22

Curtailment of the rights of Protestants. [1655-80

merely to harass the Protestants by the most rigid interpretation of the Edict and by the withdrawal of all royal favour from the despised sectaries. This course had been suggested so early as 1655 by Gondrin, Archbishop of heims, and the King began to act on it in the first year of his personal reign; for, in 1661, commissioners were sent round France to enquire into the administration of the Edict, and henceforth the liberties of the Huguenots were curtailed at every point. Thus, in 1661, toleration was withdrawn from the Pays de Gex (conterminous with Geneva) on the ground that it had not been a part of French territory at the time of the issuing of the Edict. Yet in that territory there were 17,000 Protestants, while the Roman Catholics numbered only 400. During the following year the action of the State troubled the Huguenots in many ways; but in 1666 a notable and open attack upon their privileges ensued. The General Assembly of the Clergy in 1665 had drawn up an address to the King suggesting certain liberties of which it might be possible to deprive the Huguenots, while still maintaining the letter of the Edict. Most of the proposals of the clergy were accepted by Louis XIV in the Edict of 1666, which may be taken as opening the era of persecution. It professed to maintain the Edict of Nantes; but each of its sixty clauses embodied some unjust decision against the Huguenots.

Henceforth the liberties of the Huguenots were curtailed by a hundred different methods, open and secret. Two may be taken as representative. In 1666 those of the Huguenots who accepted Catholicism were allowed three years in which to pay their debts; and in 1669 the "Chambers of the Edict," established in 1598, were suppressed. The position of the Protestants became grievous in the extreme; but for the present Louis XIV was not prepared to go further. The Elector of Brandenburg had protested against the Edict of 1666, and in 1669 Louis XIV withdrew many of its clauses. The Protestants were still oppressed by indirect persecutions of every kind; but the years between 1669 and 1680 were a period of comparative peace. During much of it, foreign affairs were claiming the King's attention; Colbert's influence was still strong; and thus no positive legislative enactments of importance are recorded against the Huguenots. But signs of coming danger were not wanting. The clergy maintained a war of pamphlets against them, and demanded "the destruction of the hydra." Turenne's conversion was a serious blow; for, so long as the first soldier in France was one of them, his fellow-Huguenots felt secure from the worst. The Government, moreover, was rigorously excluding from its service, even from the lowest grades of it, all Protestants. Even Colbert had to bow to this policy, the danger of which he realised. But the most important move in these years of comparative peace was the institution, in 1677, by Pélisson, himself a renegade Huguenot, of the "treasury of conversions." A considerable sum of money was put at the disposal of the

1665-85]

Measures against the Protestants.

23

agents of the Crown wherewith to purchase the adhesion of Huguenots. It was claimed that this means had been successful in procuring over 58,000 conversions by the year 1682.

The year 1681 marks the beginning of the end. The Peace of Nymegen had left the King's hands free to attend to domestic concerns. About the same time Madame de Montespan's influence with the King came to an end; and, though there is no evidence to connect Madame de Maintenon with the policy of the Revocation, her rise meant the strengthening of religion and the weakening of political interests in the King's mind. It is the special characteristic of the tragedy of the Revocation that so many good men and good impulses contributed to induce the King to commit his criminal and suicidal blunder. In June, 1681, was issued an Edict unsurpassed in the history of religious persecution for its mixture of hypocrisy and cruelty. It declared that children of Protestant parents might declare themselves converted to Catholicism at the age of seven. The Edict, which at first sight seemed merely ridiculous, proved in its working a terrible weapon of religious coercion. Any trivial acts or words could be interpreted as implying adhesion to Catholicism; then came the invasion of Protestant households and the forcible abduction of children. All appeals to the King were in vain. He had perhaps not yet determined on the revocation of the Edict; but he told Ruvigny, "the deputy general of the Reformed Churches," that he was henceforth "indispensably bound to effect the conversion of all his subjects and the extirpation of heresy." The attack became hotter during the following years, and the violations of the words of the Edict itself grosser. In 1682 a pastoral from the leaders of the Church in France was ordered to be read in all places of Protestant worship, in which the continued obstinacy of the Huguenots was threatened "with evils incomparably more terrible and deadly" than they had suffered up to the present. Protestants were excluded from most trade-guilds, from the financial service of the State and from the King's household. Their places of worship were closed in great numbers, usually on the plea that they had received back converts to Catholicism. Their colleges and schools were abolished. When they attempted to meet on the sites of their ruined temples, this was interpreted as rebellion and punished with barbarous severity. It is reckoned that, by 1684, 570 out of the 815 French Protestant churches had been closed. Between 1665 and 1685 nearly 200 edicts were issued dealing with "la religion prétendue réformée," and nearly all of these curtail some liberty or impose some new constraint: here they destroy a church; there they compel midwives to baptise the children of Huguenots in the Catholic faith, if their life is uncertain. One edict orders that a seat shall be placed in all Protestant "temples" for the accommodation of Catholic officials; another, that no Protestant minister may reside for more than three years in the same place. Already the Huguenots had begun to

24 The dragonnades.-Revocation of Edict of Nantes. [1681-5

stream in thousands to foreign countries in search of the security and livelihood which France denied them.

But the Government was not satisfied with legal chicanery and indirect pressure. In 1681 Marillac invented the method of the dragonnades. The quartering of soldiers on private persons was habitually practised in France. It was a grievous burden to whomsoever it befel; but, when the soldiers were quartered specially on Protestants and received a hint that their excesses would be overlooked by their officers, it became, for the sufferers from it, a martyrdom. But in 1681 the Government was not ready to adopt as its own the procedure of Marillac, which raised difficulties with foreign Governments, and vastly increased the tide of emigration. When, therefore, Ruvigny reported the iniquities which were being transacted in Poitou, the King disowned Marillac and shortly afterwards recalled him. But in 1685 Foucault was directed by Louvois to use the same methods in Béarn. Tens of thousands of Protestants saved themselves from outrage and torture by verbal adhesion to the religion of their persecutors. Then the same system was extended from Béarn to other provinces where Protestantism was strong. But the Edict of Nantes still remained on the statute-book, and the Government pretended to observe it.

The farce soon ceased. Every influence at Court was in favour of the Revocation. Chief among the King's counsellors in the matter were his confessor, the Jesuit Père La Chaise; Harlay, the Archbishop of Paris; Louvois, the Minister of War; and Le Tellier, the Chancellor, the father of Louvois. Madame de Maintenon was admitted to conferences on the treatment of the Huguenots, and found her position, as an ex-Huguenot, a difficult one. She tells us that her advice was always for moderation. "We must not hurry; we must convert, not persecute. There was a period of hesitation, in which the question of policy and legality was considered. The Court adopted the view that Protestantism in France had almost ceased to exist, and that the Protestants had, of their own free will and uncoerced, flocked to reunion with the Catholic Church. Père La Chaise promised that the completion of the work would not cost a drop of blood, and Louvois held the same opinion. The accession of James II to the English throne removed all danger on that side. Thus Revocation was determined on. The Edict was signed by the King on October 17, 1685.

The Edict of Revocation declares in its preamble that the best and largest part of the adherents of the Protestant faith have embraced Catholicism, and that, in consequence, the Edict of Nantes is no longer necessary. That Edict therefore and all other Edicts of Toleration were repealed. All meetings for public worship were henceforth interdicted to Protestants. Their ministers were exiled; their schools closed. No lay Protestants were to leave the kingdom; any attempt at departure was to be punished by sentence to the galleys for men, by "confiscation

1685-1702] Effects of the Revocation of the Edict.

25

of body and goods" for women. The last clause stated that all who still remained adherents of the Protestant faith should be allowed to dwell "in the towns and other places of the kingdom-without let or hindrance on account of their religion." But this provision, whatever meaning it was intended to bear, proved utterly futile. While the pulpits and the literature of the day were declaring that heresy had died down of its own weakness, won over by the beauty and the truth of Catholicism, the agents of the Government were well aware that it was still the faith of many thousands. The work of the dragonnades began again, and was conducted more ruthlessly than before. The emigration of Protestants, which had been going on for ten years, now assumed proportions still more alarming. In spite of all prohibitions and the condemnation of great numbers of Huguenots to the living death of the galleys, vast numbers streamed across every frontier. Certain districts, such as the Pays de Gex, were nearly depopulated; others, such as Normandy, where nearly the whole of the commerce and industry had been in the hands of the Huguenots, were reduced by the emigration to great poverty. Brandenburg, once so valuable an ally of the French King, was foremost in giving an asylum to the refugees. So strong was the feeling in England that even James II could not restrain it. He was compelled in March, 1686, to promote a public collection for the benefit of the French refugees: and a very large proportion of them found a home in England.

In France, the chorus of contemporary approval of the King's action was almost unbroken by criticism: though a little later Vauban and SaintSimon both expressed their hearty abhorrence of the methods employed✔ and their fear of the consequences. But among later historians no apologist has been found for these proceedings. The strength of France was diminished and the strength of her enemies increased. It made the Elector of Brandenburg a more determined opponent than he had been before; it contributed to the overthrow of James II three years later, whereby England became the most tenacious of all the enemies of France; it ruined the industrial and commercial projects of Colbert; and it added to the military and commercial efficiency of other countries, more especially of Brandenburg-Prussia and England. The King had said that he would complete the conversion of the Huguenots, "even if it cost him his right hand"; and the disaster was not smaller than what is implied by the metaphor. It was, moreover, soon obvious that the Revocation and its consequences had done nothing to strengthen the Church in whose cause it was undertaken. Rather, it contributed unmistakably to the rise of the anti-clerical movement of the next century, which made the repetition of such an incident for ever impossible in Europe.

Soon after the beginning of the War of the Spanish Succession, a rising in the south-east of France revealed how complete had been the

26

Rising in the Cevennes.

[1685-1710

failure of the Government to extirpate Protestantism. The hills and forests of the district of the Cevennes afforded shelter to a population which still cherished the Huguenot faith, in spite of all measures taken against them. Persecution deepened their faith into fanaticism and mysticism; voices were heard in the air; men and women were seized with convulsions, and prophesied of the iniquities of the Church of Rome and her coming overthrow. Such incidents had taken place during the War with the Grand Alliance; and they were intensified when the conclusion of peace in 1697 brought further sufferings on the district. When the outbreak of the War of the Spanish Succession again turned the attention and the resources of the Government to the frontiers, the exasperation of the peasants broke out into a rising which for four years (1702-5) proved an annoying and dangerous addition to the burdens of the foreign war. It began with the murder of the Abbé du Chaylaa notorious persecutor-in 1702. Immediately it assumed dangerous proportions. The peasants, nicknamed Camisards by their opponents (from their habit of wearing a shirt over their clothes in nocturnal attacks), found leaders, well suited to the nature of the country and the character of the people, in Roland and Cavalier. Roland's was the greater and nobler personality; but it was upon Cavalier that attention was riveted towards the end of the struggle. He was not more than eighteen years old at the beginning of the rising; but he showed extraordinary gifts, both for the simple strategy that the occasion required and for the maintenance of discipline. The struggle was conducted with great barbarity on both sides. The royal troops hunted down the Camisards like vermin, without regard to age or sex. Marshal Montrevel, who

succeeded the Count de Broglie in command of the royal forces, destroyed houses, farms and crops, and reduced the population to the extreme of starvation. But, as the rebels did not surrender, Montrevel was withdrawn and the conduct of operations was entrusted to Marshal Villars, the most successful of the soldiers employed by France in the War of the Spanish Succession, and a man of great tact and diplomatic powers. He at once adopted a more conciliatory policy, and in May, 1704, secured an interview with Cavalier at Nîmes. Much to the indignation of his comrades, who still remained in arms, he was induced to surrender by the offer of command in the royal armies and promises vague and illusory of toleration for the Protestants. He actually entered the royal army: but, convinced of the bad faith of his King, he escaped and joined the allies. He died in 1740, Governor of the Isle of Jersey, and a major-general in the British service. After his surrender the resistance in the Cevennes soon collapsed. Roland was killed in a fight. Protestantism still lingered, and was still subject to cruel persecutions. It was not until 1710 that the last of the Camisard leaders was hunted down; but Protestantism was never really extirpated from the valleys of the Cevennes.