Chapter XXIII: Book IV (1)

FROM THE REVOCATION OF THE EDICT OF NANTES UNTIL THE EDICT OF TOLERATION.

(1685-1787.)

I.

Two opposite influences divided this period: the traditional spirit of persecution, which still excited cruel violence and frightful executions during the latter half of the eighteenth century; and the new spirit of toleration, which, passing from the conscience of men of worth into the writings of philosophers, from these writings into the convictions of the intelligent classes, from these classes into the legislature and councils of the king, at length acquired an irresistible authority, and compelled even the priesthood to bow before maxims more true, more moral, more Christian than their own.

When he affixed the seal of the state to the Edict of Revocation, the Chancellor Letellier pronounced, with accents of joy and triumph, the _Nunc dimittis_ of Simeon. He, and Louis XIV. with him, believed that the Edict would be a final stroke [of policy]. It was then, on the contrary, that the whole strife again began.

So long as the Reformed had had anything to lose, were it only a shadow of their ancient liberty, were it only the empty name of the Edict of Henry IV., the majority had confined themselves to the limit of petitions and complaints. They always trusted that the sacredness of the law, justice, and humanity, would reappear in the heart of the monarch, and they carried their resignation to such an extent, as to originate the proverbial saying: “a Huguenot’s patience.” But everything—absolutely everything, was lost; they consulted no longer aught than what they owed to their conscience and their outraged faith; and by the persevering resolution to brave the most barbarous edicts at the cost of exile, the galleys, and death, they ended by wearying the very ferocity of their executioners.

A solemn lesson springs out of the epoch on which we are about to enter. It is easier to make martyrs than apostates; and the violence of the sword, unless there be total extermination (an impossibility in the reign of Louis XIV.), is broken by the power of thought.

The act of Revocation was rigorously executed against the pastors. The letter of the edict, which accorded fifteen days’ delay for departure, was overstepped. Claude received an order to quit [the country] within twenty-four hours, and “_the man of sedition_,” as Madame de Maintenon called him, was accompanied by one of the king’s servants, who never lost sight of him for an instant. The other pastors of Paris obtained two days for their preparations. Those of the provinces had a little more time extended to them, but by a complete denial of human and social rights, their children, under the age of seven years, were taken away from them. Some were even forced to abandon infants, which their mothers were nursing, and started on the road of banishment with wives, whose grievous woe scarcely left them strength to accept their support.

It had been calculated that many of the pastors would abjure; there were, however, but very few recantations; for even those ministers, who had yielded in the first movement of stupor and fear, almost all returned to their ancient faith. Old men of eighty and ninety years of age were seen bent on devoting the few remaining days of their life to distant journeys, and more than one died before he could reach an asylum where he might rest his wayworn feet and aching head.

The arrival of these pastors produced an inexpressible sensation in the foreign countries to which they went. On all sides people hastened, with indignant and pitying hearts, and tearful eyes, to salute these venerable confessors of the Gospel, who, leaning on their traveller’s staff, came ahungered and in rags, weeping for their children and their flocks, left in the hands of the persecutors, to sit beside the hearth of hospitality. A loud and fearful cry rose throughout all Protestant Christendom against Louis XIV., and even the (Roman) Catholics of those lands felt the flush of burning shame mantle upon their foreheads as they thought of their dishonoured church.

The faithful followed their leaders in crowds. It was in vain that laws, increasing in cruelty, condemned the men who tried to flee from their native soil, to perpetual imprisonment at the galleys, the women to seclusion for life, and both to forfeiture of goods; it was in vain they sentenced those to the same penalties, and shortly afterwards to death, who gave them assistance; it was in vain that a part of the victims’ spoils were promised to the informer. Emigration spread from province to province, and foiled the despotism of Louis.

We cannot in our times form any conception of such cruel laws; for, in short, if the king would endure but one religion in France, he ought at least to have sanctioned the departure from the realm, of those who were not, or refused to be, of it. This is so elementary a principle of natural justice, that even the Spanish Inquisition and the League had always permitted a choice between banishment and abjuration. Louis XIV. by an unheard-of abuse of power, would not permit it. He regarded his compromised _glory_ alone, and did not see that no one compromised it so much as he did himself.

The language of these ordinances is as inconceivable as their grounds. Words assumed a monstrous meaning. Thus, we read that flight to foreign parts became “_criminal disobedience_,” as if it were a crime to abandon everything rather than deny one’s faith! Again, we read that the fugitives were guilty of ingratitude for not having profited by the permission to return to France, as if there had not been imposed as the absolute condition of their return, the necessity of rebelling against the God of their conscience. To such a depth did Louis descend under the twofold prompting of his pride and Father La Chaise!

Guards were placed at the entrance of the towns, at river-ferries, in the ports, on the bridges, the highways, at every avenue leading to the frontiers, and thousands of peasants joined the troops posted from distance to distance, that they might earn the reward promised to those who stopped the fugitives. Everything failed. The emigrants purchased passports, which were sold to them by the very secretaries of the governors, or by the clerks of the ministers of state. They bought over the sentinels with money, giving as much as six thousand and even eight thousand livres as the price of escape. Some, more daring, fought their way across the frontiers, sword in hand.

The majority marched at night, by remote and solitary paths, concealing themselves in caverns during the day. They had _itineraries_ prepared expressly for this kind of travelling. They went down precipices, or climbed mountain-heights, and assumed all sorts of disguises. Shepherds, pilgrims, soldiers, huntsmen, valets, merchants, mendicants: they were always fugitives. Many, to avoid suspicion, pretended to sell chaplets and rosaries.

The eyewitness Bénoit has given us a minute account:—“Women of quality, even sixty and seventy years of age, who had, so to speak, never placed a foot upon the ground except to cross their apartments, or to stroll in an avenue, travelled a hundred leagues to some village, which had been indicated by a guide. Girls of fifteen, of every rank, exposed themselves to the same hazard. They drew wheelbarrows, they bore manure, panniers, and other burdens. They disfigured their faces with dyes, to embrown their complexion, with ointments or juices that blistered their skin, and gave them a wrinkled aspect. Women and girls were seen to counterfeit sickness, dumbness, and even insanity. Some went disguised as men; and some, too delicate and small to pass as grown men, donned the dress of lackeys, and followed on foot, through the mud, a guide on horseback, who assumed the character of a man of importance. Many of these females reached Rotterdam in their borrowed garments, and hastening to the foot of the pulpit, before they had time to assume a more decent garb, published their repentance of their compulsory signature.”[98]

The sea facilitated the evasion of a host of the Reformed. They hid themselves in bales of merchandise, in casks, under heaps of charcoal. They huddled together in holes in the ship’s hold, and there were children who passed whole weeks in these insupportable hiding-places without uttering a cry that might betray them. Sometimes the peril of an open boat was hazarded without a mouthful of provisions, the preparation of which might have prevented the flight of the fugitives, who thus put to sea with only a little water or snow, with which mothers moistened the lips of their babes.

Thousands of emigrants perished of fatigue, cold, hunger, or shipwreck, and by the bullets of the soldiery. Thousands of others were captured, chained to murderers, dragged across the kingdom to inspire their brethren with greater fear, and were condemned to labour at the oar on board convict vessels. The galleys of Marseilles were filled with these unfortunates, among whom were ancient magistrates, officers, people of gentle blood, and old men. The women were crowded into the convents and the tower of Constance, at Aigues-Mortes. But neither threats, nor dangers, nor executions, could prevail against the energy and heroic perseverance of an oppressed conscience.

The court became alarmed at the depopulation of the country and the ruin of industry. It thought that it was less a matter of faith that excited the French to flee from France, than the attraction of danger, and one day it therefore threw open all the outlets from the country. The next day, finding that the emigration had only multiplied, it closed them.

Touched by so great and so noble a misfortune, foreign nations rivalled each other in the display of their sympathy for the refugees. England, Switzerland, Holland, Prussia, Denmark, Sweden, generously met their first wants, and it never appeared more clearly, according to the remark of a contemporary, that the fountain of charity is inexhaustible. The more there was given, the more it seemed necessary to give. Private individuals contended with their governments in the distribution of relief. The fugitives were received with open arms: they were furnished with the means of work, with houses, and even churches; and they repaid this liberal hospitality by the example of their faith, a life of probity, and an industrious activity that enriched their adopted countries. “The French Protestants carried to England,” says Lemontey, “the secret and use of the valuable machinery which has been the foundation of her prodigious fortune, while the just complaint of these exiles cemented the avenging league of Augsburg.”[99]

It is difficult to fix the number of the refugees precisely. The figures indicated by Vauban have been already noticed. An intendant of Saintonge wrote, in 1698, that his province had lost a hundred thousand Reformers. Languedoc had lost from forty to fifty thousand before the war of the Camisards,[100] and Guienne at least as many. The emigration was proportion ably greater still in the Lyonnese and Dauphiny, on account of their proximity to the frontiers. Whole villages were abandoned, and many towns were half deserted. Manufactories were closed by hundreds; certain branches of industry entirely disappeared, and a vast extent of land went altogether out of cultivation.

Voltaire says, that in the space of three years, nearly fifty thousand families quitted the kingdom, and were followed by hosts of others. A pastor of the wilderness, Antoine Court, estimates the number at eight hundred thousand persons. Sismondi reckons that if the lowest numbers be taken, there remained in France somewhat more than a million of Reformed, and that from three to four hundred thousand established themselves in other countries. M. Capefigue, a writer hostile to the Reformation, who consulted the population tables of the general districts, calculates the emigration at two hundred and twenty-five or two hundred and thirty thousand souls, namely, one thousand five hundred and eighty ministers, two thousand three hundred elders, fifteen thousand gentlemen, and the remainder consisting almost entirely of traders and artisans. It is worthy of remark that the intendants made these returns in the first years of the Revocation, and that they were interested in showing the number of the emigrants to be as small as possible, in order to avoid the reproach of negligence.[101]

It appears probable that from the years 1669 to 1760, emigration, which was more than once renewed and suspended, according to the alternatives of persecution and repose, drove out of France, without counting those who returned at the end of a few years, four or five hundred thousand persons, who generally belonged to the most enlightened, the most industrious, and the most moral portion of the nation.

Thirteen hundred refugees passed through Geneva in one week. England formed eleven regiments of French volunteers, and twenty-two French churches rose in London. An entire suburb of that metropolis was peopled by refugees. Holland won back by the emigration more than she had been deprived of by the invasions of Louis XIV., and colonies of Huguenots were founded even in North America, and at the Cape of Good Hope. The name of these and their children has survived everywhere with honour.

This emigration has been sometimes compared with that of the year 1792; but the difference is much greater than the resemblance. The emigrants of the Revolution had only lost aristocratic privileges; the refugees of the Revocation had been despoiled of their very means of religious and civil existence. The first, at least those who emigrated at the beginning, left their country, because they would not accept the common law of equal rights; the latter, because they were deprived of that common law. The emigration of 1792 was composed of only one class of individuals, who had no other profession than that of arms; the emigration of 1685 comprised all the constituent elements of a people—merchants, manufacturers, mechanics, labourers. Moreover, the refugees founded numerous and useful establishments, of which many yet still remain, while the later emigrants have nowhere left enduring traces of their passage.

It is equally difficult to calculate the number of emigrants, who perished in the attempts to escape, in party fights, in prison, on the scaffold, and at the galleys, from the Edict of Revocation to the Edict of Toleration of Louis XVI. Sismondi thinks that the number of those who perished is equal to that of the emigrants; that is to say, according to his calculations, three or four hundred thousand. This amount would seem to be too high. Yet Boulainvillers assures us that, under the intendancy of Lamoignon de Bâville, in the single province of Languedoc, a hundred thousand persons fell victims to a premature death, and that a tenth perished by fire, strangulation, or the wheel. Probably a hundred thousand should be added for the rest of the kingdom in the eighteenth century. Thus two hundred thousand Frenchmen were sacrificed after an edict of pacification, which had lasted nearly ninety years! Such were the new and bloody hecatombs, that were immolated upon the altars of intolerance!

II.

The Protestants—we may now employ this name, as its use became general even in ecclesiastical documents—the Protestants, who had remained in the kingdom, were still the prey of the _dragonnades_, after the Edict of Revocation, each time they endeavoured to raise themselves. Those of the principality of Orange and the Messin country, who had hoped to find in their privileged position a guarantee against violence, were compelled to submit to that [which had been inflicted upon others]. The Lutherans of Alsace alone were spared, on account of their numbers and the recent diplomatic conventions, which protected them.

At Paris, some little moderation was observed, for fear of disturbing, as we have already remarked, the _fêtes_ and the repose of Louis. Nevertheless, four days after the Revocation, the place of worship at Charenton was demolished to the last stone, and the members of the flock were ordered to join the religion of the king without delay.

As they showed no alacrity in obeying, the principal elders were imprisoned by means of _lettres de cachet_. Next, the Marquis de Seignelay summoned a hundred of the Notables to his mansion, and desired them, in the presence of the procurator-general and the lieutenant of police La Reynie, immediately to sign an act of union. On several exclaiming against this brutal conduct, the doors were immediately shut, and they were told with vehement threats that they would not be permitted to return until they had signed—an unworthy ambush, an act of violence and extortion more characteristic of a bandit of Calabria, than of a secretary of state, and the grandson of the great Colbert.

All the Protestants of France were required, according to the terms of the edict, to send their children to (Roman) Catholic schools, and to have them taught the (Roman) Catholic catechism. A new ordinance directed that the children, from five to six years old, of those who were suspected of still adhering to the Reformed religion, should be taken away from them and confided to (Roman) Catholic relations, or be placed elsewhere. But this measure overstepped the possibility of execution. There were not sufficient colleges, convents, or hospitals in France to hold so many victims. The administrators of the laws were obliged to confine themselves to the children of the rich, who could afford to pay an alimentary pension, and in particular to girls of tender age. This detestable kidnapping continued during a great part of the century, and many families still preserve a painful remembrance of the losses they experienced by such abductions.

War was declared against books as well as individuals. The district commanders received orders to visit the houses of the Reformed with the index of the archbishop of Paris, already mentioned, and to seize all suspected writings. These domiciliary visits, which were repeated at intervals, have destroyed to the very last copy, a great number of previous works. The Bible even, was especially confiscated and burned with implacable hatred.

The priests were not able to give regular instruction to this multitude of pretended converts. Capuchin friars and the like were employed, who were gross, impudent, unlettered, and, in many cases, most immoral men. They filled the Protestants with disgust and contempt. Children stopped their mouths with their objections, and persons of mature age imbibed a deeper aversion for a church that employed ministers of such a character.

Recourse was had to new measures of rigour to drag from the reluctant acts of Catholicity. The curates made a roll-call of “_the re-united brethren_” who were placed upon benches apart from the true Catholics; and those who were so unfortunate as not to be present at the service, or the communion, were exposed to severe punishment. The military supported this inquisition to the utmost, and some intendants, who were desirous of avoiding restitution of the property of which the Reformers had been deprived, established an inspector in each parish, whose business it was to examine whether the new converts went regularly to mass, how they behaved there, whether they attended the Paschal communion, and faithfully observed the commandments of the Church. The _régime_, in fine, of the ninth and tenth centuries was restored, and Frenchmen were treated in the same manner as the savages of Paraguay had been by the Jesuits. The king perceived that matters had been carried too far, and secretly wrote to the intendants not to interfere any further to such an extent in the transactions of private life.

In spite of the rigour of the laws, and in some manner owing to that very rigour, Protestants reappeared on all sides. Full of horror with respect to (Roman) Catholicism, they had feigned to embrace it under the sabres of the dragoons, and cursing the law which, by an infamous sacrilege, compelled them to receive the communion in the Church of Rome, although they did not believe in its dogmas,—shame, remorse, the desire of expiating the error they had committed, all served to reanimate their energy. They held meetings in the wilds, on the summit of mountains, in deep ravines, and vowed, in the name of God, to live and die in the Reformed faith.

This opposition particularly manifested itself in Lower Languedoc, Vivarais, and Cevennes, which abounded in retreats almost inaccessible to the soldier. The principal events of our history are henceforth concentrated in those provinces. At the commencement of the French Reformation, the provinces around Paris took the first rank. Then came the turn of Béarn, Poitou, Guienne, and Saintonge. Next the Reformation was apparent only in the mountain-heights of Languedoc. The other provinces of the south followed the movement, but at a later period and with less lustre. The centre, the west, and the north long confined themselves to the silence of domestic worship.

It will be observed also that the meetings of the Protestants at the end of the seventeenth century, and the opening of the eighteenth, presented a striking feature of resemblance to those of the first days of Farel and Calvin; for they comprised scarcely any but the poor, and people of low degree. The peasantry of Cevennes united with the artisans of Meaux; but the nobles, and the rich inhabitants, had abjured, or sought an asylum in foreign lands, and nearly all those who had neither fallen nor fled, secluded themselves from the rest. From 1559 to 1685 the French Reformation reckoned great families, who perhaps brought with them less religious vitality than political passions; after the Revocation, it again recruited itself from the popular masses, and gathered there a strength, a devotion, and a constancy, to which it had for some time been a stranger.

Upon the news of these meetings, some of the pastors returned to France; and as they were not numerous enough for the task, they took assistants with them, who received the name of _preachers_. These were labourers, workmen, and shepherds, who without other preparation than their fervid zeal, rose in the meetings, and addressed pious exhortations to the audience, out of the abundance of their hearts. Some disorder of belief and conduct flowed from this, of which we shall have to speak.

Learning that the pretended converts were again beginning to celebrate their worship, the anger of the king, of his ministers, and of the Jesuits, was kindled to an excess of fury that knew no bounds. It was a phrenzy. The punishment of death was pronounced, in the month of July, 1686, against the pastors who had returned to France; the infliction of perpetual confinement in the galleys, against those who afforded them help, an asylum, or assistance of any kind; a reward of five thousand five hundred livres was promised to whoever should take a minister, or cause him to be taken; lastly, the punishment of death was pronounced against those who were discovered at a meeting. One is tempted to ask if such laws could have issued from the polished court of Louis XIV., that would have disgraced a race of cannibals.

On all sides the soldiers flew to the occupation of tracking the Reformers. It was, according to Voltaire’s expression, “a hunt in a great enclosure.” The Marquis de la Trousse, nephew of Madame de Sévigné, who commanded in Cevennes, scoured and beat the country continually with his troops. When he heard the Protestants praying, or chanting psalms, he made his soldiers fire upon them, as if they were wild beasts. Yet these poor people were unarmed; they did not defend themselves; and if they could not escape by flight, they awaited death upon their knees, raising their hands to heaven, or embracing each other. The veracious and honest pastor, Antoine Court, says that “he was furnished with an exact list of the meetings massacred in different places, and that there were encounters in which three or four hundred persons, old men, women, and children, remained dead on the spot.”

In the times of the Albigenses, or of the slaughters of Mérindol, an end would have been put to these meetings by an universal butchery, in which not even the infant at the domestic hearth would have been spared.

In the time of Louis XIV. manners had already become less barbarous than the laws; the arm of the smiter was partially arrested, and after sanguinary effusions, compelled to stay.

This was not the only retrograde step. When the Reformers were on their death-bed, fearing no longer the punishments of men, and awaiting the judgment of God, they refused to receive the sacraments of the [Roman Catholic] church. The result of this was [the promulgation of] a fresh law, not less atrocious than the preceding, but which it was impossible to carry into execution for any great length of time. Perpetual confinement at the galleys, or imprisonment for life, with confiscation of property, was decreed against the sick, who should recover after having rejected the _viaticum_; and against those who should die, in the same refusal, vengeance upon their corpses, which were doomed to be drawn upon hurdles, and then flung into the common sewers.

Rulhières says that to obtain the signature of Louis to this law, he was persuaded that it was simply one of commination. However, it was applied in some places by the priests and the dregs of the populace, and the soil of France was polluted by these hideous sights.

Some moribund Protestants themselves caused the priests to be summoned to their bedside, in order that they might declare their rejection of the sacraments of the Church, because they saw in this an act of reparation before God and man. Then their corpses, or their mangled members, were dragged through the streets along the gutters, amidst the execrations of a drunken mob; so horrible was such a spectacle at Calais, that an executioner fled to avoid participating in it, and nothing but the fear of death could induce him to return. Elsewhere, the Protestants themselves were forced to drag the bodies of their brethren. When one of them fell fainting to the ground, and was killed by the soldiers, he was thrown upon the same hurdle. Guards were placed about the corpses to prevent their being carried off by relations and buried in secret.

This was outstepping anew the limit of possibility in the reign of Louis XIV. All respectable people, (Roman) Catholics as well as Reformed, raised a shout of horror; and although the law was not formally repealed, the intendants were ordered not to execute it except in extreme cases. The secretary of state for ecclesiastical affairs wrote to them, on the 6th of February, 1687, that his majesty released them in some degree from the execution of this ordinance. “With regard to those,” he said, “who, when dying, make similar declarations (the refusal of the sacraments) through a mere motive of obstinacy, and whose relations disapprove of such rejection, it will be well not to raise the question and not to prosecute. Therefore, his majesty thinks fit that you should inform the ecclesiastics that they are, on these occasions, enjoined not to summon so readily judges as witnesses, in order that it may not be necessary to execute the declaration in its fullest extent.” This applied to the curates, who, _viaticum_ in hand, went to the houses of the heretics, escorted by judges and ushers, in order to inflame the passions of the populace.

Thus difficulties sprang up at the very moment when it was expected that they had all been overcome. There was only one course to take, since it was no longer possible to butcher a million of Frenchmen: this was to retrace the steps that had been taken; but the court had not the courage to do this, in spite of the advice of Vauban, who, from the year 1686, had dared to pronounce the word _retractation_, and it floated between the impossibility of overcoming and the shame of acknowledging its error.

The prisons were overflowed; the galleys choked; and as there were no means of lodging so many convicts, a great number were transported to America, where they nearly all miserably perished. Among those who remained in the convict vessels, or were condemned to capital punishment, many displayed great examples of fidelity and resolution. Jurieu enumerated these instances in his _Pastoral Letters_, published every fortnight, immediately after the Revocation. We will extract only one or two.

A retired captain of the merchant service, Elie Neau, had been sent to the hulks of Marseilles for having attempted to fly his country. There he became a missionary and preacher. He exhorted his brethren, consoled them, and set them an example of patience and virtue. “I do not,” he wrote to his pastor, a refugee in Holland, “I do not wish any evil to those who have placed me in fetters. On the contrary, while they thought they did me harm, they have in reality done me much good; for I understand now that true freedom consists in being liberated from sin.”

The (Roman) Catholic almoner, seeing that he strengthened his companions in misery, styled him a plague-spot and a poisoner, and even protested that he would not say mass while this man remained on the galley. Elie Neau was therefore shut up in a dungeon of the citadel in 1694.

He remained there for several years, deprived of light, air, and frequently of food, covered with a sack, a convict cap placed upon his head, and deprived of all books, even (Roman) Catholic books, and yet he wrote to his pastor: “If I told you that in place of the sun, the light of nature, the sun of grace shines with its divine rays in our hearts (he had two companions in his dungeon)!... It is true that we have many sad moments, which are terrible to the flesh; but God is always near, to impose silence upon us, and to soften the bitterness by His infinite goodness.”

Elie Neau was restored to liberty with other victims of the Protestant faith, through the intervention of the king of England. It will be remembered that France had already suffered a like disgrace in the reign of Henry II.[102]

The preachers and the pastors were doomed to certain death. There was no chance of pardon or pity for them. The first who was led to the gallows was a young man of Nismes, named Fulcran Rey. He had just completed his theological studies, and had not yet received pastoral ordination. He began, however, to preach, “convinced,” says Jurieu, “that when the house is on fire, it is the duty of every one to aid in extinguishing the flames.” Rey had taken the precaution to write a farewell letter to his father, knowing that he would not long escape the persecutors. He was, in effect, sold by some wretch, and arrested in the town of Anduze.

Promises and threats were simultaneously used to induce him to change his religion. The priests, the judges, and the intendants, held out to him the most signal favours if he would abjure, and a frightful death if he refused. His steadfastness was unbroken; Rey had welcomed martyrdom beforehand. He only asked one thing, and that was that he might not see his father and mother, the sight of whom he feared would unnerve him.

When the sentence was read to him that condemned him to be hanged, after the torture, he said, “I am treated more mildly than my Saviour, by being sentenced to so mild a death. I had prepared myself to be broken upon the wheel or burned.” Then raising his eyes to heaven, he thanked the Almighty.

On his way to the gallows, he met many who had abjured, and seeing them bathed in tears, he addressed fraternal exhortations to them. He would also have confessed his faith from the scaffold: “But a sermon,” says Jurieu, “from such a pulpit and by such a preacher, was too formidable, and a number of drummers had been placed round the gibbet, who were ordered to commence beating their drums all together.” Fulcran Rey perished at Beaucaire, the 7th of July, 1686, at the age of twenty-four years.

Astonishing vicissitude of human affairs! Who would have said to Louis XIV. that the grandson of his child, a king of France, would also have his voice drowned by drummers in like manner around his scaffold? O princes, be mindful how you accustom your subjects to the sight of sanguinary executions! You are but men yourselves, and the day of misfortune may overtake you likewise!

Claude Brousson was the most renowned of the martyrs of this era, and has left the deepest traces of admiration and commiseration in the memory of the Protestant people. He was born at Nismes in 1647, and practised at the bar of Castres and Toulouse. So long as he could defend the cause of the oppressed churches before the tribunal, he was desirous of no other avocation; but when he was no longer permitted to plead, he devoted his oratorical powers to preaching. He had been offered in vain the place of a counsellor of Parliament, if he would change his religion; but the conscience of Claude Brousson was one of those that could not be bought.

He was ordained to the ministry at Cevennes, amidst the sound of grape-shot, that spread death amongst the ranks of his brethren; and thenceforth, with no other shelter than savage rocks, the woods, or some isolated hut, he unceasingly preached the word of the Gospel. When he was too closely surrounded, he quitted France; but he afterwards returned, at the call of his soul and the wailings of the people. His wife and friends constantly besought him not to hazard his life, but they could not restrain him.

In 1693 a price was set upon his head, and five hundred livres were promised to whoever should deliver him up dead or alive. Brousson’s only reply to this atrocious proclamation was a calm and simple apology, addressed to the intendant of the province.

His sermons, which appeared at Amsterdam, in 1695, under the title of _The Mystic Manna of the Desert_, are replete with the same feeling. It might be expected that discourses composed under a forest oak, or upon the rock beside a torrent, by one proscribed, and pronounced in meetings that ofttimes terminated in fearful massacres, would be impressed with a dark and vehement exaggerated. Yet there is nothing of this in the _Mystic Manna_. The language of this preacher was more moderate and more gladsome than that of Saurin in the peaceful church of the Hague; he only saw in persecution the hand of God, and his words were only burning when he censured his hearers.

Claude Brousson was at length captured at Oléron, in Béarn, in the year 1698, and transferred to Montpellier. He might have escaped at the passage of the canal of Languedoc; but believing that his hour was come, he did not. In his interrogatory he accepted, without any opposition, the accusations respecting his exercising the ministerial office, but he denied in the most energetic terms a reproach which was absolutely false, that he had ever conspired to introduce Marshal Schomberg into France at the head of a foreign army.

On the 4th of November he was led to the scaffold, and his voice was stifled by the rolling of eighteen drums. “I have executed more than two hundred condemned,” said the hangman some days after, “but no one made me tremble so much as M. Brousson. When he was put to the torture, the commissioner and the judges turned pale and trembled more than he did, who raising his eyes, prayed to God. I would have fled, had I been able, rather than have put so honest a man to death. If I dared speak, I could say many things about him; certainly, he died like a saint.”

III.

Generous protestations were speedily raised as soon as it became generally known what evils had followed upon the Revocation of the edict, and to what extremities the council was reduced in order to maintain the delusive fiction of the unity of faith in the kingdom.

The Jansenists must be first mentioned. They declared that their blood curdled at the thought of the sacrilegious communions forced upon the heretics, and rejected as a monstrous offence against the Deity himself, a proselytism only successful under the terror of dragoons, the galleys, and gibbets.

The bishops of Grenoble and Saint-Pons deserve an honourable mention. The former addressed a letter condemnatory of the forced communions to the curates of his diocese. The latter wrote to the commander of the troops, that all compulsion in such a matter was impious. “It is,” he said, “veritable sacrilege. And it could be wished that the unhappy wretches who are guilty of these abominations, and the ministers of the altar who are the instruments of them, were cast into the sea, according to the words of the Scripture, with a millstone about their necks; for they not only confirm the Huguenots in their unbelief, but they also shake the thereby wavering faith of the Catholics.”

Many honest and pious curates, moreover, refused to discharge the office of informers, and to torture until the actual moment of death, the souls that declined their ministry. But the Jesuits and the great body of the clergy persisted in urging and employing measures of severity. Fénélon wrote from Saintonge in 1686, “The Jesuits here are a set of obstinates, who have no other words for the Protestants than fines and imprisonment in this world, and the devil and hell in the next. We have had infinite trouble to stop these good fathers from bursting into violent exclamations against our mildness.”

It is at first sight a singular thing, to see on one side the Jesuits so notorious for their equivocal piety, for their accommodative morality, the inventors of _easy devotion_, soliciting the most violent measures against the Protestants; and, on the other side, the Jansenists, so rigid in their articles of faith, and so austere in their practice, insisting upon a moderate course. But surprise ceases when we reflect that the former sought only for power, the latter were chiefly solicitous for sincerity. The first were contented with (Roman) Catholics of any kind, provided they bent their necks to the yoke of the Church; the second wanted none but true Catholics, and would not take them at the hands of soldiers and hangmen.

The nomination of M. de Noailles (afterwards a cardinal), to the see of Paris, gave some strength to the Jansenist party, who had never been completely banished from the court or the councils. The archbishop presented a memorial to the king, in which he exhorted him to adopt measures more conformable with Christianity. He was seconded by many persons of importance, who had studied the political side of the question with attention. The superintendent Pontchartrain regretted the loss of so many artisans and industrious citizens. The Marquis d’Aguesseau, the Duke de Beauvilliers, the Marquis de Pompone, and the Marshal Catinat, avowed the same opinions. They were above all struck with the progress of public poverty. They saw with affright that the force of destruction had at that epoch infinitely surpassed the power of production, and that the finances of the state were in a deplorable condition.

Vauban wrote the following lines to Louvois, which prove that the Revocation was not so popular with the enlightened classes as was pretended. “The forced conversions have inspired a general horror of the conduct of the ecclesiastics. If it is to be pursued, the necessity arises of exterminating the pretended new converts as rebels, or of banishing them as relapsed, or of confining them as madmen;—execrable projects, contrary to all the Christian virtues, moral and civil!”

Even the timid Racine himself raised his voice, in the tragedy of Esther, represented in 1689. “The choice of the subject,” says one of the commentators of this great poet, “permitted the strongest allusions. At the very moment when the Protestants were persecuted, the poet dared to make known the true maxims of the Gospel. He defended the oppressed in the presence of the royal oppressor. Lastly, he painted Louvois in the most odious light; and that there might be no possibility of his not being recognised, he put in the mouth of Haman the very words which had escaped from the minister in the delirium of his pride.”[103]

Fénélon prepared a memoir of remarkable boldness for the perusal of Louis XIV. This composition, which was for a long time unknown, was first published in 1825. In it the archbishop of Cambray represents Father La Chaise as a man of a gross and limited mind, afraid of sound virtue, loving only profane and libertine people, nourishing the king’s ignorance, and as _a blind man leading another_. He reproaches Louis himself in terms more severe than any we have used towards him in this history: “You do not love God,” Fénélon thus addresses him; “you only fear Him with the fear of a slave; it is hell, and not God, whom you dread. Your religion only consists of superstition, and petty superficial practices. You are scrupulous about trifles, and callous with regard to terrible evils. You care for nought but your own glory and pleasure. You centre everything in yourself, as if you were the God of the earth, and all the rest had been created only to be sacrificed to you!”

Madame de Maintenon, having quarrelled with Father La Chaise, and being, moreover, no longer anxious about her future [condition], also seemed to side with the Archbishop de Noailles, Fénélon, and the Jansenists. She wrote [to this effect] to one of her relations: “You have been converted; do not meddle with the conversion of others. I avow to you that I do not wish to be responsible to God nor the king for all these conversions.”

But the unbounded pride of Louis XIV., which revolted from the idea of confessing to his people and Europe that he had been mistaken, the remembrance of the praises that had been bestowed upon him for this measure, the influence of Father La Chaise, who treated as prevarication every project of milder proceedings, and the negative answers of the majority of the bishops to M. de Noaille’s letter of consultation, as to the steps it would be advisable to take,—all prevented the plan of the Jansenists from succeeding.

These laborious negotiations only elicited the Edict of the 13th of April, 1698, which solemnly confirmed the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Not one of the laws of torture and blood was abolished: only it was commanded that new means should be employed for the better instruction of the united subjects.

The conduct of the governors and the intendants was not changed in the least by it. They acted towards the Reformers like proconsuls, possessed of the enormous privilege of imprisoning, condemning to the galleys, dragging to the scaffold, shooting, abducting children, and confiscating property, without a single judicial form. Intolerance had subjected the Protestant population to the _régime_ of Turkey.

Of all these intendants, the most notorious was Lamoignon de Bâville, who for thirty-three years had been the supreme administrator, or, as he was called, the King of Languedoc. His motto was: “_Ever ready, never hurried._” He was a calm, methodical, hard man, without a passion but that of power, coolly ordering the most frightful executions, hanging, beheading, quartering sixty or eighty persons at a time, devastating whole cantons, burning towns and villages, not out of religious zeal, but for state reasons. His character was a compound of Louis XI., Richelieu, and Robespierre, and he would subordinate to his policy the sufferings, tortures, and murder of a whole people without compunction. Bâville was, indeed, to use the phrase of a contemporary, “the terror and the horror of Languedoc.”

He did not approve of the Revocation; but from the moment it was pronounced, his advice was to carry it into extreme execution against the obstinate. “It is requisite, in order to insure the tranquillity of the state,” he wrote, “to change their will, to regulate ourselves upon what we have already done, to reduce them to a full submission, by tearing the prejudices of birth from their hearts, and by compelling them, authoritatively, to adopt the religion of the state.” It was of little importance to him whether the religion were false or true, accepted or rejected by the conscience of the new converts; it was the _religion of the state_, and submission must be made thereto. “_Let them be damned, provided they obey_,” was the saying of a military commander of the same epoch. Supreme and vilest expression of the moral degradation of being a persecutor without being even a fanatic!

This ferocious proconsul was exasperated at the obstinacy of the Protestants in holding their meetings. He surrounded them with troops, and charged them with the bayonet and the sword. The most notable of the prisoners were hanged upon the first trees, the others were sent to the galleys, and there were numbered, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, two thousand of these unfortunate convicts, who were worse treated than highway robbers.

The priests of these parts, receiving nothing but marks of aversion and contempt from those whom they regarded as their flocks, partook, for the most part, of Bâville’s anger, and helped him to assuage it. They spied out the delinquents, denounced them to the authorities, put themselves at the head of the soldiers, and displayed all the more barbarity, in that it was not in their calling to be cruel.

The most bloodthirsty of all was one Chayla, an inspector of missions, and arch-priest. He had turned his presbytery into a stronghold, or a cavern of bandits, and seemed to feel an exquisite delight in the torments of his victims. “Sometimes,” says Count de Gébelin, “he tore out their beards or their eyebrows with pincers, sometimes he put hot coals into their hands, which were then forcibly clenched, so long as the coals could burn; sometimes he enveloped their fingers with cotton steeped in oil or tallow, and then setting fire to it, would sear their hands until they cracked, or were consumed to the bone.”[104]

Having arrested a band of fugitives, and shut them up in pens like animals, among whom were two ladies, related to the most important families of the country, a band of forty or fifty determined men presented themselves before the door of his house at Pont-de-Montvert, singing a psalm. These avengers of blood first broke open the dungeons, and delivered the prisoners, whose swollen bodies and fractured limbs were scarcely able to bear the motion that restored them to liberty.

The Abbé du Chayla ordered his servants to repel these persons with fire-arms, and one of the assailants fell. The others set fire to the presbytery, seized the arch-priest, made him gaze upon his victims, their mangled limbs and lacerated bodies, and then all, after this frightful act of accusation, stabbed him with their weapons. He received fifty-two wounds. Such was the beginning of the war of the Camisards.

IV.

This last struggle of the French Reformation bears no comparison with any that preceded it. Admiral Coligny and Henry of Navarre were backed by entire provinces, and half the nobility of the kingdom. The Duke de Rohan also was a redoubtable chief, and a skilful leader, who with his followers fought pitched battles. In this instance there were only poor peasants, without weapons but those which they wrenched from [the hands of] their enemies, ignorant of the art of war, and reduced to sell their lives dearly, behind the copses and rocks of their mountains. They were led on by no nobles; they were not even supported by the Reformed _bourgeoisie_ of the plains and towns; this time it was the meanest of the people who spilled their blood, and died around the standard on which they had inscribed: “Freedom of religion!”

The Camisards were led by men, whom they regarded as inspired, or prophets. A new convert, half abbé, half playwright, who curiously mingled comedy with controversy,—Bruyëis, has attacked these prophets with irony and gall in his _History of Fanaticism_. Other (Roman) Catholic writers have followed him. Even the Bishop Fléchier pursues the prophets of Languedoc with his cold and harsh antitheses.

Rulhières was more just: he had the good faith to accuse the persecutors of the Cévenoles of these mental aberrations. “Can we forget then,” he asks, “that their places of worship had been cast down; their country delivered up to military pillage; their children carried off; the houses of those styled obstinate, razed; that the most zealous of their pastors had been broken upon the wheel, while no one had instructed them in our religion?”[105]

Such, in effect, were the causes of these wild ecstasies, or inspirations—the want of spiritual leaders and of schools, spoliations, sufferings, threatened executions, the continual fear of the hulks and the gibbet. The minds of these unfortunates became excited; and finding no support on earth, they easily believed that they had supernatural communications from on high.

This religious exaltation began in the province of Vivarais, from the time of the _dragonnades_ and the Revocation [of the Edict of Nantes]. The fourth pastoral letter of Jurieu, dated the 15th of October, 1686, mentions that a man belonging to Codognan, imagined that he had seen a vision and heard a voice, which said to him, “Go, and console my people.” In Béarn and elsewhere, simple people fancied they had heard the singing of psalms in the air, and had witnessed miraculous apparitions.

Shortly afterwards, Isabeau Vincent appeared, _the Shepherdess of Dauphiny_, a young girl of sixteen or seventeen years of age, who could neither read nor write. She had ecstasies. “For the first five weeks,” says Jurieu, “she spoke during her ecstasies no language but that of her country, because her only auditors were the peasantry of her village. The noise of this miracle having spread, people came to see her who understood and spoke French. She then began to speak French, and with a diction as correct as if she had been brought up in the first houses of Paris. She composed admirable and excellent prayers. Her action had no violence. Her lips moved slightly, and without the least appearance of convulsion.”[106]

It was then as if a moral contagion had spread over the whole of Vivarais and Languedoc. Prophets were counted by hundreds. They were people of the lower classes, who had read nothing but the Bible; they quoted passage after passage, which they continually applied on every occasion. They particularly invoked the texts of the books of prophecies in the Old Testament and Apocrypha. Even children felt these inspirations, and persisted in them, notwithstanding the severe corrections of their parents, who were held responsible for these strange phenomena.

This ecstasy had four degrees: the calling, the inspiration, the prophecy, and the gift, or the inspiration in its highest degree. It cannot be doubted that the ecstasies were sincere. They were the first to believe in the spirit, which they said filled them, and obeyed it without reservation, hesitation, or delay, although they went to a certain death.

This spirit, they would say, made them better people. “The persons, who had received the inspiration,” they said, “directly abandoned every kind of licentiousness and vanity. Some who had led a debauched life, first became steady and pious, and every one who frequented their society also became better-behaved, and led an exemplary life. This spirit begot in us a horror of idolatry, a contempt for the world, charity, internal consolation, hope, and an unleavened joy of heart.”[107]

The Camisard chiefs were designated by the spirit. They believed themselves to be filled with it, and this was the source of their courage, their triumphs, and their constancy in the greatest extremities. Whether the necessity of the moment was to collect their scattered bands, to fix the point of attack, to choose the day of combat, to retreat, to advance, to discover traitors and spies, to spare prisoners, or to put them to death, it was the spirit they consulted: everywhere and in all things their persuasion was that they acted under the immediate and sovereign direction of heaven.

One of these Camisards, Elie Marion, thus tells this with great simplicity in his _Théâtre Sacré des Cevennes_: “We were without strength and without counsel, but our inspirations were our succour and our support. They elected our leaders, and conducted them; they were our military discipline. It is they who raised us, even weakness itself, to put a strong bridle upon an army of more than twenty thousand picked soldiers. It is they who banished sorrow from our hearts in the midst of the greatest peril, as well as in the deserts and the mountain fastnesses, when cold and famine oppressed us. Our heaviest crosses were but lightsome burdens, for this intimate communion that God allowed us to have with Him, bore up and consoled us; it was our safety and our happiness.”[108]

Upon what does the judgment of enlightened, as well as of ignorant men depend? These inspirations, those inner voices recall, trait for trait, the language and the history of Joan of Arc. The religious phenomenon is absolutely the same. But the Maid of Orleans delivered France, and the people of Cevennes were vanquished. The first has been almost worshipped: the others have been for the most part treated as madmen and fanatics. If the English had triumphed in the fifteenth century, the shepherdess of Vaucouleurs would also have been regarded by historians as a poor peasant girl, crazed by silly delusions!