries. French Protestant literature
blossomed in the seventeenth century, which was the age of great theological
writers in France, as the sixteenth had been the age of famous Synods. Of these
writers not a few keep their place after the lapse of two centuries, and their
works are accounted, both in our own country and in Germany, standards on the
subjects of which they treat. Their writings are characterized by the same fine
qualities which distinguished the great authors of their nation in other
departments of literature – a penetrating judgment, an acute logic, a rich
illustrative power which makes the lights and shadows of fancy to play across
the page, and a brilliant diction which enriches and purifies the thought that
shines through it. These men occupied the pulpits of some of the most important
towns, or they filled the chairs of the seminaries or colleges which the
Protestant Church was permitted to maintain, and which she richly endowed. The
French Church at that time had four such academies – Montauban, Saumur, Sedan,
and Nimes.
The first of these four seminaries, Montauban, was famous for
the high tone of its orthodoxy. It was a well of Calvinism undefiled. It was not
less distinguished for the eminent talents of its teachers. Among others, it
boasted Daniel Chamier, a remarkable man, whose name was famous in his own day,
and is not unknown in ours. Combining the sagacity of the statesman with the
erudition of the theologian, he had a chief hand in the drawing up of the Edict
of Nantes. He was a distinguished controversialist, and bore away the prize in a
public discussion at Nimes with the confessor of Henry IV. At the request of his
brethren, he undertook a refutation of Bellarmin, the ablest of the Papal
champions. This work, in four volumes, has received the praise of a modern
German theologian, Staudlin, for the stores of knowledge its author displays,
and the searching criticism which he brings to bear upon the Popish system. The
manner of his death was unusual. During the siege of Montauban (1621) he was
sent to preach to the soldiers on the walls, who had not been able to attend
church. As he mounted the ramparts, he was struck by a cannon-ball, and
expired.
Saumur was the symbol of a declining theology. Its professors
conducted their labors chiefly with an eye to smoothing the descent from
Calvinism to Arminianism. They were learned men in the main, and produced works
which excited a various interest. A moderate theology has ever had a tendency to
stereotype men in moderate attainments: the professors of Saumur are no
exception. Their names would awaken no recollections now, and it is unnecessary
therefore to mention them.
Sedan had a purer fame, and a more interesting
history. It is associated with the name of Andrew Melville, and of numerous
other Scotsmen who here taught with distinction. Pierre Dumoulin (1658), one of
the greatest Protestants of his day, filled one of its chairs. As minister of
Charenton, he had been the head of the Protestants of Paris, where his talents
and influence were of great service to the cause in every part of France; but
becoming obnoxious to the Jesuits, he fled to Sedan, then an independent
principality, though under the King of France. Here the remainder of his most
laborious life was passed. No fewer than seventy three works proceeded from his
pen; of these the most popular were the Buckler of the Faith, and the Anatomy of
the Mass. The latter still finds numerous readers. Dumoulin was a child of four
years when the St. Bartholomew Massacre took place, and would, even at that
tender age, have been included among its victims but for the kindness of a
servant. He lived to the age of ninety. When one told him that his dissolution
was near, he thanked him for bringing him such happy tidings, and broke out into
a welcome to death – " that lovely messenger that would bring him to see his
God, after whom he had so long aspired." And so he ceased to be seen of men. It
was in this university that Daniel Tilenius taught. He was the first to
introduce into France those theological controversies touching Grace and Free
Will, which the celebrated Arminius had, as we have seen, begun in Holland a few
years before. The progress of Arminian views gradually weakened the hold of
Calvinism on the French Reformed Church.
Of these four seats of
Protestant learning, Nimes was the least famous. It numbered among its
professors Samuel Petit (1643). This man, who was a distinguished Oriental
scholar, filled the chair of Greek and Hebrew in this academy. An anecdote is
told of him which attests the familiarity he had acquired with the latter
language. One day he entered the synagogue of Avignon, and found the rabbi
delivering a bitter vituperation in Hebrew' upon Christianity and Christians.
Petit waited till the speaker had made an end; and then, to the no small
astonishment of the rabbi, he began a reply in the same tongue, in which he
calmly vindicated the faith the Jew had aspersed, and exhorted its assailant to
study Christianity before again attacking it. The rabbi is said to have offered
an apology. A cardinal, who had so high an esteem of his learning as to court
his friendship, offered to obtain for him admission into the Vatican Library at
Rome, with liberty to inspect the manuscripts. The offer must have been a
tempting one to an Orientalist like Petit, but for reasons which he did not
think himself obliged to state to the cardinal, he courteously declined
it.
Besides the men we have mentioned, the Protestant Church of France,
in the seventeenth century, possessed not a few pastors eminent for their piety
and labors, whose works have long preserved their names. Among these we mention
Andre Rivet (1651), a distinguished commentator. He began his career as a pastor
in France, and closed it as a professor of theology in Holland. The principles
of criticism which he lays down in his Introduction to the Study of the Bible he
exemplifies in his Commentary on the Psalms, which is one of the best
expositions .of that part of Holy Writ that we possess. Aubertin (1652) was the
author of a work on the Eucharist, which those of the contrary opinion found it
much easier to denounce to the Privy Council than to answer. Benjamin Basnage
(1652) was a man of ability; his grandson, Jacques Basnage, was still more
so.
Blondel (1655) was the ecclesiastical historian of his day, and one
of the first to expose the forged decretals of Rome. Bochart (1667), a mail of
prodigious learning, and of equal modesty, has left behind him an imperishable
name. Mestrezat (1657) wielded a logic which was the terror of the Jesuits.
Drelincourt (1669) spent his days in visiting his flock, and his nights in
meditation and writing. His Consolations against Death still preserves his fame,
having been translated into nearly all the languages of Europe. One other name
only will we here mention, that of Jean Daille (1670), who was one of
Drelincourt's colleagues in Paris. The work by which the collaborator and friend
of the author of the Consolations against Death is best known is his Apology for
the Reformed Churches, in which he vindicates them from the charge of schism,
and establishes, on irrefragable historic proofs, their claim to
apostolicity.
So many were the lights that still shone in the sky of
French Protestantism. The whole power of the Government had for a century been
put forth to extinguish it. War had done its worst. All the great military
leaders, and the 7 of the common soldiers, lay rotting on the battle-field. To
war was added massacre. Again and again had the soil of France been drenched in
blood. Violence had so far prevailed that the Synods of the French Church were
now but a name. But the piety and learning of individual Protestants survived
all these disasters; and, like stars appearing after the clouds of tempest have
passed away, they lent a glory to the remnant that was spared, and proclaimed to
France how inherently noble was the cause which it was striving to extinguish,
and what a splendor Protestantism would shed upon the nation, had it been
permitted in peace to put forth its mighty energies, and to diffuse throughout
the length and breadth of France its many virtues, and ripen its precious
fruits.
CHAPTER 4
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THE
DRAGONNADES.
The War of the Fronde – Mazarin adopts the Foreign
Policy of Richelieu – Dies at the Height of his Power – Louis XIV now Absolute –
"The State, it is I" – His Error as a King – His Error as a Man – Alternate
Sinning and Repenting – Extermination of the Huguenots – Confiscation of their
Churches – Arrets against Protestants – Fund for the Purchase of Consciences –
Father la Chaise – Madame de Maintenon – The Dragonnades – Conversions and
Persecutions.
WE now resume our narrative. Louis, a mere youth, was
king; his mother, Anne of Austria, was regent; but Cardinal Mazarin was the
master of both, and the ruler of the kingdom. Mazarin, as we have already said,
squandered with prodigal hand the treasures which Richelieu had husbanded for
wars of ambition. The coffers of the State began to be empty, and had to be
replenished by new taxes. This brought on insurrection, and new commenced the
War of the Fronde. This war was an attempt, on the part of the nation, to raise
itself out of the gulf of dependence on the crown into which Richelieu had sunk
it. On the part of the crown, it was a struggle to retain its newly-acquired
prerogatives, and to wield over both nobles and people that despotic away from
the path of which all impediment had been removed, now that the Hugxtenots had
been suppressed. The War of the Fronde divided the aristocracy, some of the
nobles taking part with the court, others with the people. The two great
military leaders, Conde and Turenne, brilliant in arms but uncertain in
politics, passed from side to side, now supporting the court, now betraying it;
now fighting for the people, now deserting them, as the caprice of the moment or
the interest of the hour led them. The war extended over the provinces, and even
entered the gates of Paris.
Barricades rose in the streets; the Louvre
was besieged, and Mazarin and the court had to flee. But notwithstanding these
successes, the arms of the insurgents did not prosper. The tide again turned;
victory declared in favor of the royalists; and the court returned to Paris in
triumph. The War of the Fronde was at an end. The nobles, with the people and
the municipal corporations, had signally failed to curb the despotism of the
crown, and now these classes were in a worse plight than ever. Nor for 150 years
thereafter was there the least attempt to resuscitate the popular
liberties.
From this time forward Mazarin's power continued to grow, and
remained unshaken to the close of his life. Having quieted France within, he set
himself to carry out the great projects of Richelieu, so far as that great
statesman had left them incomplete. He made war with Spain, and his arms were
successful; for he brought to a close the protracted conflict which France had
waged with the House of Austria, humbling it in both its branches, and
transferring to France that political and military preponderance in Europe which
its rival, the proud and powerful House of Austria, had held for a century and a
hair. These events it does not concern us to relate, further than to note the
very significant fact that two princes of the Roman Catholic Church were
employed in weakening a Power which was the main support of that Church, and in
paving the way for that great Revolution which was to reverse the position of
all the kingdoms of Europe, stripping the Papal nations of their power, and
lifting up the Protestant kingdoms to supremacy.
Mazarin had prospered in
all his plans. Abroad he had triumphed over Austria and Spain. At home he had
abased the nobles. The Parliament and the municipal corporations he had reduced
to insignificance. The people he had sunk into vassalage. The throne he had made
supreme. But he did not live to enjoy the fruits of his anxieties and toils.
Like Richelieu, he died just as his fortunes culminated. He climbed to the
summit of his glory to find that he had arrived at the brink of his grave.
Smitten with an incurable malady (1661), he was warned by his physicians that
his end drew nigh. He sketched in outline the policy which he recommended Louis
XIV to follow, he named the ministers whom he advised him to employ in his
service; and then, turning his face to the wall:, he took farewell of all his
glory.
Louis XIV had already reigned eighteen years; he now began to
govern. He called to him the men Mazarin had named on his death-bed – Le Tellier
and the great Colbert – and told them that they were to be simply the ministers
through whom he was to act. And seldom has monarch had it more in Ms power than
Louis XIV. to do as he pleased throughout the wide extent of his realms.[1]
Abroad he was
Powerful, at home he was absolute. In his person centered all rights and
functions; he was the sole fountain of law. Seldom indeed has there been
despotism more complete or more centralized than that now embodied in Louis XIV.
His own well-known words exactly express it – "The State, it is I." It was a
fearfully responsible position. Sole master of the rights, the liberties, the
lives, and we may add the consciences of the millions who were his subjects, his
reign must be a fountain of untold blessings, or a source of numberless,
enduring, and far extending miseries.
Nor did he lack qualities which
might have enabled him to make it the former. He had a sound judgment, a firm
will, a princely disposition, and great capacity for affairs. He liked hard
work, and all through his long reign was never less than eight hours a day in
the cabinet. He was not cruel by nature, though he became so by policy. The rock
on which he split as a monarch was ambition. He had tasted of the sweets of
conquest under Mazarin, and ever after he thirsted with an unappeasable desire
for the spoils of the battle-field. In the course of his wars, there was
scarcely a country in Europe which he did not water with French blood. By these
long-continued and sanguinary conflicts he still further humbled the House of
Austria, and annexed cities and provinces to his dominions, to be stripped of
them before his reign closed; he crowned himself with laurels, to be torn from
his brow before he died. He got the title of "the Great;" he had two triumphal
arches erected in his honor in Paris; and he contracted an enormous debt, which
paved the way for the Revolution, that came like a whirlwind in his grandson's
time to sweep away that throne which he had surrounded, as he believed, with a
power that was impregnable and a glory that was boundless.
The error of
Louis XIV, as a man, was his love of pleasure. He lived in open and unrestrained
licentiousness. This laid him at the feet of his confessor, and sank him into a
viler vassalage than that of the meanest vassal in all his dominions. The
"Great" Louis, the master of a mighty kingdom, whose will was law to the
millions who called him their sovereign, trembled before a man with a shaven
crown. From the feet of his confessor he went straight to the commission of new
sins; from these he came back to the priest, who was ready with fresh penances,
which, alas! were but sins in a more hideous form. A more miserable and dreadful
life there never was. Guilt was piled upon guilt, remorse upon remorse, till at
length Fife was passed, and the great reckoning was in view. But how fared it
with the Protestants under Louis XIV? Their condition became worse from the
moment that Mazarin breathed his last and Louis began to govern in person. One
of his first ideas was that Protestantism weakened France, and must be rooted
out; that the Edict of Nantes was an error, and must be revoked. This was the
policy on which he acted as regards the Huguenots – the goal towards which he
worked – all throughout his reign: the extirpation of Huguenotism, the
revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The wars of his early years interfered with
the pursuit of this object, but he never lost sight of it. No sooner had he
taken the government into his own hands (1661) than commissioners were
appointed, and sent, two and two – a Roman Catholic and a Protestant – into all
the provinces of France, with authority to hear all complaints and settle all
quarrels which had sprung up between the two communions.
In almost every
case the commissioners found that the Roman Catholics were in the right, and the
Protestants in the wrong. The commissioners were further instructed to examine
the title-deeds of churches. In many instances none could be produced; they had
gone amissing in the lapse of time, or had perished during the wars, and the
circumstance was in every case made available for the suppression of the church.
It is impossible to tell the number of churches pulled down, of schools
suppressed, and charitable establishments confiscated for the benefit of Popish
institutions.
Next came the decree against "Relapsed Heretics." This
ordinance denounced against such the penalty of banishment for life. If one
asked for the priest's blessing at a mixed marriage, or had been heard to say to
one that he should like to enter the Church of Rome, or had done an act of
abjuration twenty years before, or given any occasion in any way for a suspicion
or report of being inclined to Romanism, he was held as having joined the Church
of Rome, and the law against "Relapsed Heretics" was applied to him; and if ever
afterwards he entered a Protestant church, he was seized and carried before the
tribunals. By another ordinance, a priest and a magistrate were authorized to
visit every sick person, and ask if he wished to die in the Roman faith. The
scandalous scenes to which this gave rise can be imagined. The dying were
distracted and tortured with exhortations to abandon their faith and pray to the
Virgin. Children were capable of abjuring Protestantism at the age of fourteen;
and by a subsequent decree, at the age of seven; and their parents were
compelled to pay for their maintenance under a Roman Catholic roof. Spies
haunted the sermons of Protestant ministers, and if the pastor spoke: a
disparaging word of the Virgin, or any saint of the Romish calendar, he was
indicted for blasphemy. If one pleaded a suit-at-law, and were doubtful of
success, he had only to say that he was arguing against a heretic, and the magic
words were instantly followed by an award in his favor. Protestants were
excluded from all offices under the crown, from all municipal posts, from the
practice of law and medicine, and generally of all the liberal professions. They
were forbidden to sing psalms in their workshops or at the doors of their
houses. They had to suspend their psalmody when a Roman Catholic procession
passed the doors of their churches. They could bury their dead only at break of
day or on the edge of night. Not more than ten mourners could follow the bier;
and the statutory number of a wedding procession was restricted to twelve. This
did not satisfy the priesthood, however. In 1665 they declared that more zeal
must be exercised in order "to cause the formidable monster of heresy to expire
completely." From this time the Protestants began to flee from their native
land. It was now, too, that Marshal Turenne abjured in his old age the faith he
had professed through life. His virtue had declined before his Protestantism was
renounced. His example was followed by the great nobles about court, and it was
remarked of all of them, as of Turenne, that they had espoused the morals of the
king before embracing his faith. The names of Count Schomberg, the Duke de la
Force, the Marquis de Ruvigny, and also several descendants of Duplessis-Mornay
stand out in noble relief from this degenerate crowd.[2]
Attempts were next
made to unite the two Churches. These came to nothing, notwithstanding the
numerous reforms in the Romish Church promised by the king, all the more freely,
perhaps, that he had no power to fulfill them. Then, after a little space, the
work of persecution was resumed; a new discharge of ordinances and arrets struck
the Protestants.
We can mention only a very few of the new grievances.
The Reformed were forbidden to print religious books without permission of a
magistrate of the Romish communion; to celebrate worship when the bishop was
holding a visitation; their domestic privacy was invaded; their rights as
parents violated; their temples demolished; and if they dared to meet around the
ruins and pray beside the sanctuaries in which their fathers had worshipped they
were punished.
But perhaps the most extraordinary means employed was the
creation of a fund for the purchase of consciences. This fund was fed from the
resources of vacant bishoprics, which were the right of the crown, but which the
king now made over to this fund. In every case, when a see became vacant, a
year's revenue was thus applied, but sees were often kept vacant for years that
the fund for conversions: might profit thereby.
Pellisson, by birth a
Calvinist, but who, having gone over to the king's religion, from a convert
became a zealous converter, presided over this fund. It was, in truth, a great
mercantile establishment, organized according to the rules and wielding the
machinery of other mercantile establishments. It had its head office in Paris,
and branch offices in all the provinces. It had its staff of clerks, its
correspondents, its table of prices, its letters of credit, and its daily
published lists of articles purchased, these articles being the bodies and the
souls of men. A curious circular letter (June 12th, 1677) of its president,
Pellisson, has been given by the historian Felice, and is as follows: –
"Although you may go as far as a hundred francs, it is not meant that you are
always to go to this extent, as it is necessary to use the utmost possible
economy; in the first place, to shed this dew on as many persons as possible
and, besides, if we give a hundred francs to people of no consequence, without
any family to follow them, those who bring a number of children after them will
demand far larger sums. Tiffs, however, need not hinder you from furnishing
still larger assistance in very important cases, if you advise me of it
beforehand, whenever his Majesty, to whom explanations will be given, thinks it
proper." The daily lists of abjurations amounted to many hundreds; but those who
closely examined the names said that the majority were knaves, or persons who,
finding conversion profitable, thought it not enough to be once, but a dozen
times converted. The king, however, was delighted with his success, and nothing
was talked of at court but the miracles of Pellisson. Every one lauded his
golden eloquence – less learned, they said, but far more efficacious than that
of Bossuet.
Louis XIV was now verging on old age, but his bigotry grew
with his years. His great minister Colbert, whose counsels had ever been on the
side of moderation, was now in his grave. There were left him the Chancellor, Le
Tellier, and the Minister of War, Louvois, both stern haters of the Huguenots.
His confessor was the well-known Father la Chaise. No fitter tool than Louis XIV
could the Jesuit have found. His Spanish mother had educated him not to hesitate
at scruples, but to go forward without compunction to the perpetration of
enormous crimes. To make matters still worse, the king now fell entirely under
the influence of Madame de Maintenon. This woman, who figures so prominently in
these awful tragedies, was the grand-daughter of the Protestant historian
Agrippa d'Aubigne. She was a Calvinist by birth, but changed her religion at an
early age, and being governess in the family of one of the royal mistresses, her
beauty and address fascinated the king, who privately married her on the death
of the queen, Maria Theresa. Madame de Maintenon did not particularly hate her
former co-religionists, but being resolved above all things to retain her
influence over Louis, and seeing the direction in which his humor set – namely,
that of expiating his profligacys by the sacrifice of the Huguenot heretics –
she and Father la Chaise became the counselors and partners of the unhappy
monarch in those deeds of tyranny and blood which shed an ever-deepening
darkness and horror over the life of Louis XIV as he approached the
grave.
Whether it was the number or the quality of the conversions that
did not satisfy the court it is hard to say, but now greater severitys were had
recourse to. It was deemed bad economy, perhaps, to do with money what could be
done by the sword. Accordingly the dragonnades were now set on foot. A
commencement was made in Poitou. In 1681 a regiment of cavalry was sent into
this province, with instructions from the Minister of War, Louvois, that the
greater part of the men and officers should be quartered on the Protestants.
"If," said he, "according to a fair distribution, the Religionists ought to have
ten, we may billet twenty on them." The number of soldiers allotted to each
Protestant family varied from four to ten. The men were made aware that they
might do as they had a mind, short of actually killing the inmates. "They gave
the reins to their passions," says Migault, describing the horrors of which he
was eye-witness; "devastation, pillage, torture – there was nothing they
recoiled at." The details must be suppressed; they are too horrible to be read.
The poor people knew not what to do; they fled to the woods; they hid themselves
in the caves of the mountains; many went mad; and others, scarce knowing what
they did, kissed a crucifix, and had their names enrolled among the converts.
The emigration was resumed on a great scale.
Thousands rose to flee from
a land where nothing awaited them but misery. The court attempted to arrest the
fugitives by threatening them with the galleys for life. The exodus continued
despite this terrible law. The refugees were joyfully welcomed in England and in
the other Protestant lands to which, with their persons, they transferred their
industry, their knowledge of art and letters, and their piety. They now made
Europe resound with their wrongs – though not one of their books could cross the
frontier of their native land. We quote a few sentences from Jurieu (1682), who,
fleeing to Holland, became Pastor of the French Church in Rotterdam: – "We were
treated as if we were the enemies of the Christian name. In those places where
Jews are tolerated they have all sorts of liberties; they exercise the arts, and
carry on trades; they are physicians; they are consulted, and Christians put
their lives and health into their hands. But we, as if polluted, are forbidden
to touch children on their entrance into the world; we are excluded from the
bar, and from all the faculties; we are driven away from the king's person; all
public posts are taken away from us; we are forbidden to use those means by
which we save ourselves from dying of hunger; we are given up to the hatred of
the mob; we are deprived of that precious liberty which we have purchased by so
many services; our children, who are part of ourselves, are taken away from us.
Are we Turks or infidels? We believe in Jesus Christ, we believe in the eternal
Son of God, the Redeemer of the world; the maxims of our morality ate pure
beyond contradiction; we respect kings; we are good subjects and good citizens;
we are as much Frenchmen as we are Reformed Christians."
The Protestants
thought one other attempt ought to be made, though not by arms, to recover some
little from the wreck of their liberties. They agreed that such of their
churches as were still standing should be re-opened for public worship on the
same day in all the southern provinces of France. This they thought would prove
to the king in a peaceable way that the abjurations, so loudly vaunted by his
counselors, were a wholesale delusion. The project was carried into effect, but
the Government pretended to see in it insurrection, and the poor Huguenots were
visited with a yet heavier measure of vengeance. The dragonnades were extended
to all the provinces of Southern France. The Protestants fled to the forests, to
the deserts of the Cevennes, to the mountains of the Pyrenees.
They were
tracked by the soldiers, and on refusing to abjure, were sabered or hanged. Some
of the pastors were broken on the wheel. Many of the churches spared till now
were demolished, and a hideous devastation was inflicted on private dwellings
and property. Everywhere there was a Reign of Terror; and the populace, entirely
in the hands of ruffians, who, if they forbore to kill, did so that they might
practice excruciating and often unnamable tortures upon their victims, now came
in crowds to the priests to abjure. "Not a post arrives," wrote Madame de
Maintenon, in September, 1685, "without bringing tidings that fill him (the
king) with joy; the conversions take place every day by thousands" Twenty
thousand abjured in Bearn, sixty thousand in the two dioceses of Nimes and
Montpellier: and while this horrible persecution went on, the Edict of Nantes
was still law.[3]
CHAPTER 5
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REVOCATION OF THE EDICT OF
NANTES.
Edict of Revocation – Summary of its Enactments – The
Protestant Churches Demolished – Charenton, etc. – The Pastors Banished – Severe
Penalties – No Burial without the Sacrament – Lay Protestants Forbidden to
Emigrate – Schomberg and Admiral Duquesne – The Ports and Outlets from France
Closed – The Flight of the Huguenots – Their Disguises – Flight of Women – Their
Sufferings on the Way – Probable Numbers of the Refugees – Disastrous Influence
of the Revocation on Science and Literature – on Trade and Manufactures – on the
Army and Navy – France Weakened and Other Countries Enriched – Panegyrics of the
Clergy – Approval of the Pope – A Te Deum at Rome – Medals in Commemoration of
the Event.
THE Edict of Nantes was already in effect repealed.
There was hardly one of its provisions which had not been set aside either by
interpretations which explained it away, or by edicts which directly nullified
it; and now scarcely anything remained of that famous charter of Huguenot
rights, save the parchment on. which it was written and the seals that attested
its stipulations and promises, which, read in the light of the scenes that were
being enacted all over France, looked like mockery.[1] But the work must be
completed. The king judged that the hour had now arrived for dealing the blow
which should extinguish for ever Protestantism in France. By the advice of his
counselors – Father la Chaise, his confessor; Madame de Maintenon, his wife; the
Chancellor Le Tellier, and Count Louvois – the king, on the 18th of October,[2] 1685, signed the
Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
The Revocation swept away all the
rights and liberties which Henry I5 r. and Louis XIII had solemnly guaranteed to
the Protestants It declared all further exercise of the Reformed worship within
the kingdom illegal; it ordered the demolition of all the Protestant churches;
it commanded the pastors to quit the kingdom within a fortnight, and forbade
them to perform any clerical function on pain of the galleys; all Protestant
schools were closed; and all infants born subsequent to the revocation of the
edict were to be baptized by priests, and educated as Roman Catholics; all
refugees were required to return to France and abjure their religion within four
months, and after the expiry of that term non compliance was to be punished with
confiscation of all their property; all Protestants were forbidden to quit the
kingdom under pain of the galleys of men, and of confiscation of body and goods
if women; and, in fine, all laws against relapsed heretics were confirmed. A
clause was added which occasioned a cruel disappointment: it was couched in the
following seemingly clement terms: – "Those Protestants who have not changed
their religion shall be allowed to dwell in the cities and places of our realm
unmolested till it shall please God to enlighten them, as he has others." This
clause was interpreted as a permission to the Reformed to hold their opinions in
their own breast and practice their worship in private. It was not long before
they had discovered that the true reading of the clause was as follows – until
they shall be converted, as others have been, by the dragoons.
On the
22nd of October the Act was registered, and on the same day the Protestants were
notified by a public spectacle that its execution had commenced. The great
Church of Charenton, in the neighborhood of Paris, built by the celebrated
architect Jacques Debrosse, and capable of containing 14,000 persons, was razed
to the ground. The first blow was dealt the detested structure by two Government
commissioners; then a mob of some hundreds threw themselves upon it, win
pickaxes and levers; in five days not a trace of the colossal fabric was to be
seen, and a cross twenty feet high, adorned with the royal arms, rose in triumph
over the demolished edifice. Other temples throughout France, venerable for
their age, or imposing from their size, which had escaped the demolitions of
former years, were now swept away. Alas, the sorrowful scenes that marked the
closing of these churches! Drowned in tears, the congregation assembled to hear
their pastor's farewell sermon, and sing their last psalm; then, forming a long
and mournful procession, they passed before the minister, who bestowed on each
singly his benediction, exhorting him to be steadfast unto the death. With many
a hallowed Communion Sunday lingering in their memories, they then passed out
for ever. Many of these churches fell amid a confused noise of blaring trumpets,
the shoutings of Romanists, and the sobbings of Protestants. Topping the ruins
of the Church of Nimes might long be seen a stone which had formed the lintel of
the portrico of the now overthrown edifice, on which were graven the words,
"This is the House of God, this is the Gate of Heaven."[3]
Though but the
crowning act of a treacherous, cruel, and most tyrannical policy under which
they had groaned for years, the Revocation fell upon the Huguenots like a
thunder-bolt. Their eyes opened on blank desolation ! Not a single safe-guard
had been left them; not a single right of conscience, or of property, or of body
of which they had not been stripped. The fact seemed too terrible to be real;
the crime – the folly – too stupendous for any king to commit! The Protestants
amounted to between one and two millions; their factories and workshops were to
be found in nearly all parts of France; their commerce and merchandise upheld
its great cities, their energy and enterprise were the life of the nation; and
to be all at once flung beyond the, pale of law, beyond the pale of humanity!
They were stupefied.
But they soon found that the first blow was far
indeed from exhausting the calamities with which this measure was pregnant. The
edict opened out in a series of oppressions to which they could see neither
limit nor end. Troops were sent into the provinces to execute it. As an
inundation breaks in, or as a tempest sweeps onward, so did a torrent of
pillagings, outrages, and murders rush upon France. Louis XIV in all this was
not persecuting, he was only converting; for had not the Savior said, "Compel
them to come in"? An army of "booted apostles" scouring the country and 800
Protestant churches now in ruins attested the reality of the Revocation; but
instantly came new provisions to amplify and perfect the edict. Protestant
preaching had already been forbidden on land; now it was forbidden on board
ship. Protestants, or new Catholics, as they were termed – for it was assumed
that now there were not any more Protestants in France – were forbidden to
employ as servants any save Roman Catholics, under penalty of a fine of 1,000
livres. Huguenots were absolutely forbidden to enter, in the capacity of
servants, any family, whether Roman Catholic or Huguenot, under pain, if men, of
being sent to the galleys, and if women, of being flogged and branded with a
fleur-de-lis.
Even English families resident in France were not exempt
from the operation of this law. Protestant ministers found lurking in France
after the expiry of the fifteen days given them for removal were to be put to
death; and, to hasten their departure and make sure that not one heretical
teacher remained in the country, a reward of 5,500 livres was offered for the
apprehension of ministers in hiding. Pastors who should return to their native
land without a written permission from the king were to expiate their offense
with their lives, while the terrors of the galleys, imprisonment for life, and
confiscation of property were suspended above those who should dare to harbor
such. Not a few foreigners, particularly Englishmen, were summoned to abjure,
and on their refusal were thrown into prison. The English monarch sent tardy
remonstrances against these insults to his crown, and the Court of Versailles
responded with an equally tardy satisfaction.
Nor did these annoyances
and torments terminate with life. Not only were the death-beds of all
Protestants besieged, and their last moments disturbed by the presence of
priests, but no grave could receive the body of the man who died without
confession and without the Sacrament of extreme unction. His corpse was a thing
too vile to rest in the bosom of the earth – it must rot above ground; it was
exposed on the highway, or was flung into the public sewer. The body of M. de
Chevenix, a man illustrious for his learning and piety, was subjected to this
indignity. Dragged away on a hurdle, it was thrown upon a dung-hill. His friends
came by night, and wrapping it in linen, bore it reverently on their shoulders,
and buried it in a garden, giving vent to their sorrow, as they lowered it
slowly into its place of sepulture, by singing the seventy-ninth Psalm: "Save
me, O Lord, for the waters are come into my soul."[4]
While one clause of
the Act of Revocation made it death for the pastor to remain in France, another
clause of the same Act made it death for the layman to flee from it. The land
was converted into a vast prison. The frontiers were jealously guarded;
sentinels were placed at aft the great outlets of the kingdom; numerous spies
kept watch at the seaports; officers patrolled the shore; and ships of war
hovered off the coast to prevent escape beyond those dismal limits within which
the Protestant had only the terrible alternative of sacrificing his conscience,
or surrendering his liberty or life. Many earnestly petitioned for leave to
withdraw from a land where to obey God was to incur the wrath of the king, but
they petitioned in vain. Of the native subjects of Louis, we know of only two to
whom this favor was conceded. The Marshal Schomberg and the Marquis de Ruvigny
were permitted to retire, the first to Portugal, and the second to England. The
Admiral Duquesne was summoned into the presence of Louis XIV., and urged to
change his religion. Pointing to his hairs, which tempest and battle had
bleached, the hero said, "For sixty years, sire, have I rendered unto Caesar
that which I owe to Caesar: suffer me still to render to God that which I owe to
God." He was permitted to live in his native land unmolested. Among the names
that lent a glory to France there were none greater than these three. Schomberg
was at the head of the army, Duquesne was the creator of the navy, and De
Ruvigny was equally renowned in diplomacy; the Revocation deprived France of the
services of all the three. This was much, and yet it was but the first
installment of that mighty sum which France was destined to pay for the
Revocation in after-years.
Nothing can be imagined more appalling than
was now the condition of the Protestant, as he looked around him in his native
land. The king was his enemy, the law was his enemy, his fellow-countrymen were
his enemies; and on all sides of him was a cordon of guards and gens-d'armes, to
apprehend and subject him to terrible sufferings should he attempt to escape
from the vast prison which had shut him in. But fruitless were all the means
taken to prevent the flight of the Huguenots. Fruitless were the peasants that
clay and night, armed with scythes and similar weapons, guarded the high-roads,
and watched the fords of rivers; fruitless the troops that lined the frontier,
and the ships that cruised off the ports and examined all outward-bound vessels;
fruitless the offered spoils of the captured fugitives, by which it was sought
to stimulate the vigilance of the guards; fruitless even the reports which were
put in circulation, that no asylum was to be found in foreign countries that
10,000 refugees had died of starvation in England, and that of those who had
fled, the vast majority were soliciting permission to return. In vain were all
these efforts to check the emigration; danger was braved, vigilance was eluded;
and the frontiers were crossed by an ever-enlarging crowd, who were even more
anxious to find liberty of conscience than to escape from death.
The
devices resorted to and the disguises assumed by the fugitives to avoid
detection were infinite. Some attired themselves in the garb of pilgrims, and
with shallop and palmer-staff pursued their journey to their much-wished-for
shrine – a land of liberty. Some traveled as couriers; some as sports-men,
carrying a gun on their shoulder; some as peasants driving cattle; some affected
to be porters, carrying burdens; others were attired in footmen's liveries, and
others wore soldiers' uniforms. The rich in some cases hired guides, who, for
sums varying from 1,000 to 6,000 livres, conducted them across the frontier. The
poor, setting out alone, chose by-paths and difficult mountain-tracks, beginning
each day's journey at night-fall, and when the dawn appeared, retiring to some
forest or cavern for rest and sleep. Sometimes they lay concealed in a barn, or
burrowed in a hay-stack, till the return of the darkness made it safe for them
to continue their flight. Nobles and gentlemen, setting their servants on
horseback, would put on their dress, and follow on foot as though they were
lackeys.
The women were not less fertile in artifices and disguises. They
dressed themselves as servants, as peasants, as nurses; even noble ladies would
journey onward trundling wheel-barrows, or carrying hods, or bearing burdens.
The young disfigured their faces by smearing or dyeing their skin and cutting
off their hair, thus converting blooming youth into withered and wrinkled age.
Some dressed themselves as beggars, some sold rosaries, and some reigned to be
deaf or insane.[5] The perils that environed
them on every side could not daunt their heroic resolution. They urged their
fleeing steps onward through the darkness of night and the tempests of winter,
through tangled forests and quaking morasses, through robbers and plunderers,
forgetting all these dangers in their anxiety to escape the guards of the king
and arrive at the rendezvous, and rejoin fathers, or brothers, or husbands, who
had reached the appointed place by another route. The terrors of the persecutor
had overcome the sense of weariness, and hundreds of miles seemed short to some
who, brought up in luxury and splendor, had never before, perhaps, walked a
league on foot. The ocean had no terrors to those who knew that there was a land
of liberty beyond it, and many crossed the English Channel at that inclement
season in open boats. Those on the sea-board got away in Dutch, in English, and
in French merchantmen, hidden in bales of goods, or buried under heaps of coal,
or stowed in empty barrels, where they had only the bung-hole to breathe
through. The very greatness of their misery wrought some alleviation of their
hardship. Their woeful plight melted the hearts of the peasants on the frontier,
and they suffered them in some instances to escape, when it was in their power
to have delivered them up to the dragoons. Even the sentinels sometimes acted as
the guides of those whom they had been appointed to arrest. There was hardly a
country in Europe into which these men did not flee, but England and Holland and
Germany were their main asylums.
It is only an approximate appreciation
that can now be formed of the numbers of Protestants who succeeded in escaping
from France. The official reports sent in to the Government by the Intendants
are not to be relied on. Those whose duty it was to frame them had many motives
for making the emigration appear less than it really was. They naturally were
unwilling to falsify the previsions of the court which had buoyed itself up with
the hope that only a very few would leave their native land. Besides, to
disclose the real extent of the emigration might seem to be to present an
indictment against themselves, as chargeable with lack of vigilance in
permitting so many to escape. It is vain, then, to think of arriving at an exact
estimate from these documents, and these are the only official sources of
information open to us. But if we look at the dismal blanks left in France, at
the large and numerous colonies planted in foreign countries, and at the length
of time during which the exodus continued, which was not less than from fifteen
to twenty years, it is impossible to resist the conclusion that the emigration
was on a scale of gigantic magnitude. Of the one million Protestants and upwards
scattered among the twenty millions of Frenchmen, it is probable that from a
quarter to half a million emigrated. Jurieu estimates that in 1687, 200,000
persons had already left France.
Antoine Court, one of the preachers of
the desert, makes the total 800,000 persons. Sismondi says from 300,000 to
400,000. In a celebrated memorial addressed to Louvois in 1688, Vauban says
"that France had lost 100,000 inhabitants, 60,000,000 of francs in specie, 9,000
sailors, 12,000 veterans, 600 officers, and her most flourishing manufactures.
The Duke de Saint Sinton says in his Memoirs that all branches of trade were
ruined, and that a quarter of the kingdom was perceptibly depopulated."[6]
The face of France
was changed in a day. Its framework was suddenly and violently shaken and
loosened, as if an earthquake had rocked the land. The current of the nation's
life was not indeed stopped outright, but its flow became languid and sluggish
beyond the power of king or of parliament again to quicken it. The shock was
felt in every department of national enterprise, whether mental or industrial.
It was felt at the bar, which it stripped of some of its brightest ornaments. It
was felt in the schools of philosophy. Some of the ablest cultivators of science
it drove away. The great astronomer and mathematician, Huygens, had to quit
France and seek asylum in Holland. It was felt in the ranks of literature. It
chased beyond the frontier some of the finest writers and most eloquent orators
that France contained. In the list of these illustrious refugees we find Claude,
Jurieu, Lenfant, Saurin, Basnage, Bayle, and Rapin. It was felt in the army and
navy. The Revocation drove beyond the frontier the flower of the French
soldiers, and decreed that henceforth those banners which had waved so proudly
on many a victorious field should be folded in humiliation and defeat. The
Revocation was felt in the iron works and smelting furnaces on the Vrigne and at
Pouru-Saint-Remy. It was felt in the manufactures of arms and implements of
husbandry in the Sedanais. It was felt in the gold and silver lace works of
Montmorency and Villiers-le-Bel. It was felt in the hat factories of Coudebec.
It was felt in the wool-carding establishments of Meaux; in the cloth
manufactories of Picardy, Champagne, and Normandy; in the silk-weaving
establishments of Tours and Lyons; in the paper mills of Auvergne and the
Angoumois; in the tanneries of Touraine; on the shipping wharves and in the
trading establishments of Bordeaux, La Rochelle, and other towns, where the
foreign trade had been almost exclusively in the hands of Protestants. In short,
not an art was cultivated, not a trade was carried on in France which did not
suffer from this blow; not a province was there where the blight it had
inflicted was not to be seen in villages half-depopulated, in habitations
deserted, in fields lying unploughed, and in gardens and vineyards overgrown
with weeds and abandoned to desolation. The ravages inflicted by the Revocation
were to be traced not on the land only, but on the ocean also. The fleet of
foreign ships which had gladdened the shores and crowded the harbors of France,
to carry thence the beautiful and varied fabrics which her ingenious sons had
worked on her looms and forged on her anvils, from this time all but
disappeared. The art and genius which created these marvels had transferred
themselves to Germany, to Holland, to England, and to Scotland, where they had
taken root, and were producing those implements with which France had been
accustomed to enrich other nations, but which now she had to beg from her
neighbors.
Thus strangely did that country defeat what had been the grand
object of her policy for half a century. Her aim all through the administrations
of Richelieu and Mazarin was to consolidate her power, and lead in the councils
of Europe. But this one act of Louis XIV did more to weaken France than all that
Richelieu and Mazarin had done to strengthen her. Not only did Louis weaken the
fabric of his own power, he enhanced the strength of that interest which it was
his great object to abase. The learning, the genius, the art which were the
glory of his realm, and would have been the bulwark of his throne, he drove away
and scattered among Protestant nations. His folly herein was as conspicuous and
as stupendous as his wickedness.
But the Revocation was not the act of
the king alone. The clergy and the nation equally with Louis must bear the guilt
of his great crime. The people by their approbation or their silence became the
ac. complice of the monarch; and the clergy made his act their own by exhausting
the whole vocabulary of panegyric in its praise. According to them the past
history of the world had nothing more wise or more magnanimous to show, and its
author had placed himself among the heroes and demi-gods of fame. We might fill
almost a volume with the laudations written and spoken on the occasion. "You
have doubtless seen the edict by which the king revokes that of Nantes," wrote
Madame de Sevigne to her daughter a few days after the publication of the
decree. "There is nothing so fine as all that it contains, and never has any
king done or ever will do ought so memorable!" The chancellor, Le Tellier, was
so carried away by the honor of affixing the seal of state to this atrocious
edict, that he declared that he would never seal another, and in a fit of devout
enthusiasm he burst out in the song with which the aged Simeon celebrated the
advent of the Savior: "Now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, since mine
eyes have seen thy salvation." When the men of law were so moved, what might we
not expect in the priests? They summoned the people to the churches to unite in
public thanksgivings, and they exhausted all their powers of eloquence in
extolling the deed. "Touched by so many marvels," exclaimed Bossuet, "let us
expand our hearts in praises of the piety of Louis. Let our acclamations ascend
to the skies, 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 strengthened faith, you have exterminated
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."
The other great preachers of Paris also
celebrated this edict, as throwing into the shade all past monuments of wisdom
and heroism. It is in the following terms that Massillon glorifies Louis'
victory over heresy: "How far did he not 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 ye 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."[7]
Nor was it popular
assemblies only who listened approvingly to these flights of rhetoric; similar
laudations of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes were pronounced before the
French Academy, and received the meed of its applause. The Abbe Tallemand, when
speaking of the demolition of the Protestant church at Charenton, exclaimed –
"Happy ruins, the finest trophy France ever beheld! The statues and the
triumphal arches erected to the glory of the king will not exalt it more than
this temple of heresy overthrown by his piety. That heresy which thought itself
invincible is entirely vanquished." Bossuet had compared Louis to Constantine
and Theodosius; Tallemand, discoursing to a body of learned men, seeks for a
more classic prototype of the King of France. A second Hercules had arisen, he
told the Academy, and a second hydra, more terrible by far than the monster
which the pagan god had slain, had fallen beneath the blows of this second and
greater Hercules.
In the midst of this universal chorus of applause we
expect to hear one dissenting voice lifted up. Surely the Jansenists will rebuke
the madness of the nation, and in some small degree redeem the honor of France.
Alas! they are silent. Not one solitary protest do we hear against this great
crime. But the Jansenists are not content to Be silent; they must needs speak,
but it is to approve of the Revocation. Through their great interpreter Arnault,
they declared that "the means which had been employed were rather violent, but
nowise unjust."
It remained for one other and mightier voice to speak.
And now that voice is heard, from the other side of the Alps, expressing a full
approval of the Revocation. All the previous inferior utterances are repeated
and sanctioned in this last and greatest utterance, and thus the Roman Catholic
world makes the deed its own, and accepts the Revocation with all its plunder
and blood, and the punishment that is to follow it. The Pope, Innocent XI, made
a Te Deum be sung at Rome for the conversion of the Huguenots, and sent a
special brief to Louis XIV, in which he promised him the eternal praises of the
Church, and a special recompense from God for the act of devotion by which he
had made his name and reign glorious.
Art was summoned to lend her aid in
appropriately commemorating the triumph of Louis over heresy. In front of the
Hotel de Ville the provost and sheriffs of Paris erected a brazen statue in
honor of the king.[8] It bore the proud words –
Ludovico Magno, Victori perpetuo, Ecclesiae ac Regum Dignitatis Assertori (To
Louis the Great, eternal Conqueror, and Assertor of the Dignity of the Church
and of Kings). Its bas-reliefs displayed a frightful bat hovering above the
works of Calvin and Huss, and enveloping them in its dark wings – emblematic
imagery borrowed probably from one of Lesueur's masterpieces in Versailles,
commemorating a similar event. Three medals were struck to perpetuate the memory
of the Revocation.[9] One of them represented
Religion planting a cross on a heap of ruins, denoting the triumph of truth over
error; with this legend, Religio Victrix (Religion the Conqueror); and
underneath were the words, Templis Cal-vinianorum eversis, 1685 (The Temples of
Calvin overturned, 1685). Another displays a figure holding a cross, its foot
planted on a prostrate foe, while in the background rises proudly an edifice,
surmounted by the motto, Haeresis Extincta, and underneath are the words,
Edictum Octobris, 1685, – intimating that by the edict of October, 1685, heresy
had been extinguished. A third represents Religion placing a crown on the head
of Louis, who stands leaning upon a rudder, and trampling under foot a dead
enemy, the symbol of heresy. The motto – which, says Weiss, "comprises at once
an error and a lie" – is Ob vicies centena millia Cal-vinianorum ad Ecclesiam
revocata, 1685 (For a hundred thousand Calvinists, twenty times told, brought
back to the Church, 1685).
All these medals proclaim what Louis XIV and
the Jesuits believed to be the fact, that Calvinism had been eternally
extinguished. The edict of October, 1685, was the date (they imagined) of its
utter overthrow. As a matter of fact, however, it was the treachery and cruelty
of the Revocation that, above most things, aroused the Protestant spirit of
Europe, and brought about that great Revolution which, three short years
afterwards, placed William of Orange on the throne of Great
Britain.
CHAPTER 6
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Top
THE PRISONS AND THE
GALLEYS.
"New Catholics" – Suspected and Watched – New and Terrible
Persecutions – Described by Quick – The Dungeons – Their Horrors – M. de
Marolles, and other Prisoners – Other Modes of Punishment – Transportation –
Sold into Foreign Slavery – Martyrdom of Fulcran Rey – Claude Brousson – his
Preaching – His Martyrdom – Drums round the Scaffold – The Galley Chain –
Chateau de la Tournelle – The Galleys.
Or the tens of thousands of Frenchmen, of all ranks,
and in every disguise who were now hurrying along the highways and byways of
France, intent only on escaping from the sod that gave them birth, all were not
equally fortunate in reaching the frontier. Many hundreds were arrested in their
flight, and brought back to endure the rage of their persecutors. Their
miserable fate it now becomes our duty to describe. Nor of these only shall we
speak, but also of their many companions in suffering, who remained in their
native land, when their brethren had fled before the awful tempest that was now
thundering in the skies of France. It is a tale of woe, with scarcely one bright
feature to relieve it.
Of those who remained, estimated by Sismondi at
about a million, many conformed to the king's religion, impelled by the terrors
of the edict, and such now passed under the name of "The New Catholics." But
their downcast looks belied their professions; their sincerity was suspected,
and they were constantly watched. So little faith had the Jesuits in the
conversions of which they boasted so loudly in public! Inspectors were
established in several parishes to examine if the new converts went regularly to
mass, if they took the Sacrament at Easter, and if they paid a dutiful obedience
to the commandments of the Church. This was a return, in the polished era of
Louis XIV, to the regime of the tenth century. Even the monarch deemed this
scrutiny somewhat too close, and issued private instructions to his agents to
temper their zeal, and moderate the rigor of the Act.[1]
According to the
edict, all Protestant children must attend a Roman Catholic school, and receive
instruction in the catechism. A new ordinance enjoined that all children above
six years of age, whose parents were suspected of being still Protestant at
heart, should be taken from their homes, and confided to Roman Catholic
relations, or placed in hospitals. The convents and asylums of all France were
not enough to accommodate the crowd of abducted youth about to be swept into
them, and the priests contented themselves with seizing only the children of the
rich, who were able to pay for their maintenance.
The edicts of the king
threatened books as well as persons with extermination. The Archbishop of Paris
had compiled a list of works which the faithful could not read but at the risk
of deadly injury. With this list in his hand the officer entered every suspected
house, and whenever he found a forbidden book he instantly destroyed it. These
visits were repeated so often that many books of rare value, known to have then
existed, are now extinct, not one copy having escaped. The records of Synods,
and the private papers and books of pastors, were the first to be destroyed.
Wherever a Bible was found it ,was straightway given to the flames.[2] The edict required that
the "New Catholics" should be instructed in the faith they professed to have
adopted; but the priests were too few and the crowd of converts too many, so the
cures lightened their labors by calling the Capuchins to share them with them.
But these were rude and illiterate men. The merest youth could put them to
silence. To gross ignorance they not infrequently added a debauched life, and in
the case of Protestants of riper years, their approach awakened only disgust,
and their teachings had no other effect on those to whom they were given, than
to deepen their aversion to a Church which employed them as her ministers. When
the first stunning shock of the edict had spent itself, there came a recoil. The
more closely "the new converts" viewed the Church into which they had been
driven, the stronger became their dislike of it. Shame and remorse for their
apostasy began to burn within them. Their sacrilegious participation in the mass
awoke their consciences thousands resolved, rather than lead a life of such base
and criminal hypocrisy, to abandon, at whatever cost, the communion they
professed to have espoused, and return to the open profession of the Protestant
worship. They withdrew from the cities. They sought a dwelling in the
wildernesses and forests, and practiced their worship in dark caves, in deep
ravines, and sometimes on the tops of mountains. There they promised to one
another to live and die in the Reformed faith.
When the king and his
counselors saw the flag of defiance waving on the mountains of the Cevennes, and
the Lower Languedoc, their rage rose to frenzy. New ordinances came to intensify
the rigors of the persecution. Quick has grouped the horrors that now
overwhelmed the poor Protestants of France, in a recital that is almost too
harrowing for perusal.
"Afterwards," says Quick, "they fell upon the
persons of the Protestants, and there was no wickedness, though ever so horrid,
which they did not put in practice, that they might enforce them to change their
religion. Amidst a thousand hideous cries and blasphemies, they hung up men and
women by the hair or feet upon the roofs of the chambers, or nooks of chimneys,
and smoked them with wisps of wet hay till they were no longer able to bear it;
and when they had taken them down, if they would not sign an abjuration of their
pretended heresies, they then trussed them up again immediately. Some they threw
into great fires, kindled on purpose, and would not take them out till they were
half roasted.
They tied ropes under their arms, and plunged them once and
again into deep wells, from whence they would not draw them till they had
promised to change their religion. They bound them as criminals are when they
are put to the rack, and in that posture putting a funnel into their mouths,
they poured wine down their throats till its fumes had deprived them of their
reason, and they had in that condition made them consent to become Catholics.
Some they stripped stark naked, and afar they had offered them a thousand
indignities, they stuck them with pins from head to foot; they cut them with
pen-knives, tore them by the noses with red-hot pincers, and dragged them about
the rooms till they promised to become Roman Catholics, or till the doleful
cries of these poor tormented creatures, calling upon God for mercy, constrained
them to let them go. They beat them with staves, and dragged them all bruised to
the Popish churches, where their enforced presence is reputed for an abjuration.
They kept them waking seven or eight days together, relieving one another by
turns, that they might not get a wink of sleep or rest. In case they began to
nod, they threw buckets of water on their faces, or holding kettles over their
heads, they beat on them with such a continual noise, that these poor wretches
lost their senses. If they found any sick, who kept their beds, men or women, be
it of fevers or other diseases, they were so cruel as to beat up an alarm with
twelve drums about their-beds for a whole week together, without intermission,
till they had promised to change."[3]
What follows is so
disgusting that it could not be quoted here unless it were covered with the
decent veil of a dead language.
The Lutherans of Alsace, protected by
recent diplomatic conventions, were exempt from these miseries; but with this
exception the persecution raged through the whole of France. In Paris and its
immediate neighborhood, matters were not urged to the same dire extremity. Those
who had instigated the king to revoke the Edict of Nantes, had assured him that
the mere terror of the Act would suffice to accomplish all he wished, and they
now strove to conceal from Louis the formidable proportions of the actual
horrors. But in other parts of France no check was put upon the murderous
passions, the brutal lusts, and the plundering greed of the soldiery, and there
a baffled bigotry and tyranny glutted their vengeance to the utmost. Among the
dreadful forms of punishment inflicted on the Protestants was the dungeon. Such
as were caught in attempts to escape, or refused to abjure, were plunged into
loathsome prisons. Here generally there reigned unbroken silence and darkness.
The poor prisoner could not receive a visit from pastor or relation; he could
not console himself by singing a psalm or by reading his Bible: shut up with
lewd and blaspheming felons, he was constrained to hear their horrible talk, and
endure their vile indignities. If his meekness and patience overcame their
cruelty, or softened the gaoler, he was at once shifted to another prison, to
prevent his being treated more tenderly by those whose compassion he had
excited. The letters of M. le Febvre, arrested in 1686, and confined fifteen
years in a solitary dungeon, have disclosed the terrible sufferings borne by
those who were shut up in these places.
"For several weeks," says he, "no
one has been allowed to enter my dungeon; and if one spot could be found where
the air was more infected than another, I was placed there. Yet the love of
truth prevails in my soul; for God who knows my heart, and the purity of my
motives, supports me by his grace." He shows us his dungeon. "It is a vault of
irregular form, and was formerly a stable, but being very damp, it was injurious
to horses. The rack and manger are here still. There is no way of admitting
light but by an opening with a double grating, in the upper part of the door.
Opposite the opening there are iron bars, fastened at their upper ends into the
wall. The place is very dark and damp. The air is noisome and has a bad smell.
Everything rots and becomes moldy. The wells and cisterns are above me. I have
never seen a fire here, except the flame of a candle. You will feel for me in
this misery, but think of the eternal weight of glory that will
follow."
Another prisoner, M. de Marolles, a distinguished scientist,
tells us that the solitude and perpetual darkness of his prison engendered, at
last, the most frightful and terrifying ideas in his mind. Believing himself on
the brink of insanity, he had recourse to prayer, and was delivered. A perfect
calm filled his mind, and those phantoms took flight that had so troubled his
soul. "He makes the days of my affliction pass speedily away," said he in the
last letter he was ever to write. "With the bread and water of affliction, He
affords me continually most delicious repasts."[4]
In the letters of
M. le Febvre, cited above, mention is made of a shepherd who was removed from
Fort St. Nicholas to a dungeon in the Chateau d'Ife.[5] The descent into this
dungeon was by a ladder, and it was lighted only by a lamp, for which the gaoler
made the prisoners pay. The shepherd, when first consigned to it, had to lie on
its miry bottom, almost without clothing. A monk, who went down into it to visit
its wretched inmates, could not help declaring that its horrors made him
shudder, that he had not nerve enough to go again. He could not refrain from
team at the sight of the unhappy beings before him, one of whom had already,
though still alive, become the prey of worms. This was the terrible fate not of
a few hundreds only. It is believed that at one stage of the persecution there
were from 12,000 to 15,000 persons in the prisons and dungeons of
France.
Another mode of punishment was transportation to Canada – the
Canada of 200 years ago. This method was resorted to in order to relieve the
prisons, which, full to overflow, could not receive the crowds that were being
daily consigned to them. Collected from the various prisons of France, or
gathered from the country around Nimes and Montpellier, these confessors of the
Gospel were brought down in gangs to Marseilles, the women strapped down in
carts, and the men mounted on horses, their feet tied below the animals belly.
The embarkation and voyage entailed incredible and protracted suffering. The
vessels that bore them across the Atlantic were small, filthy, and often
unseaworthy. Nor did their miseries end with their voyage. On their arrival in
the New World they were sold into a slavery so cruel, that in most cases they
speedily perished. Those who were thus dragged from the pleasant fields of
France, and put under the lash of barbarous task-masters in a foreign land, were
not the refuse of French society; on the contrary, they were the flower of the
nation. In these manacled gangs were men who had shone at the bar, men who had
been eminent in the pulpit, writers who were the glory of their country, and men
and women of noble or of gentle birth; yet now we see them borne across the
deep, and flung into bondage, because a sensualist king – the slave of
mistresses and priests – so willed it.
The policy of the persecutors was
to "wear out" the Protestants, in preference to summarily exterminating them by
fire and cord. It is true the murders in the fields were numerous; there were
few spots in the Cevennes which martyr-blood did not moisten, but only
occasionally in the cities was the scaffold set up. We select from the Lettres
Pastorales of Jurieu [6] a few instances. One of
the first to suffer in this way was Fulcran Rey, a young man of Nimes. He had
just finished his course of theological study when the storm burst. Does he now
decline the office of pastor?
No: accepting martyrdom beforehand, he
writes a farewell letter to those at his father's house, and goes forth to break
the silence which the banishment of the ministers had created in France by
preaching the Gospel. In a little while he was arrested. On his trial he was
promised the most flattering favors if he would abjure, but his constancy was
invincible.
He was sentenced to be hanged, after having been tortured. On
hearing his doom, he exclaimed, "I am treated more gently than my Savior was in
being condemned to so mild a form of death. I had prepared my mind to being
broken on the wheel, or being burnt to death." Then, raising his eyes to heaven,
he gave thanks to God for this mitigation of his anticipated agonies. Being come
to the scaffold, he wished to address the crowd, and confess before them the
faith in which he died; but, says Jurieu, "they were afraid of a sermon
delivered by such a preacher, and from such a pulpit, and had stationed around
the gibbet a number of drummers, with orders to beat their drums all at once."
He died at Beaucaire, July 7th, 1686, at the age of twenty-four.
But the
martyr of greatest fame of that era is Claude Brousson. Brousson had been a
distinguished member of the bar at Toulouse, where he pleaded the cause of the
oppressed Churches. Silenced as an advocate, he opened his lips as a preacher of
the Gospel. His consecration to his office took place in the wilds of the
Cevennes, which were then continually resounding with the muskets of the
murderous soldiery. The solitary hut, or the dark wood, or the deep ravine
henceforth became his home, whence he issued at appointed times to preach to the
flock of the desert. After awhile he was so hotly pursued that he judged it
prudent to withdraw from France. But in his foreign asylum his heart yearned
after his flock, and, finding no rest, he returned to those "few sheep in the
wilderness." A sum of 500 louis was offered to any one who would bring him to
the Intendant, dead or alive; nevertheless Brousson went on for five years in
the calm exercise of his ministry. His sermons were published at Amsterdam in
1695, under the title of The Mystical Manna of the Desert. "One would have
expected," says Felice, "that discourses composed by this proscribed man, under
all oak of the forest, or on a rock by some mountain torrent, and delivered to
congregations where the dead were frequently gathered as on a field of battle,
would have been marked by eager and gloomy enthusiasm. Nothing of the kind is,
however, to be found in this Mystical Manna. The preacher's language is more
moderate and graceful than that of Saurin in his quiet church of the Hague; in
the persecution he points only to the hand of God, and is vehement only when he
censures his hearers."[7] At last, in 1698, he was
arrested at Oleron and carried to Montpellier. Before his judges he freely
admitted the graver charge of his indictment, which was that he had preached to
the Protestant outlaws; but he repudiated energetically another accusation
preferred against him, that he had conspired to bring Marshal Schomberg into
France at the head of a foreign army. He was condemned to die. On the scaffold,
which he mounted on the 4th of November, he would once more have raised his
voice, but it was drowned by the roll of eighteen drums. Little did Louis XIV
then dream that his great-grandson, and next successor save one on the throne of
France, should have his dying words drowned by drums stationed round his
scaffold.
Of all the punishments to which the proscribed Protestants of
France were doomed, the most dreadful was the galleys. The more famous galleys
were those of Marseilles, and the journey thither entailed hardships so terrible
that it was a common thing for about three-fourths of the condemned to die on
the road. They marched along in gangs, carrying heavy irons, and sleeping at
night in stables or vaults. "They chained us by the neck in couples," says one
who underwent this dreadful ordeal, "with a thick chain, three feet long, in the
middle of which was a round ring. After having thus chained us, they placed us
all in file, couple behind couple, and they passed a long thick chain through
these rings, so that we were thus all chained together. Our chain made a very
long file, for we were about four hundred."[8] The fatigue of walking was
excessive, each having to carry about fifty pounds weight of chains. One of
their halting-places, the Chateau de la Tournelle, he thus speaks: "It is a
large dungeon, or rather spacious cellar, furnished with huge beams of oak
placed at the distance of about three feet apart. To these beams thick iron
chains are attached, one and a half feet in length, and two feet apart, and at
the end of these chains is an iron collar. When the wretched galley-slaves
arrived in this dungeon, they are made to lie half down, so that their heads may
rest upon the beam; then this collar is put round their necks, closed, and
rivited on an anvil with heavy blows of a hammer. And these chains with collars
are about two feet apart, and as the beams are generally about forty feet long,
twenty men are chained to them in file. This cellar which is round, is so large
that in this way they can chain up as many as five hundred. There is nothing so
dreadful as to behold the attitudes and postures of these wretches there
chained. For a man so chained cannot lie down at full length, the beam upon
which his head is fixed being too high; neither can he sit, nor stand upright,
the beam being too low. I cannot better describe the posture of such a man than
by saying he is half lying, half sitting, – part of his body being upon the
stones or flooring, the other part upon this beam. The three days and three
nights which we were obliged to pass in this cruel situation so racked our
bodies and all our limbs that we could not longer have survived it – especially
our poor old men, who cried out every moment that they were dying, and that they
had no more strength to endure this terrible torture."[9]
This dreadful
journey was but the prelude to a more dreadful doom. Chained to a bench of his
galley, the poor prisoner remained there night and day, with felons for his
companions, and scarcely any clothing, scorched by the sun, frozen by the cold,
or drenched by the sea, and compelled to row at the utmost of his strength – and
if, being exhausted, he let the oar drop, he was sure to be visited with the
bastinado. Such were the sufferings amid which hundreds of Protestants of France
wore out long years. It was not till 1775, in the beginning of Louis XVI's reign
that the galleys released their two last Protestant prisoners, Antoine Rialle
and Paul Archard.[10]
CHAPTER 7
Back to
Top
THE "CHURCH OF THE
DESERT."
Secessions – Rise of the "Church of the Desert" – Her Places
of Meeting – Her Worship – Pastors – Communion "Tokens" – Night Assemblies –
Simplicity yet Sublimity of her Worship – Renewed Persecutions – War of the
Camisards – Last Armed Struggle of French Protestantism – No Voice – Bossuet –
Antoine Court – The "Restorer of Protestantism" – Death of Louis XIV –
Theological Seminary at Lausanne – Paul Rabaut – The Edict of Malesherbes – The
Revolution.
IT seemed in very deed as if the once glorious
Protestant Church of France had fallen before the storm, and passed utterly from
off the soil she had but a century before covered with her goodly boughs. Her
ministers banished, her churches razed, her colleges closed, her sons driven
into exile, and such of them as remained in the land languishing in prison, or
dragging out a life of wretched conformity to the Romish Church – all public
monument of French Protestantism had been swept away, and the place that had
known it once seemed fated to know it no more for ever.
A deep spiritual
decay proved the forerunner of this sore judgment. An emasculated Protestantism
had taken the place of that grand Scriptural faith which had given such breadth
of view and elevation of soul to the fathers of the Huguenots. This cold belief,
so far from rallying new champions to the Protestant standard, could not even
retain those who were already around it. The nobles and great families were
apostatizing; the ministers were going over to Rome at the rate of a score or so
year by year; and numbers of the people had enlisted in the armies of Louis XIV,
although they knew that they should have to contend on the battle-field against
their brethren in the faith, and that the king's object in the war was to make
France strong that it might be able to deal a fatal blow to the Protestantism of
Europe.[1] These were symptomatic of
a most melancholy decline at the heart of French Protestantism, and now the axe
was laid at the root of that tree which, had it been left standing in the soil,
would in a few years have died of utter rottenness.
The cutting down of
the trunk was the saving of the life, for that moment shoots began to spring
forth from the old root. In the remote south, amid the mountains of Dauphine and
the Cevennes, after the first stunning effects of the blow had abated, the
Reformed began to look forth, and draw to one another;, and taking courage, they
met in little companies to celebrate their worship, or to partake of the
Sacramental bread. Thus arose The "Church of the Desert." These assemblies
speedily increased from a dozen or score of persons to hundreds, and from
hundreds at last to thousands. They were ministered to by men who had learned
their theology in no school or college, nor had the hands of presbyter been laid
upon their head; on them had come only "the anointing of the Holy Spirit." The
assemblies they addressed met on the side of a mountain, or on some lonely moor,
or in a deserted quarry or gloomy cavern, or amid the great stems and
overshadowing branches of a forest. Intimation of the meeting was sent round
only on the evening before, and if any one had scandalized his brethren by
immorality, he was omitted in the invitation. It was the only ecclesiastical
discipline which was administered. Sentinels, stationed all round, on rocks or
on hilltops, signaled to the worshippers below the approach of the dragoons,
indicating at the same time the quarter from which they were advancing, that the
people might know in what direction to flee. While the congregation was
assembling, worship was commenced by the singing of a psalm, the Hundredth being
commonly selected. The elders then read several chapters of the Bible. At this
stage the pastor, who had kept his place of concealment till now, made his
appearance, attended by a body-guard of young men, who escorted him to and from
the place of meeting, and were prepared to protect his flight should they be
surprised by the soldiers. The sermon was not to exceed an hour and a quarter in
length. Such were the limits which the Synods of the Church had fixed, with an
obvious regard to the safety of the worshippers.
The "Church of the
Desert" had been some time in existence before she had the happiness of enjoying
the ministry of her exiled pastors. A few returned, at the peril of their lives,
when they heard that their scattered flocks had begun to meet together for the
performance of worship. About 1730 a theological academy was established at
Lausanne, in Switzerland, and thence emanated all the Protestant pastors of
France till the reign of Napoleon. The same forms of worship were observed in
the wilderness as in the city church in former times. Public prayer formed an
important part of the service, conducted either by the ministers or, in their
absence, by the elders. The prayers of the pastors were commonly extemporaneous,
whereas the elders usually availed themselves of the aid of a liturgy. The
Sacrament of the Lord's Supper was dispensed at Christmas, at Easter, and at
Pentecost, as well as at other times. The purity of the table was anxiously
guarded. No one was admitted to it till first he had signified his desire to an
elder, and received from him a little medal or "token."[2] These were made of lead,
and roughly engraved, having on one side all open Bible, with the rays of the
sun, emblematic of the Spirit's light, illuminating its page, and the motto,
"Fear not, little flock;" and on the other, a shepherd tending his sheep, or a
Communion cup, and a cross, suggestive of persecution. The communicant put down
his "token" on the table, and the bread and cup were then given to him. Often
would it happen that those who had gone to mass would beg, with tears in their
eyes, admission to the table, but there they could not sit till they had given
ample proof of their Penitence.
These worshipping assemblies were usually
convened at night, the more effectively to avoid pursuit. When they met in a
wood, as very often happened, they hung lamps on the boughs of the trees, that
they might see the passages of Scripture which were read, and the psalms that
were sung. Afterwards, when the congregations had swelled to thousands, they met
during day, selecting as their rendezvous the mountain-top, or some vast stretch
of solitary moor. Their worship, how simple in its outward forms, but in spirit
how sublime, and in its accessories how grand! the open vault above, the vast
solitude around, the psalm and prayer that rose to heaven amidst the deep
stillness, the dangers that environed the worshippers – all tended to give a
reality and earnestness to the devotions, and impart a moral dignity to the
worship, compared with which the splendor of rite or of architecture would have,
been but desecration. The Protestant Church of France had returned to her early
days. It was now with her as when Calvin administered to her the first Communion
on the banks of the Claim This was her second birthday.
When the king and
the Jesuits learned that the Protestants had begun again to perform their
worship, they broke out into a transport of wrath that was speedily quenched in
blood. More arrests, more dragoons, more sentences to the galleys, more
scaffolds; such were the means by which they sought to crush the "Church of the
Desert." Everywhere in Languedoc and Dauphine the troops were on the alert for
the Reformed.
"It was a chase," as Voltaire has expressed it, "in a wide
ring." The Marquis de la Trousse, who commanded in the Cevennes, when he
surprised a congregation, made his soldiers fire into it as if it was a covey of
game. The Protestants had no arms, and could offer no resistance. They dropped
on their knees, and raising their hands to heaven, awaited death.
The
truthful Antoine Court says that "he was furnished with an exact list of
assemblies massacred in different places, and that in some of these encounters
from 300 to 400 old men, women, and children were left dead upon the spot."[3] But no violence could stop
these field-preachings. They grew ever larger in numbers, and ever more frequent
in time, till at last, we are assured, it was nothing uncommon, in traversing
the mountain-side or the forest where they had met, to find, at every four
paces, dead bodies dotting the sward, and corpses hanging suspended from the
trees.
The outbreak of the Camisards came to diversify with new and even
greater horrors this terrible tragedy. Driven to desperation and stung to
madness by the numberless cruelties, injustices, and infamies of the Government,
and permitting them. selves to be directed by certain of their own number whom
they regarded as prophets, the peasants of Vivarais and Languedoc rose in arms
against the royal troops. Ignorant of the art of war, and provided only with
such weapons as they took from their enemies, they lurked behind the bushes and
crags of their mountains, and sold their lives as dearly as they were able. They
never amounted to more than 10,000, but at times they held in check armies of
double that number.
Tiffs guerilla warfare lasted from 1702 to 1706, and
was attended with frightful slaughter on both sides. The Cevenols joined the
Camisards, which enlarged the seat and intensified the fury of the war. The
court took the alarm, and more soldiers were poured into the infected provinces.
The more effectually to suppress the rising, the Romanist population were
removed into the cities, and the country was laid waste. And the work of
devastation not proceeding rapidly enough with the musket, the sword, and the
axe, the faggot was called in to expedite it; the dwellings of the peasantry
were burned down, and the district, so flourishing before the Revocation, was
converted into one vast gloomy wilderness. This was the last armed struggle of
the Reformation in France. No noble or pastor took part in it; it was waged for
liberty rather than for religion, and though it stained rather than honored the
cause in the name of which it was waged, it emboldened the Protestants, who from
this time were treated somewhat less mercilessly, not because the Government
hated them less, but because it feared them more.
These atrocities were
enacted upon no obscure stage, and in no dark age, but in the brilliant era of
Louis XIV. Science was then cultivated, letters flourished, the divines of the
court and of the capital were learned and eloquent men, and greatly affected the
graces of meekness and charity. We wait to hear these lights of their age
exclaim against the awful crimes of which France was the theater. Surely some
voice will be lifted up.
Bossuet, "the Eagle of Meaux," has come to be
credited with a "charity" superior to his country, and which shone all the
brighter from the darkness that surrounded it. It would unspeakably delight one
to find a name, otherwise so brilliant, unstained by the oppressions and crimes
of the period; but the facts brought to light by M. M. Haag, in La France
Protestante, completely disprove the truthfulness of the panegyrics which the
too partial biographers of the distinguished bishop have pronounced upon his
moderation. These show that Bossuet was not superior in this respect to his
contemporaries. In giving vigorous enforcement to the edicts of the king within
his own diocese, he but acted consistently with his avowed principles. "It
behooves us to give obedience to kings," said Bossuet, "as to Justice itself.
They are gods, and participate in a certain sense in the independence of God. No
other than God can judge their sentences or their persons."[4] This prepares us for the
part he acted against the Protestants. The Intendant who executed the law in his
diocese, and who had orders to act according to Bossuet's advice, condemned to
death several Protestants of Nanteuil, and even the Abbe le Dieu admits that the
bishop demanded their condemnation. True, he demanded also their pardon, but
this "pardon" consisted in the commutation of the penalty of death to the
galleys for life. Further, it is certified by a letter of Frotte, a former canon
of St. Genevieve, and whom Bossuet himself describes as a very honest man, that
the bishop caused Protestants to be dragged from the villages of his diocese,
cited them before him, and with a military officer sitting by his side, summoned
them to abjure their religion; that he used to have children torn from their
parents, wives from their husbands, and to have dragoons quartered upon
Calvinists to force them to abandon their faith. He asked for lettres de cachet
to be issued against the Crochards, father and son, at the very time that the
former was dying.[5] He instigated a ruthless
persecution of two children, the Mitals.[6] We find him too in the
memoir addressed to the minister Pontchartrain, which is published in the
seventeenth volume of his works, demanding the imprisonment of two orphans, the
Demoiselles de Neuville, whose father was serving in the army of William of
Orange, thus punishing the children for the faults, as he deemed them, of the
parent. These facts, which are beyond dispute, completely overthrow the claim
for superior clemency and mildness which has been set up for the eloquent
bishop.
To pursue the century year by year to its close would only be to
repeat endlessly the same tale of crime and blood; the facts appertaining to the
progress of Protestantism in France, from the war of the Camisards until the
breaking out of the great Revolutions. group themselves around two men – Antoine
Court and Paul Rabaut. Antoine Court has received from the French Reformed the
well-earned title of "Restorer of Protestantism."
He found the French
Protestant Church at the close of the Camisard war at the last extremity. She
needed educated pastors, she needed public instruction, she needed order and
discipline, and above all a revival of piety; and he set about restoring the
Protestant Church as originally constructed by the first Synod at Paris in 1559.
He was then young, and his task was great, but he brought to it a sound judgment
and admirable prudence, an indefatigable zeal, and a bodily constitution that
sustained itself under the pressure of prodigious labors, and he succeeded in
raising again the fallen edifice. Commencing with assemblies of ten or a dozen,
he saw around him before ending his career congregations of eight and ten
thousand. By his missionary tours he revived the all but extinct knowledge and
zeal of the Protestants. He re-organized the worshipping assembly; he
re-constituted the Consistory, the Colloquy, and the Synod; and he provided a
race of educated and pious pastors. He convoked a Synod (October 21st, 1715),
the first which had met since the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. At that
moment Louis XIV lay dying in his splendid palace of Versailles. History
delights in contrasts, and we have here one that will repay our attention. On
the one side is the great monarch; his children dead; his victories swept away;
the commerce and industry of his kingdom ruined; many tracts lying untilled;
while his subjects, crushed under enormous taxes, and cursing the man whose wars
and pleasures had plunged his realm into millions of debt, waited gloomily till
his remains should be borne to the grave, that they might throw stones and mud
at his coffin. On the other side we behold a youth of nineteen laying anew the
foundations and raising up the walls of that Protestantism to commemorate the
entire destruction of which Louis XIV had caused so many medals to be struck,
and a bronze statue to be erected.
Having re-constituted upon its
original bases the Reformed Church of France, Antoine Court in 1730 retired to
Lausanne to preside over the seminary he had there founded, and which continued
for eighty years to send forth pastors and martyrs to France.[7] Paul Rabaut took his place
as nourisher of that Protestantism which Antoine Court had restored. The life of
Rabaut was full of labors and perils; but he had the satisfaction of seeing the
Protestant Church growing from day to day in spite of bloody arrets, and in
defiance of the continued operation, sometimes in greater and sometimes in less
intensity, of the dragonnade, the galleys, and the scaffold. As the result of
continual journeyings, during which he seldom slept more than two nights in the
same hiding-place, he kept flowing the fountains that his great predecessor had
opened, and streams went forth to water the weary land. But neither then nor
since has the Protestant Church of France attained the glory of her former days,
when sovereigns and princes sat in her Synods, when great generals led her
armies, and learned theologians and eloquent preachers filled her pulpits. She
continued still to wear her chains. At length in 1787 came the Edict of
Malesherbes, which merely permitted the Protestants to register their births,
marriages, and deaths; in other words, recognized them as subjects, and
permitted them to prosecute their professions and trades, but still held them
punishable for their religious opinions. At last, amid clouds of seven-fold
blackness, and the thunderings and lightnings of a righteous wrath, came the
great Revolution, which with one stroke of awful justice rent the fetters of the
French Protestants, and smote into the dust the throne which had so long
oppressed them.
Book 23 Index
FOOTNOTES
VOLUME THIRD
BOOK TWENTY-SECOND
VOLUME THIRD- BOOK TWENTY-SECOND- CHAPTER 1
[1] See ante, vol. 2., p. 624.
[2] Felice, History of the Protestants of France, vol. 1., p. 309.
[3] Elie Benoit, Histoire de l'Edit de Nantes, tom. 2., p. 295. This is a work in five volumes, filled with the acts of violence and persecution which befell the Protestants from the reign of Henry IV to the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
[4] Felice, vol. 1., p. 315.
[5] Serres, Gen. Hist. of France, continued by Grimston, pp. 256, 257.
[6] Ibid. Young, Life of John Welsh, pp. 396, 397; Edin., 1866.
[7] Elie Benoit, tom. 2., p. 377.
VOLUME THIRD- BOOK TWENTY-SECOND- CHAPTER 2
[1] Felice, pp. 326, 327.
[2] Felice, p. 329.
VOLUME THIRD- BOOK TWENTY-SECOND- CHAPTER 3
[1] Weiss, History of the French Protestant Refugees, p. 26; Edin., 1854.
[2] Weiss, Hist. French Prot. Refugees, p. 34.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid., p. 35.
[5] Hall's Works, vol. 6., p. 878.
VOLUME THIRD- BOOK TWENTY-SECOND- CHAPTER 4
[1] Voltaire, Age of Louis XIV., vol. 1., p. 73; Glas., 1753.
[2] Agnew, Protestant Exiles from France in the Reign of Louis XIV., vol. 1., p. 94 (a work of great research).
[3] Elie Benoit, Histoire de L'Edit de Nantes, tom. 4., livr. 17., 18.; Delft, 1695.
VOLUME THIRD- BOOK TWENTY-SECOND- CHAPTER 5
[1] See Bulletin de la Societe de l'Histoire du Protestantisme Francais: Deuxieme annee; p. 167 et seq.; Paris, 1854.
[2] Weiss says the 22nd of October. It was probably signed on the 18th and published on the 22nd of October.
[3] Weiss, p. 72.
[4] The Archbishop of Dublin, Richard Chevenix Trench, is his great-grandson. The archbishop is descended by the mother's side from the family of Chevenix, and by the father's side from another Huguenot family, that of La Tranches.
[5] Elie Benoit, vol. 5., pp. 554, 953.
[6] Felice, vol. 2., p. 63. See also Bulletin de la Societe de l'Histoire du Protestantisme Francais: Premiere Annee; pp. 316, 535; Paris, 1853.
[7] Massillon's Funeral Oration on Louis XIV.
[8] This statue was melted in 1792, and cast into cannon, which thundered at Valmy. (Weiss, p. 93.) .
[9] We say three, although there are five, because two of the number axe obviously reproductions with slight variations in the design.
VOLUME THIRD- BOOK TWENTY-SECOND- CHAPTER 6
[1] Felice, vol. 2., p. 79.
[2] Ibid., vol 2, p. 78
[3] John Quick, Synodicon in Gallia Reformata, pp. 130, 131; Lond., 1692.
[4] History of the Sufferings of M. Louis de Marolles; the Hague, 1699. See also Admiral Baudin's letter to the President of the Society of the History of French Protestantism – Bulletin for June and July, 1852.
[5] Situated on the rocky isle that fronts the harbor of Marseilles.
[6] Published by him every fortnight after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
[7] Felice, vol. 2., p. 87.
[8] Autobiography of a French Protestant condemned to the Galleys for the sake of his Religion (transl. from the French), p. 209. This work was written by Jean Marteilhe, who passed some years in the French galleys. It was translated by Oliver Goldsmith, first published at Rotterdam in 1757, and has since been re-published by the Religious Tract Society, London. See also Elie Benoit, bk. 24.
[9] Autobiography of a French Protestant, etc., pp. 203, 204.
[10] Bulletin de la Societe de l'Histoire du Protestantisme Francais, pp. 176, 320; Paris, 1853.
VOLUME THIRD- BOOK TWENTY-SECOND- CHAPTER 7
[1] Weiss – Bulletin de la Societe de l'Histoire du Protestantisme Francais, pp. 231-234; Paris, 1853.
[2] These medals or "tokens" are engraved on page 324. See Bulletin de la Societe de l'Histoire du Protestantisme Francais, p. 13; Paris, 1854.
[3] Felice, vol. 2., p. 82.
[4] Politique Tiree de l'Ecriture Sainte, livr. 4., art. 1., prop. 2.
[5] Bulletin de la Societe de l'Histoire du Protestantisme Francais, vol. 4.
[6] Ibid., vol. 10. p. 50.
[7] Weiss, in his History of the Refugees, says that more than 700 pastors emanated from this famous school. M. Coquerel, in his History of the Churches of the Desert, reduces the number to 100. The most reasonable calculation would not give less than 450, among whom were Alphonse Turretin and Abraham Ruchat, the historian of the Reformation in Switzerland.