BOOK IV. FROM THE REVOCATION OF THE EDICT OF NANTES UNTIL THE EDICT OF TOLERATION. (1685-1787.) (continued 2)

Strange spectacle! The judge insisted upon the execution of the laws, because he interpreted them in one sense, and the priest applied them in another. The first was only solicitous for civil unity; the latter was anxious above all things for spiritual unity. One only obliged the Protestants to be (Roman) Catholics outwardly; the other used the sentence to force them to be so internally. To such an anomalous state of things had these edicts given birth, which had ceased to correspond with the general conscience of the epoch. Even the (Roman) Catholics themselves, it is well known, had analogous conflicts in respect of the refusal of the sacraments to the Jesuits, and the certificates of confession. The only solution of the problem lay in the mutual independence, that is now proclaimed in all the constitutions, of the civil and the religious state.

The Baron de Breteuil shows, in a memorial addressed to Louis XVI., the inextricable embarrassment that had arisen with regard to the Protestants. He says: “On one side, there is the absolute necessity of the certificate of Catholicity; on the other, a scrupulous and arbitrary examination before granting this certificate. What else than laws of impossible execution could result from all these confused ideas, from all these incoherent and contradictory dispositions?... These unfortunate people, alike rejected by our tribunals under one name, and repulsed by our churches under another name, unrecognised at the same time as Calvinists, and unrecognised as converts, wholly unable to obey laws which oppose each other, and thereby destitute of every means of proving, either before a priest or before a judge, the evidence of their births, their marriages, and their burials, are cut off, as it were, from the family of mankind.”[117]

The illustrious Chancellor d’Aguesseau has stated the dilemma in a very perfect manner. “Either the Church must relax its rigour by some modification, or if the Church does not think it ought to do so, it must cease to importune the king to use his authority to reduce his subjects to an impossibility, by commanding them to fulfil a religious duty, which the Church will not permit them to discharge.”

And, indeed, the declaration of 1724, while it repeatedly engendered frightful consequences, was never fully executed. It contained, moreover, dispositions revolting against the most sacred feelings of human nature, justice, and society. To punish with the galleys and confiscation of wealth a son, or a daughter, who addressed pious exhortations to a dying father; to inflict a similar punishment upon whoever should fail to denounce his pastor, or should open to him the door of his house; to load with a fine the physician who should refuse to discharge the infamous office of informer—all this, as M. de Sismondi remarks, bore the stamp of so barbarous and savage a fanaticism, that it may be doubted if the code of any other nation has approached it. Were it possible, again, in the eighteenth century, to write similar atrocities in the laws, it would be impossible to find judges and administrators to carry them out.

As it always happens, atrocity engendered ridicule. Some of the priests instituted a roll-call of children in the Church, after the example of serjeants at a military review, and noted those who were absent that their parents might be fined. But the children frequently refused to answer, mocked the curate, and disturbed his mass. What could be done? Where were the means of punishment, when it might be required to send a whole population, fathers, mothers, and children, to the galleys?

Cardinal Fleury, who governed the kingdom after the Duke de Bourbon, seems to have comprehended this difficulty. Having been engaged in his youth on a mission with Fénélon in Saintonge, and passed many years in Provence, he was acquainted with the invincible firmness of the Protestants. This, conjoined with the alliance of this priest with Great Britain and Holland, the mildness of his character, and his desire of sparing Louis XV. the anxieties of government, will explain his conduct towards the Protestants. He did not destroy the sword of intolerance, but he willingly let it remain in the scabbard.

The curates of Cevennes addressed several urgent remonstrances to him upon this subject. They bitterly complained of the increasing desertion of the Huguenots. The aged cardinal gave little heed to them; he was engrossed with other affairs, and feared disturbance more than heresy.

The persecution, therefore, was only local and momentary, according to the humour of the intendants. Some meetings were surprised and dispersed by the soldiery; some families were ruined, and other unfortunates were condemned to the galleys. The pastors, particularly, were tracked with implacable cruelty, in the hope that the terror of death would induce them to quit the kingdom.

Many of them were capitally executed. We will cite [the case of] the minister Alexander Roussel, who was hanged at Montpellier, on the 30th of November, 1728, respecting whose martyrdom a popular complaint has come down to us. He was sold for a bribe, and confessed without hesitation that he had preached in Cevennes. When he was asked where he lodged, he replied: “The heaven is my covering.” The Jesuits vainly solicited him to change his religion; his answer was: “I will ever keep the law of Jesus Christ: if I die for His sake, I shall dwell with angels.” He was dragged to the gallows with the rope about his neck, bareheaded and barefoot, singing the 51st psalm, and died uttering prayers to God for his judges and the executioner.

Another pastor, Pierre Durand, who, with Antoine Court, had signed the first deliberations of the synods of the wilderness, was also executed at Montpellier, on the 22nd of April, 1782. He was a man full of years, and noted for his faith and zeal. Five priests accompanied him to the scaffold, and endeavoured to wrench from him an abjuration at any price. Durand remained firm to the last.

These executions afflicted the Protestants of the wilderness, but did not cast them down. The very exactions of the clergy themselves conspired to drive them from the Church of Rome; for seeing that they would not be satisfied with simple forms of (Roman) Catholicism, they resolved upon renouncing the Church in their turn, and that completely. From this time the number of baptisms and marriages of the wilderness multiplied, in spite of the civil disabilities which attainted them.

Antoine Court strengthened and encouraged the faithful by his exhortations and his example. In 1728 he undertook a tour of nearly a hundred leagues, convoked thirty-two religious meetings in two months, and counted as many as three thousand hearers at the foot of his pulpit; even the most timid began to be emboldened.

The synods rapidly increased, and became more rigid against the parents, who allowed their children to be baptized in the (Roman) Catholic church, or to be married there. They also insisted upon the duty of taking part in the religious services. The synod of 1730 says: “Write to the Protestants under the Cross, that they may know the indispensable obligation they are under to attend the meetings of piety, whenever Providence shall furnish the opportunity. If after being sufficiently instructed in this duty, they refuse to fulfil it, it shall be declared that they are cut off from the Church of the Lord, and are no longer His children.”

It is interesting to observe that these men, who were denied all the rights of citizens, were so bent upon discharging all its duties, that they employed their authority in repressing contraband trade. They thus decided in 1730: “The members of our churches who, to escape paying the king’s dues, shall carry on or countenance smuggling, shall be first censured, and then, if they relapse, exposed to final excommunication. The assembly does not in this article comprise the contraband commerce in religious books, which do not anywise prejudice the king or the state.”

The re-awakening of Languedoc and Dauphiny excited a pious rivalry in other provinces. Rouergue, Guienne, Quercy, Saintonge, Aunis, and Poitou, held meetings again and demanded pastors. There were but few. Antoine Court sought the young men who appeared fitted for this holy vocation at the plough, in the trader’s warehouse, in the workman’s shop; but the instruction they derived from a wandering life was insufficient.

The restorer of French Protestantism began to reflect upon the necessity of a theological school. To open it in France was not to be dreamed of. The universities of England and Germany were too distant from the southern provinces, and did not speak their language. Geneva was too near, and its academy too severely watched. Antoine Court decided upon Lausanne. His long and urgent solicitations, his indefatigable endeavours, the liberality of Switzerland, England, and the other Protestant powers, contributed to found there a French theological seminary. Court went to establish it himself, in 1730, with the title of deputy-general of the churches, and directed this school during the thirty concluding years of his life. It was this college that sent forth all the Protestant pastors until the reign of Napoleon.

VIII.

Before we proceed to relate the events, which will conduct us beyond the year 1750, it is but a duty of justice which we owe to the refugee pastors, to follow them in their exile; they had all ceased to live in the former half of the eighteenth century. Although they died upon a foreign soil, the French Reformation has a right to claim them: they belong to it by their birth, their education, the first years of their ministry, by the language they used, and by the constancy of their sympathy for their oppressed brethren.

We shall not speak of the lay refugees, whose names are illustrious in literature, science, and industry, such as Rapin Thoyras, the learned Bayle, Denis Papin, the constructor of machines, the chemist Lémery, the traveller Chardin, and many others. We must confine ourselves to those fugitives, who exercised a direct influence upon the state of the Reformed churches of France.

It is universally acknowledged, that the majority of the fugitive pastors was composed of pious and intelligent men of irreproachable character. No Protestant clergy in Europe were superior to them. We will only mention the principal among them, arranging them according to the date of their death.

Pierre Jurieu (1637-1713) was a laborious and vehement controversialist. He has had numerous opponents among the (Roman) Catholics and the sceptics, and his memory has suffered in consequence. It must be confessed that he gave occasion to certain attacks by his venturous predictions, his assertions concerning suspected miracles, and the sharpness of his polemics. But these defects were redeemed by a host of estimable qualities; a firm attachment to his religious persuasions, an incomparable activity, a solid erudition in every branch of theological science, and a clear and ready wit. He never lacked penetration to discover error, or courage to combat it.

He did not long exercise the functions of a pastor. Nominated in 1674 professor of theology at Sédan, he made his appearance with much éclat. Bayle, who pursued him at a later period with so many invectives, at that time wrote: “He is one of the first men of his age, and if the delicacy of his constitution does not offer resistance to his ardour for study, and to his application to the functions of his office, everything may be expected of him. I tell you, and I repeat it, he is the first man of our communion, whether it be for sound judgment or for the nicety of his wit.”

It is not sufficiently known, that during his retreat in Holland, some years before the Revocation, he was almost the only opponent (le seul tenant, as they called it), of Arnauld, Bossuet, Nicole, and Maimbourg. The others, being still in France, dared not speak out. But in his pulpit at Rotterdam, he recoiled before no truth, and his strong and unfettered voice often inflicted the most severe and just chastisements upon the persecutors.

Nor is it sufficiently known that he became, after the fatal edict, the protector of a crowd of refugees, that he solicited and procured for them the assistance of several sovereigns, and that at the same time he gave them the shelter of hospitality, he consoled and encouraged their brethren, who languished at home, by his Pastoral Letters.

The list of Jurieu’s works is very extensive. While yet with his flock at Vitry-le-Français, he composed a Treatise on Devotion, which was reprinted seventeen times within a few years, and twenty-six times in an English translation. This work has induced the regret that the author, absorbed by controversy, did not employ more of his time in writing books of simple edification.

His reply to Father Maimbourg, Le Calvinisme et le Papisme mis en parallèle (“Calvinism and Popery Compared”), less pointed than the answer of Bayle, and less venomous, nevertheless obtained considerable applause, and was greatly read. Claude wrote to him: “Your last work against Maimbourg has at length reached me, and I have not read, but devoured it, without the possibility of quitting it. Everybody here (at Paris) of any note, with any courage or zeal left, is charmed with the book.”

He answered the attacks of Nicole by the Vrai Système de l’Eglise (“The True System of the Church”), which competent judges declare to be his master-piece. In it Jurieu develops the doctrine of the invisible church, in opposition to the visible communion of Rome. He also produced Histoire Critique des Dogmes et des Cultes (“A Critical History of Dogmas and Forms of Worship”), where humanity is considered in its religious development. The illustrious defender of the Reformed faith did not cease to wield his pen until the eve of the day of his death.

Pierre Allix (1641-1717) withdrew to England after the Revocation. He was only thirty years of age when he was summoned to succeed to the Drelincourts and Daillés. His discourses were full, solid, and distinguished for a sobriety and a clearness of style that made them equally pleasing to the educated and the ignorant. He had prepared his last sermon upon the farewell of Saint Paul to the Ephesians, to be preached at Charenton; but the place of worship was closed by the kings order eight days sooner than was expected.

“Doctor Allix,” says one of his biographers, “was loved and esteemed by all the learned men of his time. Extremely zealous for the Protestant religion, he was always ready to undertake its defence against the partisans of the Romish church. He passionately desired to unite the Protestants, particularly the Lutherans, with the Reformed, and he frequently consulted the ministers of Geneva, Holland, and Berlin, on this subject. He had a profound acquaintance with all the sciences. He was well versed in the Hebrew, Syriac, and Chaldean languages; and as his erudition was vast, and his memory excellent, he was a kind of living library.” Some writers of great weight have considered him to be the most learned of the ministers of Charenton.

Pierre Allix received at London the title of Honorary Doctor, from the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. The Anglican clergy had so high an opinion of his ability that they confided to him the task of writing The History of the Councils, and even the Parliament bestowed upon him particular marks of consideration.

Jean La Placette (1639-1718) was surnamed the Nicole of the Reformed, on account of his numerous and judicious moral writings. He equalled the Jansenist doctor in knowledge of the human heart, and surpassed him in that of the Scriptures. His style was simple and chaste, and he was, above all, sincere in the highest sense of the word.

La Placette was a pastor of the French church at Copenhagen for the space of twenty-six years (1685-1711). He dedicated his Nouveaux Essais de Morale (“New Moral Essays”) to the queen of Denmark. “Our people,” he says in the preface, “are far from comprehending the extent of purity which the Gospel requires of us. They are even influenced by a great number of false maxims, more pernicious than errors of pure speculation. Besides, our writers—at least those of our nation—have been forced by the importunity of their adversaries, to give up all their leisure to the defence of the truth, so that they have been able to compose but a very few works of morality, and these only treat of some particular matters. Thus, that part of religion, which is, if I may venture to say so, the soul and essence of it, and which it is so necessary should be well explained and understood, has been in some sort neglected.”

David Martin (1639-1721) has acquired a popular name in the Reformed communion of France by his corrections of the old versions of the Bible. His translation, without being free from defects, is nevertheless that which most faithfully reproduces the simplicity and the vigour of the original text. He was invited in 1694, by the synod of the Walloon churches, to undertake this book and to accompany it with critical reflections. Thirteen years after, he published his new edition of the Bible, in two folio volumes.

This pastor had made the French language his particular study. “So well had he mastered all the rules and niceties,” says Nicéron, “that he was able to furnish remarks and observations to the French Academy. He sent many to them when the academy was about to print the second edition of its dictionary; and the letter of thanks which he received in return, shows the importance the Academy attached to his criticisms.”

David Martin twice refused the professorial chair; but he took pleasure in giving lectures at his house on theology, to the young students of Utrecht. At the age of upwards of eighty years he still preserved considerable mental vigour. On the 7th of September, 1721, he preached upon Providence, with a force which astonished all his auditory; at the conclusion of the sermon he was unable to descend from the pulpit but with the assistance of his friends, and two days after drew his last breath. This pious divine had always desired that he might die when leaving the house of God.

Jacques Basnage (1653-1723), grandson of Benjamin Basnage, of whom we have already spoken, surpassed all the members of his family in the variety of his acquirements, the extent of his labours, and the grandeur of the part he was summoned to play. “He was more fitted for a minister of state than of a parish,” says Voltaire.

Basnage, in fact, participated in several important negotiations. He took part in the conferences preceding the peace of Utrecht, and demanded, but uselessly, the re-establishment of religious freedom in France. Shortly afterwards, Cardinal de Bouillon, who had retired to Holland, confided to him the affairs he had to settle with the States-General. In 1716 the Abbé Dubois had recourse to the intermission of Basnage to conclude a treaty with the United Provinces and England. Singular spectacle! that of a poor exiled pastor influencing the alliances of his native country!

The regent also addressed him to prevent the Spanish Cardinal Alberoni from exciting insurrections among the Protestants of the southern provinces. Basnage advised the French government to put itself in communication with Antoine Court, and this humble minister of the desert, condemned to death by the laws [of his country], promised that Languedoc should not be disturbed. On this occasion, and at the express request of the Duke d’Orléans, Basnage wrote a pastoral instruction for the Reformed of France, which spread with rapidity. In it the author maintains the principles of Christianity respecting the obedience due to the sovereign; but, perhaps, after exhorting the oppressed to submission, he might have said something more to the oppressors.

Placed at the head of the French church of the Hague, appointed historiographer to the States-General of Holland, and surrounded by the esteem of the public, he was as happy as an exile from his native land could be. “He was true,” says a biographer, “even to the minutest things. The custom of the highest society had imbued him with a politeness rarely found in the learned. Affable and popular, his greatest pleasure was to serve others, and to employ his credit in favour of the unfortunate.”

It is surprising that he was able, in the midst of his political occupations and the labours of his pastoral office, to compose so many works on theology and ecclesiastical history. Some of them are very voluminous, among others, L’Histoire de la religion des Eglises réformées (“The History of the Religion of the Reformed Churches”); L’Histoire des Juifs (“The History of the Jews”); and that of the Church from the time of the Christian era to the eighteenth century. The erudition of Basnage is vast, his thought penetrating, and his style firm; he raised controversy to a height that has only been attained by Bossuet.

Jacques Abbadie (1654-1724) was the best apologist of Christianity, and one of the most able writers of the Reformed communion. After completing his studies at the academies of Sédan and Saumur, he entered into the service of the French church of Berlin. “The only thing that vexes me,” the Duke de Montausier said one day to the ambassador of the elector of Brandenburg, when speaking of a work of Abbadie, “is, that the author of this book should be at liberty.” If France had lost one of her glories, who was chargeable with the fault?

Abbadie afterwards withdrew to England, and died dean of the parish of Killaloe in Ireland. We read in a notice of his life: “His manners, polished by intercourse with good society, were mild and easy, and a more even and obliging temper never existed. As his mind was full of gaiety, and he expressed himself upon all kinds of subjects with as much elegance, correctness, and fire as in his meditated works, his conversation was as agreeable as useful, and one never quitted his company without regret.”

His treatise on L’Art de se connaître soi-même (“The Art of Knowing Oneself”) is full of judicious observations, and shows that the author had profoundly meditated upon the relations of the human conscience to the duties of the Gospel. But the most celebrated of his works is the treatise on La Verité de la religion Chrétienne (“The Truth of the Christian Religion”). It obtained the suffrage of (Roman) Catholics as well as Protestants. “This admirable work,” said the Abbé Desfontaines, forty years afterwards, “eclipses everything that has ever been published before it for the defence of Christianity. How many conversions has it not effected! How many strong minds has it not subjected!”

Madame de Sévigné wrote to the Comte de Bussi-Rabutin, “It is the most divine of books; this esteem is general. I do not believe any one has spoken of religion like this man. I shall re-peruse it every three months for the remainder of my life.” And the count answered with the same enthusiasm: “Until now I have never been touched by other books, which tell me of God, and now I see well the reason; it is that the source appeared doubtful; but seeing it clear and transparent in Abbadie, I value what I did not before esteem. I repeat it, this is an admirable book. He pourtrays to me everything he says, and compels my reason not to doubt that which once appeared to it incredible.”

The author combats the Atheists in the first part of his work, the Deists in the second, and the Socinians in the third. He starts with this proposition, “There is a God,” to arrive at this: “Jesus is the promised Messiah.” Then he ascends from this last proposition to the first. The book has been translated into several languages, and it has appeared in a great variety of editions.

Elie Bénoît (1640-1728) was a learned and industrious theologian. We discharge a debt of gratitude in consecrating a few lines to the author of L’Histoire de l’Edit de Nantes (“The History of the Edict of Nantes”), of which we have made great use in our own.

He was pastor of the church of Alençon, and had the pain of seeing his place of worship closed, under the futile pretext that the faithful had assumed a defensive attitude on some occasion of their worship being interrupted by the populace. He went to Paris in support of their cause; but instead of obtaining the redress of his complaints, he was answered by threats.

Bénoît took refuge in Holland, and published there a letter addressed to his former parishioners. As we read in his memoirs, they emigrated en masse; for there remained in France scarcely an eighth, which will serve to explain why the town of Alençon ceases to figure in the catalogue of the Reformed churches.

The chief work of Bénoît is the history we have so often quoted. It should be read by all who are desirous of studying one of the most important periods of the French Reformation. More brevity and precision might perhaps be desired in this book, but assuredly not greater exactness. The author displays a correct judgment, and a moderation which proves him to have been swayed by no other passion than that of truth.

Jacques Saurin (1677-1730) was the greatest preacher of the French Protestants. He was born at Nismes, where his father practised as an advocate, and received his early education at Geneva. He was tempted, at the age of seventeen, by the profession of arms, and became an ensign in the Savoyard service. On the re-establishment of peace, he resumed his academical studies under the learned teachers Tronchin, Turretin, and Pictet.

In 1701 he was appointed pastor of a French church in London; and some years subsequently, having visited Holland and preached at the Hague, he received so much applause that a new place was created for him, under the title of “minister of the nobles:” he held it until his death.

From 1708 to 1725 he published five volumes of sermons; seven others, inferior to the first, appeared posthumously. He possessed all the great qualities of a Christian orator: a profound knowledge of the Bible, a healthy and vigorous theology, the art of devising learned and original plans, a masculine logic, judicious and always serious ornaments, and a style which was eminently subservient to thought; though sometimes it might be desired that there had been more unction in his speech and more correctness in his language. The misfortunes of the faithful, to whom Saurin preached the Gospel, enhanced his oratorical powers, by surrounding it with a tragic poignancy. Some of his sermons have thrown weight into the scales of the destinies of Europe.

The action, with which Saurin delivered his discourses, is not so well known as their substance. The journalists of his time speak of him in the following manner: “He has a natural exterior which prepossesses the congregation in his favour, whilst his voice is powerful and sonorous. Those, who remember the magnificent prayer which he pronounced before the sermon, will not have forgotten how the ear was filled with the most harmonious sounds. It could have been wished that his voice preserved the same éclat until the end of the action; but as we are not drawing a panegyric, we may confess that he did not so well manage it. A little less impetuosity would have freed him from this defect. The expectation raised by the prayer was not disappointed by the sermon; [that it was not so] we [may] confidently appeal to his auditors. All, without any exception, were charmed; and he who came with the intention to criticise, gradually forgot his purpose, as he attentively sought to discover something susceptible of criticism.”[118]

Saurin published letters upon the state of Christianity in France. He reproached the Reformed with not having quitted a country where they could not freely celebrate their worship, and applied to them the name of temporisers. The reproach was too severe, and it is not to be regretted that his advice to emigrate en masse was not followed.

He was accused before the Walloon synods of having justified officious lying in his discourses upon the Bible. This became the subject of a long and laborious polemical contest. Saurin addressed this declaration to the synods: “I have not pretended in my dissertation upon lying to do anything else than to report historically the sentiments of those who believe that lying is always criminal, and of those who believe it to be innocent in certain cases. As for the holiness and veracity of God, as well as the obligation which binds men to speak the truth, I hold by the doctrine contained in my catechism, which I will ever teach.”

It is related that Saurin, who in the pulpit was so skilful in unravelling the passions of men and their secret motives of action, was unable to discover them in society. He was altogether wanting in experience of the world; and was so full of confidence and candour, that it was as easy to deceive him as a child. His life was frequently troubled in consequence.

Jaques Lenfant (1661-1728) and Isaac de Beausobre (1659-1738), are two names which ought to remain united in the pages of history, since they have figured in joint works. They were both pastors at Berlin, and had the same turn of mind, the same taste for historical and critical studies, the same belief, [and lived] the same religious life; whilst contemporary memoirs attribute to both the same amiable character.

Lenfant has written the history of the councils of Constance, Pisa, and Basle—books dictated by science and conscience. Voltaire says of him, that he contributed more than any one to spread the grace and strength of the French language to the furthermost parts of Germany. Beausobre, for his part, has made for himself a name justly celebrated by his history of Manichæism.

The two authors were associated in the publication of a new edition of the New Testament, with critical notes. To Beausobre were allotted the Epistles of Saint Paul, and to Lenfant all the other books of the New Testament. The task of the former was more difficult, that of the other of greater extent. The biographer of Beausobre says: “This distribution of the work did not prevent their working in concert. When one was of a different opinion to the other, they discussed and criticised, but each cheerfully submitted to the strongest evidence.”

The successors of this illustrious generation of refugee pastors and theologians belong to us no more. Born and educated out of France, their glory is the property of the countries that sustained them on their hospitable soil.

IX.

We left the Reformed zealously labouring for the re-organization of their churches. They restored vigorous action to many of the articles of ancient discipline. The newly-established consistories watched over the maintenance of good order among the flocks. The meetings approached the great centres of the Protestant population, and were held more frequently by day. In a word, the period from 1730 to 1744 was a time of calm when compared with the horrible tempest, which had dispersed and scattered everything but a few years before.

The religious movement extended. A young pastor, who joined great prudence to ardent faith, Michel Viala, traversed Upper Languedoc, and held assemblies in the neighbourhoods of Castres and Montauban. The county of Foix received Pierre Corteis; Béarn, Etienne Deffère; and Poitou and Normandy, Jean Loire and André Migault. We see that the pastors, whose number was always limited, were compelled to discharge the duties of missionaries; their fields of labour were far more extensive than dioceses.

With a view to the introduction of greater regularity into their teaching and their maxims of conduct, they resolved to convoke a general or national synod, and this assembly was opened, on the 18th of August, 1744, in a secluded spot in Lower Languedoc, under the presidency of Michel Viala. The majority of the old Protestant provinces, from Cevennes to Normandy, were represented at this meeting; but there was no delegate from the Isle of France or Paris.

The moment was well chosen in one respect, and badly in another. The Protestants could collect with greater facility, because the war engaged all the attention of the government and all the forces of the country abroad. But this very war was certain to inspire the council with greater displeasure at such an assembly.

The first step of the synod was to declare its inviolable fidelity to the king. It ordered the celebration, before the end of the year, of a solemn fast in all the Reformed flocks of the kingdom, “for the preservation of the sacred person of his majesty, for the success of his arms, for the cessation of war, and for the deliverance of the Church.” The pastors were exhorted to preach at least once a year upon the submission due to “the powers that be.”

This meeting took wise measures for the observation of discipline and the correction of manners. It invited the pastors to abstain from treating of points of controversy in the pulpit, and not to speak without circumspection of the sufferings of the Reformed people. It recommended to the flocks to celebrate their worship as much as possible in open day. The tenth article of the resolutions stated, “As there are many provinces, where the religious services are still performed during the night, the synod, in order to manifest still more the purity of our intentions as well as to preserve uniformity, has directed the pastors and elders of the different provinces to conform, as far as prudence will permit, to the churches, which perform their service in daylight.”

Antoine Court came from Lausanne to be present at this great meeting, and after appeasing a difference which had arisen with regard to a pastor who had been falsely accused, he had the joy of preaching to an audience of ten thousand persons.

This assembly of so many of the faithful, this general synod, of which the members came from the extremities of the realm, this semi-publicity given to acts that the law considered as criminal and rebellious, disturbed and irritated the council, who began to fear that the Protestants maintained a secret intelligence with foreigners.

Nothing was more false. From the sixteenth century, in the very times of the most bloody persecutions, the mass of the Reformed had never once forgotten their duty to their sovereign and their country. If in the wars of the Camisards, some of the Cévenoles had looked to England or Holland for assistance, it was only a local and partial affair. But the apprehensions of the court, which continually broke out afresh after the Edict of Revocation, prove the great truth, that it is not possible to persecute with impunity. When public authority ignores every condition of justice, morality, and order, it is the first victim of its attempt; and in default of the remorse, from which fanaticism or corruption may relieve it, it expiates its crime by unceasing and invincible terrors.

Calumny played its part in these deplorable circumstances; and opinion, ignorant of the true sentiments of a proscribed population, easily adopted the grossest falsehoods. It was pretended that the pastor Jacques Roger had read a false Edict of Toleration at the religious meetings, in order to drive the Protestants to rebellion; that those who were present were armed; that they had sung a hymn imploring God to bless the English with victory; that their collections for the poor were military taxes; that twenty-five thousand Camisards held themselves in readiness to join the enemy, who blockaded the ports of Provence; that the convents were to be pillaged, the priests and the monks massacred, and the whole south of France put to fire and sword.

These popular rumours were still more extravagant than odious, and had not even a shadow of truth. Yet they were believed at court, and the Baron Lenain d’Asfeld, intendant of Languedoc, was directed to ascertain indirectly from the consistories and pastors of the desert, if it were true that the religionists had understandings with the enemy. He wished, moreover, to know if, in case of an invasion, the government might count upon a rising of Protestant volunteers. This was a new example of the effects of intolerance; they thought themselves obliged to treat with Frenchmen as if they were foreigners; and because they would not consider them citizens, they were no longer trusted in their country’s day of misfortune.

The Protestants answered, that not one of their co-religionists would join the English armies, that they were all ready to perform their duty for the service of the king; that the pastors never ceased to recommend obedience, and that if they contravened the laws in matters of religion, it was under an obligation superior to all human authority.

The intendant Lenain, who had had many occasions of studying the [character of the] Protestants, did not distrust their assurances of fidelity. But it was not so at Versailles, where objects were distorted by fear and distance. The news of the national synod of 1744 produced those acts, which seemed allied to madness.

Louis XV. was made to sign, in February, 1745, two ordinances still more cruel, if that were possible, than any that had preceded them. In addition to the penalty of death against the pastors, and of perpetual imprisonment at the galleys against those who harboured them, a fine of three thousand livres was pronounced against all the Protestants of the place where a pastor should be arrested. As for the meetings, it was no longer necessary to have been present at them in order to be doomed to the galleys and [to suffer] forfeiture of property; it was sufficient not to have denounced them. Everything was a crime according to these laws; and out of fifteen hundred thousand Reformed, one-half might have been condemned, at the end of six months, to row in convict vessels, and the other half to beg their bread.

Although it was impossible to execute these ordinances literally, and although the very men, who had drawn them up, would not have suffered it, they were followed by cruel disasters. The Protestants might send petitions upon petitions to the king, to the ministers, to the intendants, to every one who had power to help them; these requests, wherein they stated in the humblest language their sufferings and their unalterable sentiments of fidelity, did not reach their address, and if they did arrive there, were never read. Some were burned or fixed to the pillory by the hand of the executioner, as if their complaints were less just because they were stamped with ignominy.

Antoine Court has written an historical memoir upon the persecutions that recommenced after the synod of 1744. His integrity is as free from suspicion as his perfect acquaintance with the events, and we therefore borrow from him the facts we are about to relate.

The abduction of children multiplied in the provinces, and particularly in Normandy. Court gives a list, and it is very lengthy, name by name. This kidnapping was usually carried on at night, like a brigand’s descent, by companies of archers headed by the parish curates. When there was a delay in opening the doors of the houses, they were burst in, and then the soldiers, sabre in hand, with oaths upon their lips, overthrowing everything in the search after their prey, insulting the despair no less than the shrieks of the mothers, and beating the fathers who dared to complain, carried off the children, the young girls in preference, and dragged them away to the convents. The parents were obliged to furnish a pension for their maintenance, and if one of the victims escaped, they were made responsible for it. These horrors provoked a fresh emigration. Six hundred families of Normandy profited by their proximity to the sea to fly from the kingdom with everything they could take with them.

Lettres de cachet were again used against the people of importance. The religionists of less consideration underwent the sentences of the judiciary or administrative sentences. The Parliaments of Grenoble, Bordeaux, Toulouse, and the intendants of Saintonge, Guienne, Dauphiny, Quercy, and Languedoc, relentlessly pursued the Reformed, who had had their children baptized, or their marriages blessed in the desert.

The religious meetings were spied, and attacked most unmercilessly. On the 17th of March, 1745, two troops of dragoons fell upon an assembly in the neighbourhood of Mazamet, killed several persons, wounded a greater number, and carried off many prisoners. Scenes of the same kind were enacted near Montauban, Uzès, Saint Hippolyte, Saint Ambroix, and in other places. It was again necessary to have recourse to night meetings.

From 1744 to 1746 we count three hundred persons who were condemned to be flogged, to be degraded from the nobility, to be imprisoned for life, to the galleys, or to death, by the single Parliament of Grenoble, which showed a most pitiless spirit, because it administered justice in a border province, and at only a few steps from the enemy’s camp upon the Alps. The fines were enormous. In a petition addressed to the king in 1750, the Protestants of Dauphiny stated that they had been obliged to pay more than two hundred thousand livres, and that from the depth of their prisons, they heard their goods and their inheritances sold by auction.

The same things happened in the provinces of the south, though to a less extent. Nismes paid upwards of sixty thousand livres. The intendants coined money out of heresy, as was afterwards done in 1793 out of the aristocracy.

“I could produce here,” says Antoine Court, “first a list of more than six hundred prisoners arrested since 1744 (he wrote in 1753), in the provinces of Languedoc, the Upper and Lower Alps, Vivarais, Dauphiny, Provence, the county of Foix, Saintonge, and Poitou; among whom were many gentlemen, advocates, physicians, substantial burghers, and rich tradesmen, who have suffered long and cruel imprisonment, out of which they have escaped by arbitrary and ruinous fines alone. I could produce another catalogue of more than eight hundred prisoners who have been condemned to divers punishments, among whom more than eighty were gentlemen.”

Some of the condemned obtained their pardon through the intervention of powerful protectors, or by means of pecuniary sacrifices, after having passed a certain time in confinement; and this explains how it was that, in 1753, there remained at Toulouse more than forty-eight convicts on account of religion. Allowances must also be made for the mortality which struck a great number of these unfortunate persons, [who had been] suddenly degraded from a position of competency to a condition so abject.

The glass-makers of the county of Foix were condemned by the intendant of Auch, to perpetual imprisonment at the galleys, and forfeiture of all their property. One of them, Grenier de Lastermes, was a venerable old man of seventy-six years. He underwent his sentence at the hulks of Toulon: his two sons died, one near him, the other upon the galleys of Marseilles. We have read a letter of this once opulent old man, in which he thanks the consistory of Marseilles for having allowed him two sous a day to alleviate his misery! He wrote: “We are engaged upon the labours marked out for us, having only bread and water for our nourishment, without the opportunity of exemption, but by payment of a sol every morning to the under-gaolers; otherwise we are exposed to remain fastened to a beam with a great chain, night and day.”

The dragonnades were renewed at Milhau, Saint Affrique, and at other places in Rouergue, Languedoc, and Dauphiny. This was the punishment of the lower ranks of the people for being present at the assemblies.

These sentences, if they had been less barbarous, would have been laughable. Not only were the religionists persecuted for having introduced Bibles and pious books into the realm, but a poor man, named Etienne Arnaud, of Dieu-le-Fit, was sentenced, in 1744, to imprisonment for life and the pillory. For what? Because he had taught some young folks to sing psalms. His psalter and a copy of the New Testament were nailed to the pillory beside him.

X.

The pastors, however, continued to be the object of the most implacable persecutions. If the government had reflected, it would have seen, on one side, that the Reformed were invincibly attached to their creeds, whether with their pastors or without them; on the other, that their ministers of religion did more good than harm, even in a political point of view, since they restrained the explosion of the popular resentment, and always recommended order, patience, and respect for the law. But neither the intendants nor the Parliaments were able to comprehend that these men were among the number of the most useful citizens, and three pastors were put to death in 1745 and 1746.

The first, Louis Rang, or Ranc, was twenty-six years of age. He was arrested at an inn of Levron, condemned to capital punishment by the Parliament of Grenoble, and executed at Die, in March, 1745.

A contemporary historian says: “At Crest, the minister asked permission to be shaved, and to have his hair arranged. This neatness appeared to him requisite the better to show the serenity which reigned in his soul, and the contempt with which he treated the unjust death he was about to suffer. He met his end like a hero, and never did Christian exhibit a more elevated calmness at such a moment. On his way to execution, he chanted the verse of the 118th psalm: ‘This is the day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it,’ which he repeated several times. The speech he attempted to make could not be heard, on account of the noise of the drums, which were beaten purposely to smother his voice. He would not hearken to the Jesuits who accompanied him, but kept his eyes continually raised to heaven, and gave signs of feelings of the most lively and earnest piety. When he arrived at the foot of the ladder, he knelt, prayed, and then mounted the scaffold courageously.”[119]

His corpse was insulted by the populace; but a (Roman) Catholic lady, who must have blushed for her faith, provided a sepulchre for his wretched remains.

After this youthful servant of the Gospel, died the veteran of the assemblies of the wilderness, Jacques Roger—who had restored the churches with Antoine Court—an aged minister, seventy years old. He was taken in the neighbourhood of Crest. “Who are you?” demanded the officer of the patrol. “I am,” he answered, “he whom you have long sought for, and it is time that you should find me.” Like Ignatius of Antioch, Jacques Roger sighed for the crown of martyrdom.

Confined with other Protestant prisoners, he exhorted them to remain firm in the faith. When the executioner came to summon him, he exclaimed: “This is the blessed day, this is the glad moment I have so long yearned for. Let us rejoice, my soul, for this is the happy day when thou shalt enter into the joy of thy Lord.”

He beseeched the Jesuits, who importuned him, to cease from troubling his mind in its repose, and walked to the scaffold in the midst of the crash of the drums that were continually beaten. “There was no one,” says Armand de la Chapelle, “who did not read upon the countenance of this holy confessor, the profound calmness, the sincere piety, and the ardent zeal of his soul. Even the Jesuits spoke of him with praise, and many persons of the Romish communion could not refrain from showing how much they were touched. When he had prayed on his knees at the foot of the ladder, he mounted the steps with the same air of modest confidence, which he had all along displayed.” His body was thrown into the Isère, after it had been suspended twenty-four hours on the gibbet.

The third victim, who excited the warmest sympathy, was executed on the 2nd of February, 1746. His name was Matthieu Majal, and he bore, according to the custom of the desert pastors, the surname of Désubas. His age also was twenty-six.

Having been surprised at Saint Agrève, in Vivarais, he was taken to Vernoux. The news of his arrest spread universal grief. When he passed through a village on the way, some unarmed peasants supplicated the commanding officer to release their pastor; and one of them, throwing himself upon Désubas, closely embraced him, imploring his liberty. The only reply was an order to fire upon the peasants, and six were slain.

The next day—one of religious service—a more numerous gathering, but similarly unarmed, penetrated into the town of Vernoux. The officer, who dreaded a rising, ordered his soldiers to fire from the houses against this crowd, whose wailings and prayers were their only weapons. Thirty of these unfortunates fell dead, and two or three hundred were wounded.

Then the mountaineers of Vivarais flew to arms, and prepared to avenge the murder of their brethren. Fortunately the pastors hastened to intercede, and to beseech them, in the name of their faith, their families, their country, in the name of their common salvation, to refrain. “It is only on this condition,” said the most revered of these pastors to them, “that I will continue my ministry among you.”

Désubas himself wrote this note from his prison. “I implore you, gentlemen, to retire. The king’s people are here in strong numbers; and too much blood has been spilled already. I am calm, and entirely resigned to the Divine will.”

The peasants yielded, and threw their arms away. But along the road by which the pastor passed, from Vernoux to Montpellier, they stood grief-stricken and indignant, with difficulty repressing the promptings of their desire to rescue him. All their ministers were there, hidden in the multitude, and striving to appease it with the sacred words of the Evangelist.

Désubas reached Montpellier at the time of holding the States. The whole body of the clergy hastened around him, soliciting but one word, one single word of abjuration. Vain efforts! The pastor of the desert was more firm before the seductions of his persecutors than before the tears of his people: he had long devoted himself to death.

The intendant Lenain asked him, not for his own information, but to acquit himself of the forms of his duty, if the Protestants had not a common treasury, if they were not collecting arms, and if they were not in correspondence with England. “There is not a word of truth in it,” answered the prisoner, “the ministers preach nothing but patience and fidelity to the king.” “I know it, sir,” said the intendant, deeply moved.

When sentence of death was pronounced against Désubas, both the judges and the intendant wept. “It is,” he said, “with sorrow that we condemn you, but such are the orders of the king.” “I know it, sir,” replied the pastor of the desert, in his turn.

The scaffold was erected upon the esplanade of Montpellier, whither Désubas was conducted, bareheaded and barefoot, in the midst of an innumerable concourse of spectators. The papers and books which had been found upon him, were burnt before his face; and when he sought to address the multitude, the din of fourteen drums drowned his words. He preserved a placid countenance, repulsed the Jesuits, who held a crucifix to him, pronounced a short prayer, and ascending the fatal ladder, gave up his soul to God.

We may here recognise the profound opposition that existed between the laws and the manners of the period. The magistrates, while they sentenced [Désubas], revolted against the legal text, whilst their hearts acknowledged him to be innocent whom they were compelled to condemn as guilty. All the (Roman) Catholics of any moral or intellectual education, were thunderstruck at the execution of Désubas. The Protestants, on the contrary, thanked God for having given them so heroic a martyr, and his name is still heard in the popular legends, beneath the cottage roof of the peasantry of Vivarais and Languedoc.

Yet this renewal of the persecutions had exhausted the patience of many of the Reformed. Seeing that they were absolutely denied any approximation to religious liberty, they demanded permission to sell their property and quit the kingdom. They wrote to Louis XV.: “We cannot live without following our religion, and we are compelled, however unwillingly, to supplicate your majesty, with the most profound humility and respect, that you may please to allow us to leave the realm with our wives, our children, and our effects, to retire into foreign countries, where we may freely worship God in the form we believe to be indispensable, and on which depends our eternal happiness or misery.”

Instead of granting this authority, the council replied by an aggravation of severity, particularly after the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, in 1748. The troops required employment; the court had leisure; it remembered the uneasiness which the heretics had caused it during the war, and it resolved to attempt a decisive blow that should, if possible, put an end once for all to this proscribed people.

It is painful continually to discover the hand of the (Roman) Catholic clergy in these scenes of violence, spoliation, and death. The venerable Malesherbes, the Baron de Breteuil, Rulhières, Joly de Fleury, Gilbert de Voisins, Rippert de Monclar, the gravest statesmen, the most eminent magistrates, who have written upon the religious affairs of this epoch, all proclaim this with unanimous voice. They agree in characterizing the conduct of the priests as obstinate, unrelenting, sometimes haughty, sometimes supple and humble, but ever exacting the use of extreme measures of compulsion and severity for the re-establishment of religious unity.

What is still more intolerable is, that at the very time when the clergy demanded the strict execution of the horrible ordinances of 1724 and 1745, they never ceased to declare that the Church was always adverse to all means that were not charitable and paternal. Is it possible to conceive, imagine, or dream of the possibility of so flagrant a contradiction?

What! knock at every door, besiege the offices of all the ministers, address the sovereign, threaten, solicit, pray, even offer money; and for what purpose? To oppress the conscience of more than a million of Protestants; to persecute them even in the sanctuary of domestic worship; to constrain them to have their children baptized by a priest under pain of bastardy; to compel married people to ask for the (Roman) Catholic benediction under pain of being denied any civil condition; to send soldiers, in a word, against the meetings, gaolers and hangmen against the pastors; and all this as only a labour of charity, goodness, and fraternal love!

There was a bishop of Castres, who applied for a regiment of dragoons in order to dissolve the meetings, taking care at the same time to add that the soldiers should not injure his flock, among whom he counted the re-united brethren. The bishop of Aire forwarded complaints that the custom of establishing the refusal of the sacraments at the death-bed of heretics had fallen into desuetude, and he wanted to renew the suits for the ignominious treatment of their corpses. The Count de Saint Florentin, secretary of state for religious affairs, who was not without complaisance for the clergy, was obliged to address a very severe admonition to this prelate.

The notion of religious freedom, or even of simple toleration, seems to have been absolutely unknown to the Romish ecclesiastics of the time: they did not understand it; and if they beheld an inkling of it in others, they combatted it as an act of impiety. We have a proof of this in a letter which made considerable noise in 1751. It bore the signature of Chabannes, bishop of Agen.

There had fallen into his possession a paper containing the following matter: “It is the intention of the comptroller-general to grant every kind of protection to the Sieur Frontin, a Huguenot trader, and that he should be treated with such consideration as may induce the merchants of his sect to return to the kingdom.” In fact, the object was to afford the opportunity to some of the industrious refugees of again peacefully residing in France.

The bishop immediately took pen in hand to express his astonishment and grief to the comptroller-general, Machault. His letter is lengthy, and skilfully written. He avoided all mention of dogma, well aware that this kind of argument would be of no avail with unbelievers; but he developed in his own way the political side of the question. According to him the Calvinists were the enemies of the king, rebels on principle, republicans by system; they had on many occasions brought the country within an inch of its ruin, and would do so again if they were recalled. Louis XIV. had the wisdom to free the body politic of the state from these vicious and peccant humours, which had caused so many disorders in it (we follow the text); Louis XV. will pursue the same course. As for the thought of permitting the Huguenot pastors to carry on their ministry in France, it was an enormity to which the bishop would on no account agree. “Heaven, which has ever protected the monarchy,” he says in conclusion, “heaven, which has until now united religion with it by a bond that has not been broken, inspired him with this confidence. We will not witness the free exercise of Calvinism. No, the son, the heir, the imitator of Louis the Great, will not re-establish the Huguenots.”

The comptroller-general, who had no affection for the priests, but who feared their intrigues and denunciations, hastened to disavow the more or less apochryphal paper, which had stirred up the bile of the bishop of Agen, and the matter dropped. The difference of opinions and times was here again apparent. In our days, a prelate who should utter the sentiments of Chabannes, would be accused of insanity; in the middle of the eighteenth century, the Bishop Chabannes was taxed with excessive indulgence by his brethren; he was considered much too moderate a man!

Monclus, bishop of Alais, indeed carried his exactions a great deal farther. Although he confessed that persecution does not change the heart, and that conversion is only a work of grace, he, at the same time, in 1751, publicly solicited a new declaration against the Protestants. He required the entire abolition of judicial forms. The Huguenots, who should refuse to perform the acts of Catholicity, ought to be, according to this prelate’s notions, summarily tried by the commandant of the province, or by the intendant. He accused the magistrates of having relaxed the severity of the ordinances, which was an act of unfaithfulness, which had been the cause of all the misfortunes of the realm. He demanded that the intervention of the Parliaments should cease; that the military or administrative power should be wholly uncontrolled; and that the judgments should be arbitrary and absolute.

The procurator-general, at the Parliament of Aix, Rippert de Monclar, defended religion, justice, morality, and humanity, which had been so greatly outraged by this priest. He replied, in a Political and Theological Memoir, published in 1755, that the sentiments of the prelate were as irreligious as they were inhuman, and tended to the total destruction of society. “If the bishops have any reason to complain,” he adds, “of the profanation of the sacraments by the Protestants, and of the uselessness of the proofs they have exacted for seventy years past, why are they bent upon continuing the same acts of Catholicism, by soliciting against them a continuous and rigorous execution of royal ordinances? Why force them in this manner to repeat this horrible impiety which is complained of? Is it imagined that it is preferable to tread our holy religion underfoot, than not to profess it at all? Who believes that it is possible to force a person, against his inclination and belief, to receive mysteries so dread that faith alone with love and ardour ought to lead us to approach them, and which should be avoided by Catholics themselves, who feel the slightest coldness or indifference? The profanations that have happened have appalled both heaven and earth, and yet it is sought to renew the hideous sight.”[120]

Rippert de Monclar says that these heretics were, after all, not worse than the Jews, who were allowed not only liberty of marriage, independently of the Church, but also the free exercise of their religion. He asks if it were right to embrace in one condemnation, with the hundred and fifty thousand fathers and mothers who had contracted clandestine marriages, the whole multitude of children born or to be born? “What wrong have they done,” he exclaimed, “that they were made the opprobrium of the land?”

He proves, moreover, that the persecutions sought by the bishop of Alais, would not be more efficacious than those which had already taken place. “If this prelate,” he says, “were to have a correct list of all the Protestant ministers, who have been put to death; of all the persons of every age and degree, who have been sent to the galleys; of all the taxes, fines, and other contributions, which have been exacted; of all the children, who have been torn from their parents; of all the marriages, which have been annulled and declared public concubinages; of all the property, which has been thereupon awarded to collateral relations; of all the individuals, who have been imprisoned and kept in long captivity; of all the decrees, that have been passed against an infinity of others; even of all the excesses, and of all the frightful massacres committed by the king’s troops, and in opposition to the intention of his majesty; alas! this list would fill volumes. Every corner of France re-echoes with the cries of these miserable people; they attract the very compassion of those who glory, I will not say in being Christians, but in being men; and yet a bishop is insensible to all this, and would fain redouble them! Would it not better become him, to plant and nourish [measures] in their behalf, and to weep between the porch and the altar for them?”[121]

This lesson of morality and public reproof, given by the magistracy to the clergy, was as deserved as it was severe; it was not the only one, as we shall have occasion to show.

XI.

The government did not accede on all points to the demands of the bishops; it neither dared nor wished [to do so]. Nevertheless it complied with a great deal, and all the more in that it required to recruit its finances, [which had been] exhausted by the war. The prelates consented to increase their voluntary donations, but under the express condition that the extirpation of heresy should be prosecuted with more rigour.

The Protestants, for their part, did not cease by every peaceable means to petition for the redress of their grievances. Seven pastors of the desert addressed to Louis XV., on the 21st December, 1750, a new and respectful petition, in which, after having stated that they regarded the aggregate worship, baptisms, marriages, and sacraments of their communion as a matter of conscience, they said: “Your troops pursue us in the deserts as if we were wild beasts; our property is confiscated; our children are torn from us; we are condemned to the galleys; and although our ministers continually exhort us to discharge our duty as good citizens and faithful subjects, a price is set upon their heads, and when they are taken, they are cruelly executed.”

Louis XV. and his council gave no heed to this petition any more than they had done to the others. The Protestants were in the depth of the provinces; they had neither voluntary donations to offer to the government, nor powerful protectors to invoke. They were regarded with suspicion from the very fact of their being proscribed, and the injury, which had been inflicted, was the best reason for inflicting greater severity upon them.

These details of the sentiments of the court, and the incessant provocations of the clergy, serve to explain the renewal of the persecutions, which the Protestants endured from 1750 to 1755. The intendant Lenain, who was naturally a rigid man, but had treated the Protestants more mildly, as he had become better acquainted with them, was replaced in Languedoc by the Viscount Guignard de Saint Priest, who, without being either fanatically or cruelly disposed, unhesitatingly executed the most violent measures. The meetings near Cayla, Vigan, and Anduze, were again attacked. In the last of these encounters, three men were killed, others wounded, and many led to prison; whilst the pursuit was carried on with such bitter determination, that it became necessary to renounce religious service on the Sabbath.

The intendant received orders to proceed to a general re-baptism of children, and to a re-benediction of marriages throughout the whole Reformed population. The words [of this order] were as barbarous as the thing itself. With this view, he convoked the notables at Nismes and elsewhere, in 1751, and commanded them to take their children to the parochial churches within a fortnight’s time; in default of which they would be punished with the utmost rigour of the ordinances; and the curates and (Roman) Catholic consuls were directed to prepare lists of the recusants. Guignard de Saint Priest took the trouble, ridiculous under the circumstances, to start a chapter of controversy, like a doctor of the Sorbonne, and to establish that (Roman) Catholic baptism being recognised by the religionists as effective, their rejection of it would be a senseless obstinacy.

The Protestants replied to this military controversialist, that the curates interpreted the question quite differently; that they exacted the promise to rear the children in the Romish faith, that they treated and punished those of the baptized as having relapsed, who did not remain (Roman) Catholics, and that the clergy had made use of the following maxim: “The Church has power over those, who receive baptism, just as the king, neither more nor less, has full right over the coin which he issues from his mint.”

Finding his reasons fail, the Viscount de Saint Priest resumed a part better suited to his character, and pronounced the most fearful threats against the obstinate. The oppressed were terrified. They abandoned their houses, fields, workshops, and factories, and fled for safety to the woods and mountain caverns.

The intendants anger increased; and on the 1st of September, 1751, he wrote to one of his subordinates: “They are mistaken if they hope that the king’s mind will change, or that I shall omit to execute the precise orders which his majesty has given me on the subject. I am willing, however, to grant them a short delay.” But the desertion went on increasing, and Saint Priest had recommenced the dragonnades with billets conceived in these terms: “The Sieur N., cavalier of the maréchaussée, will remain in garrison at the house of * * *, until he has taken his children to the church to undergo the ceremony of baptism by the curate of the place; and he will exact, for his pay, four livres a day, until perfect obedience has been shown, at the same time informing him that the garrison will be reinforced.”

A commandant of the name of Pontuan, or Pontual, shouted in the streets of Cayla: “Let nobody deceive himself; all the Huguenots shall obey or perish, if I die myself!” The soldiers, aided by some of the [Roman] Catholics, and frequently accompanied by the local priests, tracked the children about the country, seized them as if they were malefactors, and dragged them to the church.

“Some,” says Antoine Court, “ten, twelve, and fourteen years old, absolutely refused to be led to the church, and it was necessary to drag them there by main force; some uttered piercing shrieks that went to the heart; others threw themselves like young lions upon those who tried to seize them; others, again, who had no other means of showing their despite, turned the ceremony into ridicule which they were forced to undergo: when they were covered with a white cloth, and the water was about to be sprinkled upon their heads, they exclaimed: ‘Are they going to shave us?’ The curate and the garrison of Lussan so greatly tortured the children of the village in dragging them to the church, where they shut them up under lock and key, that some of them told the curate they seemed to see the devil whenever they looked upon him, and others, still more desperate, spat in his face.”[122]

In such a state, in the midst of these brutal and degrading scenes, baptism was administered to them by force! If we were told that such acts had been committed by a horde of savages, we should scarcely believe it; and yet these things took place in France within a century of our time!

When he had effected the re-baptism of Cayla, the commandant Pontual, whose zeal increased with the gratification he experienced in the capture of the children, continued his expeditions throughout Vaunage, the whole length of the coast, placing sometimes as many as fifteen or twenty garrison soldiers in the houses of the absentees and the obstinate, whose property they sacked and demolished.

The court of Versailles was rejoiced at the news of so many re-baptized children, and ordered the work to be prosecuted in the mountains. But this was the limit of Pontual’s exploits. The old recollections of the Camisards were awakened; and some of the peasantry, rather encouraged than restrained by their minister Coste, resumed the musket, declaring that on the first act of violence against their children, blood should be spilled. Neither the curates nor the soldiers heeded the menace; and in an ambush of the Cévenoles, three priests fell on the 10th of August, 1752, two mortally wounded, as they guided the military in an expedition into Lédignan, on the banks of the Gardon.

These gunshots produced an extraordinary effect. The soldiers evacuated the hills; the intendant stopped short; Versailles took alarm; people remembered the war of the Camisards; the re-baptisms were instantly abandoned, and for ever. If the ministers of state had been fanatics, civil war would have broken out again with all its horrors; but they were only unbelievers who parodied, while they laughed at, the passions of bygone generations, and they halted at the first symptoms of a serious conflict.

Emigration also, which had been renewed upon a large scale, contributed to calm their factitious anger. It was true that the same precautions had been taken to guard the passes as in 1685; but the Protestants had used the same means to escape the vigilance of the soldiers. Languedoc, Dauphiny, Saintonge, already impoverished by the Edict of Revocation, were threatened with the loss of the last remains of their industry and commerce. The frivolity of Versailles retreated before this prospect.

A few weeks after this exhibition of insurgency, the Marquis de Paulmy, the minister of war, visited the fortresses of Languedoc. Being a man of prudence and integrity, he received the complaints of the Protestants with kindness, and forbade the subaltern officers to maltreat them.

A pastor, François Benezet, had been condemned to death during the persecutions; he was executed at Montpellier, on the 27th March, 1752. Harassed by the importunities of an abbé, who continually cried, “You are damned; hell will be your lot if you do not abjure;” he replied, “If you were persuaded that there is a hell, would you persecute me as you do? And should I have been condemned to lose my life upon the gallows, merely because I have addressed a few exhortations to my brethren?”

He endeavoured to speak at the foot of the gibbet; as usual, his voice was drowned by the noise of drums. He died singing the 51st Psalm. Benezet left behind him a child of two years old, and a pregnant wife. Like Louis Ranc and Désubas, he was only twenty-six years old.

Another pastor, Jean Molines, did not display the same courage. He abjured before the scaffold; but until his last moment he repented his weakness. He withdrew, inconsolable, to Holland; and although he was reinstated in the communion of the faithful, after having given proofs of profound remorse, he never forgave himself. An eyewitness relates, that his countenance, furrowed with wrinkles, bore the imprint of despair. His sight was dimmed with tears; and his head hung heavily upon his breast. For thirty years he wandered about insensible to everything around him, as one who reckoned himself no longer among the living, and died with the one regret of not having won the crown of martyrdom.

While he was in prison, some priests published a Letter and Abjuration of the Sieur Molines, in his name. The Protestants answered this work of pious fraud: “We cannot conceive how his converters can have let him date his abjuration from the citadel of Montpellier. A fortress has never yet been a school of enlightenment, or a means of convincing people of the truth of religion. Every retractation that comes from a fettered hand is so eminently suspicious, that no one would dare to adduce it before a tribunal.”

XII.

We have yet to traverse the epoch of general persecutions, particularly in the province of Languedoc; happily, it was but of short duration, and it was the last.

The author of these new persecutions was a nobleman celebrated for adventures of gallantry, the most brilliant epicurean of the eighteenth century, an unbeliever, who protected Voltaire, and whom Voltaire extolled,—in a word, the Marshal de Richelieu. Assuredly, of all the parts he could play, not one became him so little as that of an inquisitor of faith.

As governor of Languedoc he had for some time shown a degree of kindness to the religionists; but on a sudden, in the month of February, 1754, he ordered a proclamation, or instruction to the military commandants, to be placarded in the principal towns and villages of the dioceses of Montpellier, Nismes, Uzès, and Alais, which re-awakened all the alarms of the Protestants. The marshal did not mention re-baptism; that affair had been too unsuccessful in its results; but he pointed now at the meetings of the desert, and threatened to apply the most rigorous dispositions of the Edict of 1724 against them.

Orders were issued to arrest the new converts, and refugees or suspected persons, who came from foreign countries without an express authorization. The meetings were to be watched with the greatest tenacity, and dispersed by force. As many prisoners were to be made as possible; particularly the preachers were to be seized, and shot if they attempted to fly, and no one was to be released until further orders. A reward of a thousand crowns was promised to any one who should capture a minister, and orders were given to arrest whomsoever should be found in the same house with him.

When this proclamation appeared, people asked what had provoked it. A tacit toleration had been established since the affair of Lédignan. The confidence of the Reformed had returned. They assembled peaceably, with very little mystery, but without ostentation, in the depth of some valley, or upon the heights of their mountains. Their relations with the [Roman] Catholics became more easy; agriculture, industry, commerce, the revenues of the states, everything gained by it. Wherefore, then, this new appeal to brutal force?

This has never been well known. The ill humour of a minister of state, some pressing letters of the clergy, the caprice or the vanity of a governor, who flattered himself that he would by ingenious combinations terminate a struggle that had lasted eighty years,—any of these things sufficed in those times to renew the persecution. But if the Duke de Richelieu had hoped to terminate the struggle by means of a strategetical plan, he was deceived. The courtier of Louis XV. judged of the conscience of the Protestants by his own.

Some meetings were immediately suspended, others were attacked. The prisons were filled; the tower of Aigues-Mortes received a further number of unfortunate females; but the greater number of the people would not submit. Richelieu reported his difficulties at Versailles, and the Count de Saint Florentin sent him an answer, that “The king’s judgment was, that it was absolutely imperative they should be sickened of their taste for assemblies.” This was an easy sentence to pen in a despatch; but the taste for assemblies, inherent in every sincere faith, was even stronger than the will of Louis XV.

The Protestants simply redoubled the precautions, with which they sought to hold their religious meetings. They procured information as to the days and hours of the troops’ excursions, the direction they took, the number of the soldiers on service, and the character, more or less rigorous, of the commanding officer. The faithful were warned even by (Roman) Catholics, who were ashamed of these brutalities, or, on the first signal of alarm, they dispersed. If, however, they were surprised, despite their precautious measures to ensure safety, their hearts accepted the suffering as a divine trial.

It was in one of these attacks upon the meetings that Jean Fabre, a Protestant of Nismes, supplicated a commander of a detachment to put him in prison in the stead of his father, an old man of seventy-eight. The governor of the province sent the pious son off to the convict prison of Toulon, considering, it would seem, that the Huguenots did not belong to the human race; and it was only when the drama of the Honest Convict informed the court, the ministers, France, and Europe, of this act of treason against humanity, and when Jean Fabre had worn the chains of the galley-slave for seven weary years, that he was restored to his family.

All the other surprises of meetings offer a repetition of the same enormities, and we will cite that only which happened in Lower Languedoc on the 8th of August, 1756. Three young men were to be ordained to the ministry of the Gospel at this assembly. The solemnity had collected several pastors, and attracted a vast concourse of people; as many as from ten to twelve thousand had come from the whole surrounding country. They were singing a psalm, when a detachment of fifteen or eighteen soldiers made their appearance, hastening musket in hand to the spot. The multitude, although unarmed, might have crushed this handful of assailants by their very weight; but the pastors always preached patience and submission. The crowd leaped to their feet, and precipitately fled in all directions. The troop fired upon them,—every shot told; and while some fell dead, and others wounded, the rest escaped uttering shrieks of terror and grief; only a few stood their ground, and endeavoured to defend their wives and children with stones. The murderers remained masters of the field, and a long track of blood marked the locality of this prayer-meeting. Do we relate a scene of the age of Louis XV., or one of the time of Innocent III. and Simon de Montfort?

Another pastor perished in this deplorable epoch. Etienne Teissier, whose surname of the desert was Lafage, was arrested near Castres, at the farmhouse of a Protestant named Jacques Novis. On the approach of the troops, he endeavoured to escape over the roof; but a gun-shot broke his arm and wounded him in the chin. All the persons in the house were arrested with him, and among them a woman and two young girls. The prisoners followed the guards singing the psalms of the desert-meetings.

Lafage was taken to the prison of Alais. “The Abbé Ricard, canon of Alais, after showing the prisoner the greatest marks of politeness, thought proper to lead off a controversial discussion; and it was not until the unfortunate minister declared that he had not the strength to discuss, that he was nearly mortally wounded, and that his only desire was to prepare himself for his approaching end, that he was relieved from the importunities of the priest. Several of the faithful, however, were admitted to the consolation of visiting the martyr. Even his father and one of his brothers were allowed to see him; and he implored them, to pray for him, but to submit themselves with holy resignation to the decrees of Providence; he assured them, besides, that he was resolved to suffer everything for the cause of the Gospel.... On his arrival at Montpellier, the trial of the minister was arranged and consummated with barbarous rapidity. The unhappy pastor, already dangerously wounded by the fire of the troops, was fastened to the gibbet, which did not, any more than the preparations for the execution, disturb the serenity of his soul. The soldiers who encompassed the scaffold, could not restrain their tears at the aspect of this last sacrifice of a faith so intrepid. The sentence of death was pronounced by Guignard de Saint Priest, the intendant.”[123]

This administrator condemned also, upon his own authority, Jacques Novis as contumacious, sentenced him to perpetual imprisonment at the galleys, confiscated two-thirds of his property, ordered that his house should be razed to the ground (a house razed in 1754 for having sheltered a pastor!), and released his wife and three children, who were well-nigh reduced to beg their bread. All this was done without the intervention of any judge, by the mere sentence of a commissioner; the form of justice was not less outraged than justice itself.

And this act, which would now rouse the indignation of all France,[124] was not an isolated or exceptional iniquity. The other provinces, although treated with more caution than Languedoc, because they did not contain so many religionists, were not without their share of sufferings and victims.

In Saintonge, the Protestants assembled in barns or remote buildings, because the inclemency of the climate would not easily permit them to celebrate their worship in the open air. Whereupon, one day, the intendant ordered the demolition of these places of service to the very last, and sentenced to detention for life at the galleys a poor man, who had allowed meetings to be held in his house. A woman was condemned to perpetual confinement on the bare suspicion of having given asylum to the pastor Gibert; and this very pastor, happily contumacious, was condemned, on the sentence of the intendant, to be hanged, after humbly kneeling before the principal door of a (Roman) Catholic church. His nephew, compelled to be present at the execution, was then sent to the galleys, with a number of Protestants, who had been convicted of having accompanied the minister in his excursions. This took place in 1756.

In the county of Montauban, the soldiers committed brutalities, which did not always pass without an effusion of blood, and the Parliament of Toulouse conceived the idea of enjoining all persons who had been married in the desert, to separate immediately, under pain of fine and corporal punishment. This wrought the dissolution of thousands of families at a single blow, or constrained them to purchase the benediction of the priest by sacrilegious acts of (Roman) Catholicism. The Protestants refused to submit, but they had to suffer every kind of trouble and anguish in their homes. The decree of the Parliament made hundreds of people miserable, but none of them (Roman) Catholics.

The province of Béarn, once so oppressed, the first of the provinces where Louis XIII. had forcibly reinstalled the (Roman) Catholic religion, and where Louvois organized the expeditions of the dragonnades, encountered fresh calamities in 1757 and 1758. The governor put his troops at the disposal of the clergy. The Protestants of Orthez, Salies, and Bellocq fled to the mountains, and more than one hundred persons were proclaimed for capture dead or alive. The curates were generally extremely exacting in the proofs they required from the religionists. Those of Orthez, besides the gifts of large amount, which it was necessary to guarantee in the presence of the notary, made those who had been espoused wait one year, and sometimes two years, before they would give the nuptial benediction. In one case the curate imposed a delay of twelve years.

In Guienne, the Reformed of Sainte Foy, Bergerac, Tonneins, Clairac, and other places, were forced to maintain dragoons, to pay fines, to suffer vexations of every kind; nor were the ideas of re-baptism and re-benediction yet abandoned there in 1758.

The Parliament of Bordeaux (it is true that Montesquieu was there no longer), reprinted the declaration of 1724, sent it to all the curates of the district to be publicly read, and in the month of November, 1757, passed a decree commanding all those who had been married by ministers, or even by any other ecclesiastics than their own curates, to separate immediately; prohibiting them from conversing under pain of exemplary punishment; branding their cohabitation with the name of concubinage; declaring their children illegitimate, and, as such, incapable of direct succession; lastly, commanding fathers, mothers, and guardians to send their children to the (Roman) Catholic schools, and to be catechized until they were fourteen years old, and to the Sunday and feast-day teachings until the age of twenty.[125]

To crown these tyrannical proceedings, this decree was published for several days on the Exchange of Bordeaux, where the most eminent of the Protestants were met: “a circumstance,” says a petition which we have before us, “that materially injured their credit in their commercial transactions on one hand; and that, on the other, tended to make them an object of hatred or of contempt to the lower orders of the people, always extreme in their opinions and heedless in their proceedings.”

The petitioners further said, “We do not regret either office or honours; it is with your majesty to dispense them to whomsoever you please; but we claim the rights that we derive from nature, and which every religion should hold sacred. It must be no longer hidden from you: there are, sire, more than fifty thousand marriages that will fall within the scope of the decree of the Parliament of Bordeaux; and among these marriages, there are some of so old a date as to have given birth to ten or twelve children. Behold, sire, what a multitude of citizens are reduced in one instant to despair!”

Lastly, the Protestants took up the political question: “When a neighbouring state, jealous of the prosperity of our armies, vainly sought, last September, to penetrate into Saintonge and Aunis, what class of your subjects showed more zeal than the Protestants to repel the presumptuous enemy? Your generals did them justice in this respect. Are not your armies and your navy at this present moment filled with soldiers, officers, and sailors of the Reformed religion, distinguished not less for their unshaken fidelity than for their bravery?” (3rd January, 1758.)

This petition did not prevent the decree of the Parliament of Bordeaux from being followed by cruel iniquities. The seneschal of Nérac condemned five Protestants to the galleys, one of whom was an old man of eighty. Numbers of others were thrust into the prisons of Guienne, Périgord, and Agenois. The Reformed of Sainte Foy and Bergerac had to pay upwards of forty thousand livres, besides the losses they sustained through the soldiers billeted upon them. And yet the authorities had not the courage to execute the decree in its entirety; the rich merchants of Bordeaux had pronounced the word “emigration” in their complaints, and the interest of the treasury procured for them that which had been refused by the fanatic bigotry of the priests and the despotism of the court.

XIII.

Until now we have delayed to mention the venerable pastor Paul Rabaut, because he belongs to two epochs, and his long career connects him both with the times of persecution and those of toleration. During half a century, Paul Rabaut has afforded the most elevated, and the most perfect type of a true servant of Jesus Christ. He was firm and courageous, yet cautious, and as inflexible in matters of religion as he was submissive in purely civil affairs; and this rare union of qualities justly entitled him to the greatest influence over the churches of the desert.

Paul Rabaut was born on the 9th of January, 1718, at Bédarieux, near Montpellier, of an honest family of traders, who delighted in sheltering the proscribed pastors. It was in his conversations with them that he felt himself animated with a desire for the evangelical ministry, or, as Antoine Court would have said, for the vocation of martyrdom. He was grave, studious, and, beyond all, pious, which procured him the surname of “the minister of Charenton” from his schoolmaster.

From the age of sixteen he became, with his friend Jean Pradel, the companion of the desert ministers. He shared their labours, and imitated their patience. Rejoiced that he suffered with them for the sake of his Divine Master, he undertook, without having the title or the office of pastor, to instruct his brethren, reading the Bible at the meetings, exhorting the faithful in their domestic circles, encouraging some, comforting others, and setting an example to all.

But this noviciate, however dear it might be, was insufficient. The churches wanted pastors capable of opposing the aberrations within and the objections without, with a sound and intelligent theology. Paul Rabaut perceived this, and in 1740 he went to study in the seminary at Lausanne. Antoine Court received him as a son, and his discernment soon marked the young disciple out as the man most fitted to succeed him in the government of the flocks of the wilderness.

On his return in 1743 he was appointed pastor of Nismes, and from this early moment, he took the lofty position which he occupied until his death in 1795. His colleagues reposed implicit confidence in him, and never failed to consult him on all difficult occasions. His abode, which was often but a hut of piled stones, became the centre of Protestant affairs. All the faithful respected him, and when persecution began to rage anew, they instinctively turned towards him, as sailors fix their look upon the lighthouse signal in a storm.

Every one knew the devotion with which he had embraced the pastoral office, and that he had no other object than the welfare of religion. A letter, which he addressed to the intendant Lenain in 1746, will show how he himself explained this: “When I resolved upon exercising the ministry in this kingdom, I knew well to what I exposed myself; and, indeed, I have always considered myself a victim destined to death. I believed that I was doing the greatest good in my power, by devoting myself to the pastor’s calling. Since the Protestants are deprived of the free exercise of their religion, since they think it wrong for them to attend the services of the (Roman) Catholic religion, since they cannot procure the books they require for their instruction, you may judge, sir, what would be their condition, if they were absolutely deprived of pastors. They would forget their most essential duties; they would fall, either into fanaticism—that fruitful source of extravagance and disorders—or into indifference and contempt for religion altogether.”

Paul Rabaut, whom the law condemned to death, contributed more than any one to dissuade the Protestant population from desperate counsels, and, perhaps, no Frenchman throughout the whole eighteenth century has been more useful to his country. Not only in the synods, where he maintained the authority of a wise discipline, but also in private interviews and conversations with individuals, he continually and unceasingly recommended obedience to the laws and the magistrates, never admitting an exception whatsoever but the conscientious worship of God.

We read in his letters that he always, and with all his power, strove to prevent the religionists from bringing weapons to the assemblies. In the melancholy affair of the pastor Désubas, when thousands of the peasantry vowed to avenge the blood of their brethren slaughtered at Vernoux, he invoked religion, humanity, the duty of submission, and whatever is of most avail in faith and Christian law, to induce them to disarm. He did this again in the insurrection that had begun on the borders of the Gardon, at the time of the general re-baptizement.

He wrote to the leaders in the province, on this head: “When I desired to know whence the evil proceeded, I found that divers persons, seeing themselves threatened either with loss of their property and their freedom, or by compulsion to perform acts opposed to their conscience, with reference to their marriages or the baptism of their children, and perceiving no opportunity of quitting the kingdom and freeing their conscience, gave themselves up to despair and attacked some priests, because they regarded them as the first and principal cause of their troubles. Once again, I blame these folks, but I thought it my duty to explain to you the cause of their despair. If it be thought that my ministry is necessary to calm the minds of the people, I will undertake the task with pleasure. Above all, if I could satisfy the Protestants of these parts that they will not be molested in their conscience, I would earnestly recommend the mass to stop those who are bent on rising, should there be any so minded.” (21st August, 1752.)

It is thus that he obtained the esteem of the (Roman) Catholics as well as the respect of the Reformed. People were confident that he would decide all religious questions with that wise moderation, which, without detracting from the obligations of faith, would never unreasonably provoke the severity of power.

When the minister of war passed through Languedoc, Rabaut had the boldness to present a petition to him for the king. This happened on the 19th September, 1752, between Nismes and Montpellier. While he waited at a post-house for a change of horses, the Marquis de Paulmy perceived a stranger respectfully approaching him, with a paper in his hand. Rabaut introduced himself by name: the minister knew him to be the proscribed pastor, and might have ordered his arrest, and even summary execution, according to the letter of the ordinances. But impressed with admiration at the noble bearing of the pastor, he bowed and accepted the petition, which he promised to lay before the king. It is ascertained that he kept his word.

The intendant of Languedoc also refused to seize the person of Rabaut, for the reason that the trial and execution of the venerated pastor would have convulsed the whole province. As this officer, however, entertained the idea, that the religious meetings would cease to be held, on the departure of the minister, he used every effort to make him quit the realm: sometimes he offered to release a certain number of prisoners, as the price of his expatriation; sometimes he persecuted his wife, Madeleine Gaidan, whose name deserves to be associated with that of her husband. She never gave such advice as might be expected from the weakness of her sex, and preferred leading a wandering and uncertain life with her aged mother and her children, rather than urge Rabaut to quit the post, which God had allotted to him. The Duke de Mirepoix was ashamed of these unworthy molestations, and allowed Madeleine Gaidan to return to Nismes, after a lapse of two years of persecution.