surrounded it with fortifications and defended it valiantly against John of England. During the Breton wars of succession Nantes took part first with Jean de Montfort, but afterwards with Charles of Blois, and did not open its gates to Monfort till his success was assured and his English allies had retired. In 1560 Francis II. granted Nantes a communal constitution. In the course of the 15th and 16th centuries the city suffered from several epidemics. Averse to Protestantism, it joined the League along with the duke of Mercœur, governor of Brittany, who helped to raise the country into an independent duchy; and it was not till 1598 that it opened its gates to Henry IV., who here signed on the 2nd of May of that year the famous Edict of Nantes which until its revocation by Louis XIV. in 1685 was the charter of Huguenot liberties in France. It was at Nantes that Henry de Talleyrand, count of Chalais, was punished in 1626 for plotting against Richelieu, that Fouquet was arrested in 1661, and that the Cellamare conspirators were executed under the regent Philip of Orleans. Having warmly embraced the cause of the Revolution in 1789, the city was in 1793 treated with extreme rigour by J. B. Carrier, envoy of the Committee of Public Safety, whose noyades or wholesale drownings of prisoners became notorious. Nantes on more than one occasion vigorously resisted the Vendeans. It was here that the duchess of Berry was arrested in 1832 while trying to stir up La Vendée against Louis Philippe.
NANTES, EDICT OF, the law promulgated in April 1598 by
which the French king, Henry IV., gave religious liberty to his
Protestant subjects, the Huguenots. The story of the struggle
for the edict is part of the history of France, and during the
thirty-five years of civil war which preceded its grant, many
treaties and other arrangements had been made between the
contending religious parties, but none of these had been satisfactory
or lasting. The elation of the Protestants at the accession
of Henry IV. in 1589 was followed by deep depression, when it
was found that not only did he adopt the Roman Catholic faith,
but that his efforts to redress their grievances were singularly
ineffectual. In 1594 they took determined measures to protect
themselves; in 1597, the war with Spain being practically over,
long negotiations took place between the king and their representatives,
prominent among whom was the historian J. A. de
Thou, and at last the edict was drawn up. It consisted of 95
general articles, which were signed by Henry at Nantes on the
13th of April 1598, and of 56 particular ones, signed on the
2nd of May. There was also some supplementary matter.
The main provisions of the edict of Nantes may be briefly
summarized under six heads: (1) It gave liberty of conscience
to the Protestants throughout the whole of France. (2) It
gave to the Protestants the right of holding public worship in
those places where they had held it in the year 1576 and in the
earlier part of 1577, also in places where this freedom had been
granted by the edict of Poitiers (1577) and the treaties of Nérac
(1579) and of Félix (1580). The Protestants could also worship
in two towns in each bailliage and sénéchansée. The greater
nobles could hold Protestant services in their houses; the
lesser nobles could do the same, but only for gatherings of not
more than thirty people. Regarding Paris, the Protestants
could conduct worship within five leagues of the city; previously
this prohibition had extended to a distance of ten leagues.
(3) Full civil rights were granted to the Protestants. They could
trade freely, inherit property and enter the universities, colleges
and schools. All official positions were open to them. (4) To
deal with disputes arising out of the edict a chamber was established
in the parlement of Paris (le chambre de l'édit). This
was to be composed of ten Roman Catholic, and of six Protestant
members. Chambers for the same purpose, but consisting of
Protestants and Roman Catholics in equal numbers, were established
in connexion with the provincial parlements. (5) The
Protestant pastors were to be paid by the state and to be freed
from certain burdens, their position being made practically
equal to that of the Roman Catholic clergy. (6) A hundred
places of safety were given to the Protestants for eight years,
the expenses of garrisoning them being undertaken by the king.
In many ways the terms of the edict were very generous to
the Protestants, but it must be remembered that the liberty
to hold public worship was made the exception and not the rule;
this was prohibited except in certain specified cases, and in this
respect they were less favourably treated than they were under
the arrangement made in 1576.
The edict was greatly disliked by the Roman Catholic clergy and their friends, and a few changes were made to conciliate them. The parlement of Paris shared this dislike, and succeeded in reducing the number of Protestant members of the chambre de l’édit from six to one. Then cajoled and threatened by Henry, the parlement registered the edict on the 25th of February 1599. After similar trouble it was also registered by the provincial parlements, the last to take this step being the parlement of Rouen, which delayed the registration until 1609.
The strong political position secured to the French Protestants by the edict of Nantes was very objectionable, not only to the ardent Roman Catholics, but also to more moderate persons, and the payments made to their ministers by the state were viewed with increasing dislike. Thus about 1660 a strong movement began for its repeal, and this had great influence with the king. One after another proclamations and declarations were issued which deprived the Protestants of their rights under the edict; their position was rendered intolerable by a series of persecutions which culminated in the dragonnades, and at length on the 18th of October 1685 Louis revoked the edict, thus depriving the Protestants in France of all civil and religious liberty. This gave a new impetus to the emigration of the Huguenots, which had been going on for some years, and England, Holland and Brandenburg received numbers of thrifty and industrious French families.
The history of the French Protestants, to which the edict of Nantes belongs, is dealt with in the articles France: History, and Huguenots. For further details about the edict see the papers and documents published as Le Troisième centenaire de l’édit de Nantes (1898); N. A. F. Puaux, Histoire du Protestantisme français (Paris, 1894); H. M. Baird, The Huguenots and the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (London, 1895); C. Benoist, La Condition des Protestants sous le régime de l’édit de Nantes et après sa révocation (Paris, 1900); A. Lods, L’Édit de Nantes devant le parlement de Paris (1899); and the Bulletin historique et littéraire of the Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Français.
NANTEUIL, ROBERT (1623–1678), French line-engraver, was
born about 1623, or, as other authorities state, in 1630, the
son of a merchant of Reims. Having received an excellent
classical education, he studied engraving under his brother-in-law,
Nicholas Regnesson; and, his crayon portraits having
attracted attention, he was pensioned by Louis XIV. and
appointed designer and engraver of the cabinet to that monarch.
It was mainly due to his influence that the king granted the
edict of 1660, dated from St Jean de Luz, by which engraving
was pronounced free and distinct from the mechanical arts, and
its practitioners were declared entitled to the privileges of other
artists. He died at Paris in 1678. The plates of Nanteuil,
several of them approaching the scale of life, number about three
hundred. In his early practice he imitated the technique of
his predecessors, working with straight lines, strengthened, but
not crossed, in the shadows, in the style of Claude Mellan, and
in other prints cross-hatching like Regnesson, or stippling in the
manner of Jean Boulanger; but he gradually asserted his full
individuality, modelling the faces of his portraits with the utmost
precision and completeness, and employing various methods
of touch for the draperies and other parts of his plates. Among
the finest works of his fully developed period may be named
the portraits of Pomponne de Bellièvre, Gilles Ménage, Jean
Loret, the duc de la Meilleraye and the duchess de Nemours.
A list of his works will be found in Dumesnil’s Le Peintre-graveur française, vol. iv.
NANTICOKE, a borough of Luzerne county, Pennsylvania, U.S.A., on the North Branch of the Susquehanna river, opposite West Nanticoke, and 8 m. S.W. of Wilkes-Barre. Pop. (1880), 3884; (1890), 10,044; (1900), 12,116, of whom 5055 were foreign-born; (1910 census) 18,877. It is served by the Pennsylvania, the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western and the
