its revocation. As long as Mazarin was alive the complaints
of the clergy were in vain, but when Louis XIV. attained his
majority there commenced a legal persecution which was bound
in time to bring about the ruin of the reformed churches. The
Edict of Nantes, which was part of the law of the land, might
seem to defy all attacks, but the clergy found means to evade
the law by demanding that it should be observed with literal
accuracy, disregarding the changes which had been produced
in France during more than half a century. The clergy in 1661
successfully demanded that commissioners should be sent to
the provinces to report infractions of the Edict, and thus began
a judicial war which was to last for more than twenty years.
All the churches which had been built since the Edict of Nantes
were condemned to be demolished. All the privileges which
were not explicitly stated in the actual text of the Edict were
suppressed. More than four hundred proclamations, edicts or
declarations attacking the Huguenots in their households and
their civil freedom, their property and their liberty of
conscience were promulgated during the years which preceded
the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. In spite of all sufferings
which this rigorous legislation inflicted upon them they did not
cease to resist, and in order to crush this resistance and to
compel them to accept the “king’s religion,” there were organized
the terrible dragonnades (1683–1686) which effected the forcible
conversion of thousands of Protestants who gave way under
the tortures which were inflicted upon them. It was then
that Louis XIV. declared that “the best of the larger part of
our subjects, who formerly held the so-called reformed religion,
have embraced the Catholic religion, and therefore the Edict
of Nantes has become unnecessary”; on the 18th of October
1685 he pronounced its revocation. Thus under the influence
of the clergy was committed one of the most flagrant political
and religious blunders in the history of France, which in the
course of a few years lost more than 400,000 of its inhabitants,
men who, having to choose between their conscience and their
country, endowed the nations which received them with their
heroism, their courage and their ability.
There is perhaps no example in history of so cruel a persecution as this, which destroyed a church of which Protestant Europe was justly proud. At no period in its career had it numbered among its adherents so many men of eminence, Abbadie, Claude, Bayle, Du Bosc, Jurieu, Élie Benoist, La Placette, Basnage, Daillé, Mestrezat, Du Quesne, Schomberg, Ruvigny. There were no Huguenots left in France; those who, conquered by persecution, remained there were described as “New Catholics.” All the pastors who refused to abjure their faith were compelled to leave the country within fifteen days. The work was complete. Protestantism, with its churches and its schools, was destroyed. As Bayle wrote, “France was Catholic to a man under the reign of Louis the Great.”
Persecution had succeeded in silencing, but it could not convert the people. The Huguenots, before the ruins of their churches, remembered the early Christians and held their services in secret. Their pastors, making light of death, returned from the lands of their exile and visited their own churches to restore their courage. If any one denied the Catholic faith on his death-bed his body was thrown into the common sewers. The galleys were full of brave Huguenots condemned for remaining constant to the Protestant faith. For fifteen years the exiles continuously besought Louis XIV. to give them back their religious liberty. For a moment they hoped that the Treaty of Ryswick (1697) would realise their hopes, but Louis XIV. steadily declined to grant their requests. Despair armed the Cévennes, and in 1702 the war of the Camisards broke out, a struggle of giants sustained by Jean Cavalier with his mountaineers against the royal troops (see Camisards and Cavalier, Jean). The Huguenots seemed to be finally conquered. On the 8th of March 1715 Louis XIV. announced that he had put an end to all exercise of the Protestant religion; but in this very year, on the 21st of August, while the king was dying at Versailles, there assembled together at Monoblet in Languedoc, under the presidency of a young man twenty years of age, Antoine Court, a number of preachers, as the pastors were then called, with the object of raising the church from its ruins. This was the first synod of the Desert. To re-establish the abandoned worship, to unite the churches in the struggle for liberty of conscience, such was the work to which Court devoted his life, and which earned for him the name of the “Restorer of Protestantism” (see Court, Antoine). In spite of persecution the Protestants continued their assemblies; the fear of death and of the galleys were alike powerless to break their resistance. On the demand of the clergy all marriages celebrated by their pastors were declared null and void, and the children born of these unions were regarded as bastards.
Protestantism, which persecution seemed to have driven from France, drew new life from this very persecution. Outlawed, exiles in their own country, deprived of all civil existence, the Huguenots showed an invincible heroism. The history of their church during the period of the Desert is the history of a church which refused to die. Amongst its famous defenders was Paul Rabaut, the successor of Antoine Court. Year by year the churches became more numerous. In 1756 there were already 40 pastors; several years later, in 1763, the date of the last synod of the Desert, their number had increased to 65. The question of Protestant marriages roused public opinion which could not tolerate the idea that Frenchmen, whose sole crime was their religious belief, should be condemned to civil death. The torture of Jean Calas, who was condemned on a false charge of having killed his son because he desired to become a Catholic, caused general indignation, of which Voltaire became the eloquent mouthpiece. Ideas of tolerance, of which Bayle had been the earliest advocate, became victorious, and owing to the devotion of Rabaut Saint-Étienne, son of Paul Rabaut, and the zeal of Lafayette, the edict of November 1787, in spite of the fierce opposition of the clergy, renewed the civil rights of the Huguenots by recognizing the validity of their marriages. Victories even greater were in store; two years later liberty of conscience was won. On the 22nd of August 1789 the pastor Rabaut Saint-Étienne, deputy for the sénéchaussée of Nîmes to the States General, cried out, “It is not tolerance which I demand, it is liberty, that my country should accord it equally without distinction of rank, of birth or of religion.” The Declaration of the Rights of Man affirmed the liberty of religion; the Huguenots had not suffered in vain, for the cause for which their ancestors and themselves had suffered so much was triumphant, and it was the nation itself which proclaimed the victory. But religious passions were always active, and at Montauban as at Nîmes (1790) Catholics and Protestants came to blows. The Huguenots, having endured the persecutions of successive monarchs, had to endure those of the Terror; their churches were shut, their pastors dispersed and some died upon the scaffold. On the 3rd of Ventose, year II. (February 21, 1795), the church was divorced from the state and the Protestants devoted themselves to reorganization. Some years later Bonaparte, having signed the Concordat of the 15th of July 1801, promulgated the law of the 18th of Germinal, year X., which recognized the legal standing of the Protestant church, but took from it the character of free church which it had always claimed. So great was the contrast between a past which recalled to Protestants nothing but persecution, and a present in which they enjoyed liberty of conscience, that they accepted with a profound gratitude a régime of which the ecclesiastical standpoint was so alien to their traditions. With enthusiasm they repeated the words with which Napoleon had received the pastors at the Tuileries on the 16th of Frimaire, year XII.: “The empire of the law ends where the undefined empire of conscience begins; law and prince are powerless against this liberty.”
The Protestants, on the day on which liberty of conscience was restored, could measure the full extent of the misery which they had endured. Of this people, which in the 16th century formed more than one-tenth of the population of France, there survived only a few hundred thousands; migration and persecution had more than decimated them. In 1626 there were 809
