THE REVOCATION OF THE EDICT OF NANTES AND ITS EFFECTS.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now that Protestantism had been put down, and the officers of Louis announced from all parts of the kingdom that the Huguenots were becoming converted by thousands, there was nothing but a clear course before the Jesuits in France. For their religion was now the favoured religion of the State. It is true there were the Jansenists—declared to be heretical by the Popes, and distinguished for their opposition to the doctrines and moral teaching of the Jesuits—who were suffering from a persecution which then drove some of the members of Port Royal into exile, and eventually destroyed them.

But even the Jansenists approved the persecution of the Protestants. The great Arnault, their most illustrious interpreter, though in exile in the Low Countries, declared that though the means which Louis XIV had employed had been rather violent, they had in nowise been unjust. But Protestantism being declared destroyed, and Jansenism being in disgrace, there was virtually no legal religion in France but one—that of the Roman Catholic Church. Atheism, it is true, was tolerated, but then Atheism was not a religion. The Atheists did not, like the Protestants, set up rival churches, or appoint rival ministers, and seek to draw people to their assemblies. The Atheists, though they tacitly approved the religion of the King, had no opposition to offer to it—only neglect, and perhaps concealed contempt.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EFFECTS OF THE REVOCATION.

THE Revocation struck with civil death the entire Protestant population of France. All the liberty of conscience which they had enjoyed under the Edict of Nantes, was swept away by the act of the King. They were deprived of every right and privilege; their social life was destroyed; their callings were proscribed; their property was liable to be confiscated at any moment; and they were subjected to mean, detestable, and outrageous cruelties.

From the day of the Revocation, the relation of Louis XIV to his Huguenot subjects was that of the Tyrant and his Victims. The only resource which remained to the latter was that of flying from their native country; and an immense number of persons took the opportunity of escaping from France.

The Edict of Revocation proclaimed that the Huguenot subjects of France must thenceforward be of "the King's religion"; and the order was promulgated throughout the kingdom. The Prime Minister, Louvois, wrote to the provincial governors, " His Majesty desires that the severest rigour shall be shown to those who will not conform to His Religion, and those who seek the foolish glory of wishing to be the last, must be pushed to the utmost extremity."

The Huguenots were forbidden, under the penalty of death, to worship publicly after their own religious forms. They were also forbidden, under the penalty of being sent to the galleys for life, to worship privately in their own homes. If they were overheard singing their favourite psalms, they were liable to fine, imprisonment, or the galleys. They were compelled to hang out flags from their houses on the days of Catholic processions; but they were forbidden, under a heavy penalty, to look out of their windows when the Corpus Domini was borne along the streets.

The Huguenots were rigidly forbidden to instruct their children in their own faith. They were commanded to send them to the priest to be baptized and brought up in the Roman Catholic faith, under the penalty of five hundred livres fine in each case. The boys were educated in Jesuit schools, the girls in nunneries, the parents being compelled to pay the required expenses; and where the parents were too poor to pay, the children were at once transferred to the general hospitals. A decree of the King, published in December, 1685, ordered that every child of five years and upwards was to be taken possession of by the authorities, and removed from its Protestant parents. This decree often proved a sentence of death, not only to the child, but to its parents.

The whole of the Protestant temples throughout France were subject to demolition. The expelled pastors were compelled to evacuate the country within fifteen days. If, in the meantime, they were found performing their functions, they were liable to be sent to the galleys for life. If they undertook to marry Protestants, the marriages were declared illegal, and the children bastards. If, after the expiry of the fifteen days, they were found lingering in France, the pastors were then liable to the penalty of death.

Protestants could neither he born, nor live, nor die, without state and priestly interference. Protestant sages-femmes were not permitted to exercise their functions; Protestant doctors were prohibited from practising; Protestant surgeons and apothecaries were suppressed; Protestant advocates, notaries, and lawyers were interdicted; Protestants could not teach, and all their schools, public and private, were put down. Protestants were no longer employed by the Government in affairs of finance, as collectors of taxes, or even as labourers on the public roads, or in any other office. Even Protestant grocers were forbidden to exercise their calling.

There must be no Protestant librarians, booksellers, or printers. There was, indeed, a general raid upon Protestant literature all over France. All Bibles, Testaments, and books of religious instruction, were collected and publicly burnt. There were bonfires in almost every town. At Metz, it occupied a whole day to burn the Protestant books which had been seized, handed over to the clergy, and condemned to be destroyed.

Protestants were even forbidden to hire out horses, and Protestant grooms were forbidden to give riding lessons. Protestant domestics were forbidden to hire themselves as servants, and Protestant mistresses were forbidden to hire them under heavy penalties. If they engaged Protestant servants, they were liable to be sent to the galleys for life. They were even prevented employing "new converts".

Artisans were forbidden to work without certificates that their religion was Catholic. Protestant apprenticeships were suppressed. Protestant washerwomen were excluded from their washing-places on the river. In fact, there was scarcely a degradation that could he invented, or an insult that could be perpetrated, that was not practised upon those poor Huguenots who refused to be of "the King's religion."

Even when Protestants were about to take refuge in death, their troubles were not over. The priests had the power of forcing their way into the dying man's house, where they presented themselves at his bedside, and offered him conversion and the viaticum. If the dying man refused these, he was liable to be seized after death, dragged from the house, pulled along the streets naked, and buried in a ditch, or thrown upon a dunghill.

For several years before the Revocation, while the persecutions of the Huguenots had been increasing, many had realised their means, and fled abroad into Switzerland, Germany, Holland, and England. But after the Revocation, emigration from France was strictly forbidden, under penalty of confiscation of the whole goods and property of the emigrant. Any person found attempting to leave the country, was liable to the seizure of all that belonged to him, and to perpetual imprisonment at the galleys; one half the amount realised by the sale of the property being paid to the informers, who thus became the most active agents of the Government. The Act also ordered that all landed proprietors who had left France before the Revocation, should return within four months, under penalty of confiscation of all their property.

Amongst those of the King's subjects who were the most ready to obey "his orders were some of the old Huguenot noble families, such as the members of the houses of Bouillon, Coligny, Rohan, Tremouille, Sully, and La Force. These great vassals, whom a turbulent feudalism had probably in the first instance induced to embrace Protestantism, were now found ready to change their profession of religion in servile obedience to the monarch.

The lesser nobility were more faithful and consistent. Many of them abandoned their estates and fled across the frontier, rather than live a daily lie to God by forswearing the religion of their conscience. Others of this class, on whom religion sat more lightly, as the only means of saving their property from confiscation, pretended to be converted to Roman Catholicism; though, we shall find, that these "new converts", as they were called, were treated with as much suspicion on the one side as they were regarded with contempt on the other.

There were also the Huguenot manufacturers, merchants, and employers of labour, of whom a large number closed their workshops and factories, sold off their goods, converted everything into cash, at whatever sacrifice, and fled across the frontier into Switzerland—either settling there, or passing through it on their way to Germany, Holland, or England.

It was necessary to stop this emigration, which was rapidly diminishing the population, and steadily impoverishing the country. It was indeed a terrible thing for Frenchmen to tear themselves away from their country—Frenchmen, who have always clung so close to their soil that they have rarely heen able to form colonies of emigration elsewhere—it was breaking so many living fibres to leave France, to quit the homes of their fathers, their firesides, their kin, and their race. Yet, in a multitude of cases, they were compelled to tear themselves by the roots out of the France they so loved.

Yet it was so very easy for them to remain. The King merely required them to be "converted." He held that loyalty required them to be of "his religion." On the 19th of October, 1685, the day after he had signed the Act of Revocation, La Reynée, lieutenant of the police of Paris, issued a notice to the Huguenot tradespeople and working-classes, requiring them to be converted instantly. Many of them were terrified, and conformed accordingly. Next day, another notice was issued to the Huguenot bourgeois, requiring them to assemble on the following day for the purpose of publicly making a declaration of their conversion.

The result of these measures was to make hypocrites rather than believers, and they took effect upon the weakest and least-principled persons. The strongest, most, independent, and high-minded of the Huguenots, who would not be hypocrites, resolved passively to resist them, and if they could not be allowed to exercise freedom of conscience in their own country, they determined to seek it elsewhere. Hence the large increase in the emigration from all parts of France immediately after the Act of Revocation had been proclaimed. All the roads leading to the frontier or the sea-coast streamed with fugitives. They went in various forms and guises—sometimes in bodies of armed men, at other times in solitary parties, travelling at night and sleeping in the woods by day. They went as beggars, travelling merchants, sellers of beads and chaplets, gipsies, soldiers, shepherds, women with their faces dyed and sometimes dressed in men's clothes, and in all manner of disguises.

To prevent this extensive emigration, more violent measures were adopted. Every road out of France was posted with guards. The towns, highways, bridges, and ferries, were all watched; and heavy rewards were promised to those who would stop and bring back the fugitives. Many were taken, loaded with irons, and dis- patched by the most public roads through France—as a sight to be seen by other Protestants—to the galleys at Marseilles, Brest, and other ports. As they went along they were subject to every sort of indignity in the towns and villages through which they passed. They were hooted, stoned, spit upon, and loaded with insult.

Many others went by sea, in French as well as in foreign ships. Though the sailors of France were prohibited the exercise of the reformed religion, under the penalty of fines, corporal punishment, and seizure of the vessels where the worship was allowed, yet many of the emigrants contrived to get away by the help of French ship captains, masters of sloops, fishing-boats, and coast pilots — who most probably sympathized with the views of those who wished to fly their country rather than become hypocrites and forswear their religion. A large number of emigrants, who went hurriedly off to sea in little boats, moist have been drowned, as they were never afterwards heard of.

There were also many English ships that appeared off the coast to take the flying Huguenots away by night. They also escaped in foreign ships taking in their cargoes in the western harbours. They got cooped up in casks or wine barraques, with holes for breathing places; others contrived to get surreptitiously into the hold, and stowed themselves away among the goods. When it became known to the Government that many Protestants were escaping in this way, provision was made to meet the case; and a Royal Order was issued that, before any ship was allowed to set sail for a foreign port, the hold should be fumigated with deadly gas, so that any hidden Huguenot who could not otherwise be detected, might thus be suffocated!

In the meantime, however, numerous efforts were being made to convert the Huguenots. The King, his ministers, the dragoons, the bishops, and clergy used all due diligence. "Everybody is now missionary," said the fascinating Madame de Sévigné; "each has his mission—above all the magistrates and governors of provinces, helped by the dragoons. It is the grandest and finest thing that has ever been imagined and executed."

The conversions effected by the dragoons were much more sudden than those effected by the priests. Sometimes a hundred or more persons were converted by a single troop within an hour. In this way Murillac converted thousands of persons in a week. The regiment of Ashfeld converted the whole province of Poitou in a month.

De Noailles was very successful in his conversions. He converted Nimes in twenty-four hours; the day after he converted Montpellier; and he promised in a few weeks to deliver all Lower Languedoc from the leprosy of heresy. In one of his dispatches soon after the Revocation, he boasted that he had converted 350 nobility and gentry, 54 ministers, and 25,000 individuals of various classes.

The quickness of the conversions effected by the dragoons is easily to be accounted for. The principal cause was the free quartering of soldiers in the houses of the Protestants. The soldiers knew what was the object for which they were thus quartered. They lived freely in all ways. They drank, swore, shouted, beat the heretics, insulted their women, and subjected them to every imaginable outrage and insult.

One of their methods of making converts was borrowed from the persecutions of the Vaudois. It consisted in forcing the feet of the intended converts into boots full of boiling grease, or they would hang them up by the feet, sometimes forgetting to cut them down until they were dead. They would also force them to drink water perpetually, or make them sit under a slow dripping upon their heads until they died of madness. Sometimes they placed burning coals in their hands, or used an instrument of torture resembling that known in Scotland as the thumbscrews. Many of their attempts at conversion were accompanied by details too hideous to be recorded.

(Thumbscrews were used in the reign of James II Louis and James borrowed from each other the means of converting heretics ; but whether the origin of the thumbscrew be French or Scotch is not known)

Of those who would not be converted, the prisons were kept full. They were kept there without the usual allowance of straw, and almost without food. In winter they had no fire, and at night no lamp. Though ill, they had no doctors. Besides the gaoler, their only visitors were priests and monks, entreating them to make abjuration. Of course many died in prison—feeble women, and aged and infirm men. In the society of obscene criminals, with whom many were imprisoned, they prayed for speedy deliverance by death, and death often came to their help.

More agreeable, but still more insulting, methods of conversion were also attempted. Louis tried to bribe the pastors by offering them an increase of annual pay beyond their former stipends. If there were a Protestant judge or advocate, Louis at once endeavoured to bribe him over. For instance, there was a heretical syndic of Strasburg, to whom Louis wrote, "Will you be converted? I will give you 6,000 livres of pension.—Will you not? I will dismiss you."

Of course many of the efforts made to convert the Huguenots proved successful. The orders of the Prime Minister, the free quarters afforded to the dragoons, the preachings and threatenings of the clergy, all contributed to terrify the Protestants. The fear of being sent to the galleys for life—the threat of losing the whole of one's goods and property—the alarm of seeing one's household broken up, the children seized by the priests and sent to the nearest monkery or nunnery for maintenance and education—all these considerations doubtless had their effect in increasing the number of conversions.

Persecution is not easy to bear. To have all the public powers and authorities employed against one's life, interests, and faith, is what few can persistently oppose; And torture, whether it be slow or sudden, is what many persons, by reason of their physical capa- city, have not the power to resist. Even the slow torment of dragoons quartered in the houses of the heretics—their noise and shoutings, their drinking and roistering, the insults and outrages they were allowed to practise—was sufficient to compel many at once to declare themselves to be converted.

Indeed, pain is, of all things, one of the most terrible of converters. One of the prisoners condemned to the galleys, when he saw the tortures which the victims about him had to endure by night and by day, said that sufferings such as these were "enough to make one conform to Buddhism or Mahommedanism as well as to Popery"; and doubtless it was force and suffering which converted the Huguenots, far more than love of the King or love of the Pope.

By all these means—forcible, threatening, insulting, and bribing—employed for the conversion of the Huguenots, the Catholics boasted that in the space of three months they had received an accession of five hundred thousand new converts to the Church of Rome.

But the "new converts" did not gain much by their change. They were forced to attend mass, but remained suspected. Even the dragoons who converted them, called them dastards and deniers of their faith. They tried, if they could, to avoid confession, but confess they must. There was the fine, confiscation of goods, and imprisonment at the priest's back.

Places were set apart for them in the churches, where they were penned up like lepers. A person was stationed at the door with a roll of their names, to which they were obliged to answer. During the service, the most prominent among them were made to carry the lights, the holy water, the incense, and such things, which to Huguenots were an abomination. They were also required to partake of the Host, which Protestants regarded as an awful mockery of the glorious Grodhead.

The Duc de Saint-Simon, in his memoirs, after referring to the unmanly cruelties practised by Louis XIV on the Huguenots, "without the slightest pretext or necessity," characterizes this forced participation in the Eucharist as sacrilegious and blasphemous folly, notwithstanding that nearly all the bishops lent themselves to the practice. "From simulated abjuration," he says, "they [the Huguenots] are dragged to endorse what they do not believe in, and to receive the divine body of the Saint of saints whilst remaining persuaded that they are only eating bread which they ought to abhor. Such is the general abomination born of flattery and cruelty. From torture to abjuration, and from that to the communion, there were only twenty-four hours' distance; and the executioners were the conductors of the converts, and their witnesses. Those who in the end appeared to have become recon- ciled, when more at leisure did not fail, by their flight or their behaviour, to contradict their pretended conversion."

Indeed, many of the new converts, finding life in France to be all but intolerable, determined to follow the example of the Huguenots who had already fled, and took the first opportunity of disposing of their goods and leaving the country. One of the first things they did on reaching a foreign soil, was to attend a congregation of their brethren, and make "reconnaisances," or acknowledgment of their repentance for having attended mass and pretended to be converted to the Roman Catholic Church. At one of the sittings of the Threadneedle Street Huguenot Church in London, held in May, 1687—two years after the Revocation—not fewer than 497 members were again received into the Church which, by force, they had pretended to abandon.

Not many pastors abjured. A few who yielded in the first instance through terror and stupor, almost invariably returned to their ancient faith. They were offered considerable pensions if they would conform and become Catholics. The King promised to augment their income by one-third, and if they became advocates or doctors in law, to dispense with their three years' study, and with the right of diploma.

At length, most of the pastors had left the country. About seven hundred had gone into Switzerland, Holland, Prussia, England, and elsewhere. A few remained going about to meetings of the peasantry, at the daily risk of death; for every pastor taken was hung. A reward of 5,500 livres was promised to whoever should take a pastor, or cause him to be taken. The punishment of death was also pronounced against all persons who should be discovered attending such meetings.

Nevertheless, meetings of the Protestants continued to be held, with pastors or without. They were, for the most part, held at night, amidst the ruins of their pulled-down temples. But this exposed them to great danger, for spies were on the alert to inform upon them and have them apprehended.

At length they selected more sheltered places in remote quarters, where they met for prayer and praise, often resorting thither from great distances. They were, however, often surprised, cut to pieces by the dragoons, who hung part of the prisoners on the neighbouring trees, and took the others to prison, from whence they were sent to the galleys, or hung on the nearest public gibbet.

Fulcran Rey was one of the most celebrated of the early victims. He was a native of Nimes, twenty-four years old. He had just completed his theological studies; but there were neither synods to receive him to pastoral ordination, nor temples for him to preach in. The only reward he could earn by proceeding on his mission was death, yet he determined to preach. The first assemblies he joined were in the neighbourhood of Nimes, where his addresses were interrupted by assaults of the dragoons. The dangers to his co-religionaries were too great in the neighbourhood of this populous town; and he next went to Castres and the Vaunage; after which he accepted an invitation to proceed into the less populous districts of the Cevennes.

He felt the presentiment of death upon him in accepting the invitation; but he went, leaving behind him a letter to his father, saying that he was willing, if necessary, to give his life for the cause of truth. "Oh! what happiness it would give me," he said, "if I might be found amongst the number of those whom the Lord has reserved to announce his praise and to die for his cause!"

His apostolate was short but glorious. He went from village to village in the Cevennes, collected the old worshippers together, prayed and preached to them, encouraging all to suffer in the name of Christ. He remained at this work for about six weeks, when a spy who accompanied him—one whom he had regarded as sincere a Huguenot as himself—informed against him for the royal reward, and delivered him over to the dragoons.

Rey was at first thrown into prison at Anduze, when, after a brief examination by the local judge, he was entrusted to thirty soldiers, to be conveyed to Alais. There he was subjected to further examination, avow- ing that he had preached wherever he had found faithful people ready to hear him. At Nimes, he was told that he had broken the law, in preaching contrary to the King's will. "I obey the law of the King of kings," he replied; "it is right that I should obey God rather than man. Do with me what you will; I am ready to die."

The priests, the judges, and other persons of influence endeavoured to induce him to change his opinions. Promises of great favours were offered him if he would abjure; and when the intendant Baville informed him of the frightful death before him if he refused, he replied, "My life is not of value to me, provided I gain Christ." He remained firm. He was ordered to be put to the torture. He was still unshaken. Then he was delivered over to the executioner. "I am treated," he said, "more mildly than my Saviour."

On his way to the place of execution, two monks walked by his side to induce him to relent, and to help him to die. "Let me alone," he said, "you annoy me with your consolations." On coming in sight of the gallows at Beaucaire, he cried, "Courage, courage! the end of my journey is at hand. I see before me the ladder which leads to heaven."

The monks wished to mount the ladder with him. "Return," said he, "I have no need of your help. I have assistance enough from God to take the last step of my journey." When he reached the upper platform, he was about, before dying, to make public his confession of faith. But the authorities had arranged beforehand that this should be prevented. When he opened his mouth, a roll of military drums muffled his voice. His radiant look and gestures spoke for him. A few minutes more, and he was dead; and when the paleness of death spread over his face, it still bore the reflex of joy and peace in which he had expired. "There is a veritable martyr," said many even of the Catholics who were witnesses of his death.

It was thought that the public hanging of a pastor would put a stop to all further ministrations among the Huguenots. But the sight of the bodies of their brethren hung on the nearest trees, and the heads of their pastors rolling on the scaffold, did not deter them from continuing to hold religious meetings in solitary places, more especially in Languedoc, Viverais, and the provinces in the south-east of France.

Between the year 1686, when Fulcran Rey was hanged at Beaucaire, and the year 1698, when Claude Brousson was hanged at Montpellier, not fewer than seventeen pastors were publicly executed; namely, three at Nimes, two at St. Hippolyte and Marsillargues in the Cevennes, and twelve on the Peyrou at Montpellier—the public place on which Protestant Christians in the South of France were then principally executed.

There has been some discussion lately as to the massacre of the Huguenots about a century before this period. It has been held that the St. Bartholomew Massacre was only a political squabble, begun by the Huguenots, in which they got the worst of it. The number of persons killed on the occasion has been reduced to a very small number. It has been doubted whether the Pope had anything to do with the medal struck at Rome, bearing the motto Ugonottorum Strages ("Massacre of the Huguenots"), with the Pope's head on one side, and an angel on the other pursuing and slaying a band of flying heretics.

Whatever may be said of the massacre of St. Bartholomew, there can be no mistake about the persecutions which preceded and followed the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. They were continued for more than half a century, and had the effect of driving from France about a million of the best, most vigorous, and industrious of Frenchmen. In the single province of Languedoc, not less than a hundred thousand persons (according to Boulainvillers) were destroyed by premature death, one-tenth of whom perished by fire, strangulation, or the wheel.

It could not be said that Louis XIV and the priests were destroying France and tearing its flesh, and that Frenchmen did not know it. The proclamations, edicts and laws published against the Huguenots were known to all Frenchmen. Bénoit gives a list of three hundred and thirty-three issued by Louis XIV during the ten years subsequent to the Revocation, and they were continued, as we shall find, during the succeeding reign.

"We have," says M. Charles Coquerel, "a horror of St. Bartholomew! Will foreigners believe it, that France observed a code of laws framed in the same infernal spirit, which maintained a perpetual St. Bartholomew's day in this country for about sixty years! If they cannot call us the most barbarous of people, their judgment will be well founded in pronouncing us the most inconsistent."

M. De Felice, however, will not believe that the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes was popular in France. He takes a much more patriotic view of the French people. He cannot believe them to have been wilfully guilty of the barbarities which the French Government committed upon the Huguenots. It was the King, the priests, and the courtiers only! But he forgets that these upper barbarians were supported by the soldiers and the people everywhere. He adds, however, that if the Revocation were popular, "it would be the most overwhelming accusation against the Church of Rome, that it had thus educated and fashioned France". There is, however, no doubt whatever that the Jesuits, during the long period that they had the exclusive education of the country in their hands, did thus fashion France; for, in 1793, the people educated by them treated King, Jesuits, priests, and aristocracy, in precisely the same manner that they had treated the Huguenots about a century before.

 

 

France under Richelieu and Colbert.

The French Monarchy (1483-1789)..

History of the Rise of the Huguenots VOL.1

History of the Rise of the Huguenots VOL.2

The Huguenots and Henry of Navarre VOL.1

The Huguenots and Henry of Navarre VOL.2.

The Huguenots and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes VOL 1.

The Huguenots and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes VOL. 2.