BOOK IV. FROM THE REVOCATION OF THE EDICT OF NANTES UNTIL THE EDICT OF TOLERATION. (1685-1787.) (continued 3)

Paul Rabaut, however, was not the less liable to the rigour of the ordinances, which decreed sentence of death against the pastors. “For more than thirty years,” says one of his biographers, “caverns and huts, whence he was unearthed like a wild animal, were his only habitation. For a long time lie dwelt in a safe hiding-place that one of his faithful guides had provided for him, under a pile of stones and thorn-bushes. It was discovered at length by a shepherd, and such was the wretchedness of his condition, that when he was forced to abandon the place, he still regretted this retreat [which was] more fit for savage beasts than men.”[126]

He assumed all sorts of disguises and names, like the (Roman) Catholic priests during the Reign of Terror. At one time it was M. Paul, at another, M. Denis, or M. Pastourel, or M. Théophile, on his way to perform the functions of his ministry under the garb of a trader, or a journeyman baker.

It is difficult to picture to oneself the extent of his labours. He wrote to one of his friends at Geneva, in 1755, that being occupied all day with a multitude of affairs, he was often obliged to work far into the night; then, he said, with that humility which characterizes eminent men: “When I fix my attention upon the divine fire with which, I will not say Jesus Christ and the apostles, but the Reformed and their immediate successors, burned for the salvation of souls, it seems to me that, in comparison with them, we are ice. Their immense works astound me, and at the same time cover me with confusion. What would I not give to resemble them in everything laudable!”

What was indeed a singular novelty in this time of disorder—he entered into a correspondence with a prince of the blood, from the depth of his retreat. The influence of philosophical ideas, the desire of taking one of the causes of the opposition in hand, or perhaps the mere heaviness of idleness, engaged the Prince de Conti to interest himself in the fate of the Protestants. He sought information from Paul Rabaut, and invited him to a conference. The pastor of the desert started secretly for Paris, in the month of July, 1755.

He had two interviews with the prince, and stated the following points: “That the galley convicts and prisoners sentenced on account of their religion, and the children of both sexes shut up in the convents and seminaries, should be set at liberty; that baptisms and marriages celebrated by the (Protestant) ministers should be valid, under condition of being registered in offices established by the king; that the exercise of religion should be permitted, if not in the places of worship, at least in private houses at some distance from the towns and villages; finally, that every one should be allowed to sell his property without any special authority, and that the refugees should have the right of returning to the realm.”

These demands were assuredly moderate enough. [What they asked for] was far from full freedom of religion; it was not even toleration to any great extent. The (Roman) Catholics of Ireland have never at any time had less; and they already enjoyed much more in the eighteenth century. The Prince de Conti, however, did not consider that there was any chance of obtaining so much from the council and the clergy, and these negotiations had no result.

Paul Rabaut returned to his labours in Languedoc. The author from whom we have already quoted, gives the following description of him: “He was short of stature; his complexion was dark; his physiognomy and demeanour mild; lois manner grave, yet affable; and his habits simple and patriarchal. His food was of the most sober kind. His powers of endurance were remarkable. The hard and wandering life he had been forced to lead from his youth upwards, in following a proscribed faith, had strengthened his constitution; but his unceasing devotion to his flock had injured and undermined his vigour, and seriously affected him in his old age.”

People flocked from all parts to hear him preach. Another biographer says: “We are told that his audience sometimes comprised from ten to twelve thousand of the faithful. But his voice was so distinct and sonorous that although [he preached] in the open air, it reached those at the greatest distance, and all could take home with them the useful lessons of the pastor. He prayed with a fervour and an unction that penetrated every bosom, and disposed hearts the least prepared to listen to the sermon. He frequently preached without preparation, and his wild and uncultured eloquence seemed even to grow in sublimity.”[127]

Some of the manuscript sermons of Paul Rabaut have been preserved. It is said that they are not distinguished either for oratorical genius or for studious finish: the venerable pastor had neither leisure nor opportunity. But they are remarkable for order, mildness, perspicuity, and unction: his style was of that simple and paternal kind which suited the meetings of the wilderness.[128]

XIV.

The approach of the year 1760 witnessed a sensible relaxation of persecution. The laws of intolerance were not, indeed, abrogated, but they were relaxed by desuetude; for knowledge, public opinion, the interest of the state, the relations of commerce and society, tended every day to approximate the (Roman) Catholics to the Protestants. The differences of confession were rapidly disappearing before the common name and quality of Frenchmen.

The clergy perceived this with dismay, and in their general assembly of 1760, they addressed urgent remonstrances to the king against this remission of the laws: “Nearly every barrier opposed to Calvinism,” they said, “has been successively broken down. Ministers and preachers, reared in heretical schools and foreign nations, have inundated some of our provinces. They have held consistories and synods, and are constantly presiding over assemblies, sometimes secret, sometimes solemn. They baptize, administer the [the Lord’s] supper, preach their erroneous doctrines, and perform the marriage ceremony. At first the Calvinists only demanded the power of celebrating their marriages in a purely civil and profane form; and although they feigned to limit themselves to this permission, it was evident that it would, of itself, lead to the entire toleration of Calvinism. Now this toleration is openly and loudly preached!”

Toleration, it would hence appear, was in the eyes of the priests, an impious and immoral maxim. Their sayings were unheeded, and the nation kept the even tenor of its new way.

Military and civil authorities, governors, intendants, subordinates, officers, magistrates, were alike ashamed, both before the tribunal of their own conscience and that of public opinion, of persecuting individuals whom they were compelled to esteem as men of honour and good citizens. Rulhières cites some curious instances of this: “Even the troops,” he says “softened the inhumanity of the orders they had to execute. The officers slackened the march of their detachments, that the assembled religionists might have time to escape. They took care that a sufficient warning should precede their approach; and they purposely followed circuitous roads, to throw their soldiers off the scent.”[129]

Sometimes the Protestants were still summoned by official means, to return to the strict execution of the edicts: but this was nothing more than the last discharge of artillery after a lost battle.

Thus, in 1761, the Marshal de Thomond, who had been appointed to the government of Languedoc, commanded the religionists to reverse their marriages and the baptisms of their children within six days. This order caused much astonishment, but no dismay. No one feared any serious conflict, and the simple force of inertia effectively defeated the measure; whilst the marshal himself undertook the charge of transmitting the petitions of the pastors to Louis XV. In three months the whole affair was forgotten.

Two synods were convoked in Lower Languedoc, in the year 1760. One comprised twenty pastors and fifty-four elders; the other fifteen pastors and thirty-eight elders. These gatherings were not publicly announced, but neither were they held in secret; appearances were preserved, though the law was disregarded.

Gradually, as persecution relaxed, the language of the leaders of the churches became more resolute, as might be expected. Paul Rabaut and his colleague, Paul Vincent, in 1761, addressed a pastoral letter to the Reformed of Nismes, exhorting them to abstain from the slightest act of adhesion to the Church of Rome. They were no longer to assist at mass, to have their marriages blessed by the priest, or their children baptized at the (Roman) Catholic church, even when the curates remitted altogether their exactions; they were enjoined to be entirely and constantly faithful to the practices of the Reformed faith. The pastors were true to their duty in imposing these injunctions; they could not require less, since it is of the essence of every religion to be sufficient for the wants of its own members. The Romish clergy did the same thing after the 9th Thermidor.

The meetings became more regular; they were held nearer and nearer to the towns and villages; for proximity, to use the customary phrase, largely increased the number of assistants. These meetings were held in some places under the eye of the magistrates. The Protestants of Nismes performed their religious services within cannon-shot of the citadel, and those of Montauban in the suburbs.

Dating from 1755, the religionists confined at Toulon, the captives detained in the different provinces of the kingdom, and the prisoners of the tower of Constance, began to be set at liberty with greater facility, but only one by one, and frequently, it must be confessed, through the intervention of foreign influences, or by means of ransom. The liberation of a religious convict was effected for nothing, on a letter from Voltaire, or some Protestant prince; otherwise, it cost a thousand crowns; and afterwards, two thousand livres; the rate of ransom gradually lowering with the advance of public morals. Yet in 1759 there were forty-one prisoners still confined at the galleys, whose only crime was that they had been present at a desert meeting, or had sheltered a pastor.

This improved condition was, however, disturbed in a horrible manner by the capital execution of four persons in one case, and of a venerable old man in another. It was the sad privilege of the town of Toulouse, which had erected the first scaffold against the disciples of the Reformation in 1532, to spill the last blood on account of an heretical offence in 1762.

Toulouse, which has made a considerable advance in enlightenment since this period, was at that time almost altogether wanting in intelligence and commercial spirit. It was filled with nobles and Parliament men, who had bent beneath the servile yoke of their traditional prejudices. By their side swarmed legions of priests and monks, more Spanish than French, who kept up an abject superstition by then processions, their relics, and their confraternities. Below them vegetated an ignorant and fanatic people. Every year the Church pompously celebrated at Toulouse the commemoration of the great southern massacre of Saint Bartholomew in 1562; and Toulouse was the stage of the last executions.

François Rochette, a pastor, aged twenty-five years, who performed the service of the numerous churches of Quercy, had gone to recruit his exhausted health by means of the mineral waters of Saint Antonin. He was invited, on the road, to administer baptism, and while crossing the country in the neighbourhood of Caussade, during the night of the 13th of September, 1761, was arrested with the two peasants who were acting as his guides. They were suspected of belonging to a band of robbers who infested the province. The mistake was soon perceived; and as Rochette was not surprised in the exercise of his functions, he might easily have escaped by concealing his profession. Those, who interrogated him went even so far as to point out to him this means of acquittal, but he refused to buy his deliverance by the least disavowal of truth.

The morning spread the news of his arrest with the rapidity of lightning through the whole country. The sorrowing and anxious Protestants assembled together, and urgently solicited the liberation of their pastor. A fair was held that day at Caussade, and the town was crowded with people. The (Roman) Catholics conceived the notion that the Huguenots had flown to arms, and intended a universal massacre. The tocsin was sounded on every side; the villages rose en masse, and the (Roman) Catholic peasantry stuck a white cross in their hats, in imitation of the assassins of Saint Bartholomew. The night of the 14th was spent in casting bullets, preparing cartouches, and many a curate joined in and hastened the arming. The next day, the whole population was on the alert, ready for the direst excesses, and it was with the utmost difficulty the magistrates could restrain them.

Three brothers named Grenier, glass-manufacturers in the county of Foix, happened to be at this time in Montauban. Hearing that the pastor Rochette had been arrested, that the Protestants were threatened with attack, and that a terrible contest was imminent, they hastened to the spot of danger, with the first arms they could snatch up in their haste, a sword and two guns. They were pursued, butchers’ dogs were put upon their track, and at length they were captured and dragged to the prison of Rochette.

The Parliament of Toulouse took cognizance of the matter, as if it were an affair of state, and the trial was conducted with the most glaring partiality. Paul Rabaut and his companions, astounded with a severity so long forgotten, fruitlessly petitioned the Duke de Richelieu, the Duke de Fitz-James, and Marie-Adelaide de France. The accused sent long justificatory memorials to the court in vain. A sentence, passed on the 18th of February, 1762, condemned François Rochette to death, as convicted of having exercised the functions of a Protestant minister, and the three brothers Grenier, as guilty of armed sedition. The other accused, who were poor peasants that had never committed the shadow of a crime, were condemned to the galleys.

When the sentence was read to Rochette and his three fellow-sufferers, they exclaimed with one voice, “Well! since we must die, let us beseech God to accept the sacrifice we offer Him.” The pastor prayed with his friends, and the court wept at the sight.

Four curates came to exhort them to abjure, and one of them threatened the religionists with hell, if they persisted in their heresy. “We are about to appear,” replied the pastor, “before a more equitable judge than you, even before Him who shed His blood for our salvation.”

They spent their time in prayer and pious exhortations, and encouraged each other for the final struggle. All the assistants, sentries, and gaolers, were moved at their calm and noble resignation. Rochette, seeing a soldier more concerned than the rest of his comrades, said to him, “My friend, are you not ready to die for the king; why then should you grieve that I should die for God?”

The curates renewed their efforts to proselytize. “It is for your salvation,” said they, “that we are here.” The answer of one of the prisoners was, “If you were at Geneva, ready to die in your bed (for no one is slain there on account of his religion), would you be pleased if four ministers came, under the pretence of zeal, to persecute you until your last breath? Do not, then, unto others that which you would not wish to be done unto yourselves.”

On the 19th of February, at two o’clock in the afternoon, the mournful procession started on its way. Rochette was, according to the terms of the sentence, bareheaded, barefooted, with a halter hung about his neck, from which, before and behind, labels were suspended, with these words, Minister of the pretended Reformed religion.

When the array passed before the church of Saint Etienne, an attempt was made to force him, in pursuance of the terms of the Parliament’s condemnation, to kneel with a torch of yellow wax in his hand, and to ask pardon of God, the king, and justice, for all his crimes and misdeeds.

Rochette stepped down from the tumbril, and instead of abjuring or making a confession which his heart denied, he pronounced on his knees the following words: “I beseech God to pardon me for all my sins, and I firmly believe that they have been washed away by the blood of Jesus Christ, who has redeemed us so dearly. I have no pardon to ask of the king, whom I have ever honoured as the Lord’s anointed, and loved as the father of my native land; I have ever been a good and faithful subject, and of this I believe my judges to be convinced. I have always preached to my flock patience, obedience, and submission; and my sermons, which you possess, are summed up in these words, ‘Fear God, honour the king.’ If I have contravened the law touching religious assemblies, it was by God’s commandments I contravened them; God must be obeyed before men. As for justice and the law, I am guilty of no offence against them, and I pray God may pardon my judges.”

Every door, balcony, window, roof, and approach near to the place of execution, was covered with spectators. “Toulouse,” says Count de Gébelin, an eyewitness, who related these circumstances, “Toulouse, that city drunk with the blood of martyrs, seemed a Protestant town. People asked what was the creed of these heretics; and when they heard our martyrs speak of Jesus Christ and of his death, every one was surprised and afflicted. They were infinitely touched, also, with the lofty, yet mild bearing of the three brothers, which compelled their admiration almost as much as the inexpressible serenity of the minister, whose graceful and spiritual physiognomy, whose words full of firmness and courage, and whose youth, filled every beholder with interest, knowing, as all did, that he only died because he disdained to save his life by a lie.”[130]

Rochette was executed first. He exhorted his companions until the end, and sang the canticle of the Protestant martyrs: This is the blessed day. “Die a Catholic,” said the executioner, moved with pity. “Judge which is the better religion,” replied Rochette, “that which persecutes, or that which is persecuted.”

The youngest of the three brothers (he was only twenty-two years of age), hid his face in his hands to shut out this tragic scene. The two others contemplated it with calmness. As they were gentlemen,[131] their sentence was, to be beheaded They embraced each other, recommending their souls to God. The eldest offered his head to the axe first. When it came to the turn of the last, the executioner said: “You have seen your brothers die; change, lest you perish like them.” “Do thy duty,” said the martyr, and his head rolled upon the scaffold.

Count de Gébelin adds, as he concludes his recital: “Every one present returned home in silence, in a state of consternation, and unable to persuade themselves that there could be such courage and such cruelty in the world; and I, who describe it, cannot refrain from tears of joy and sadness, as I contemplate their blessed lot, and that our church should be still capable of affording examples of piety and firmness that will compare with the most illustrious monuments of the primitive church.”

Eighteen days afterwards, on the 9th of March, 1762, the scaffold rose again at Toulouse for the execution of Jean Calas, an old man of sixty-eight. The whole world is familiar with his trial, and all its circumstances. Every one knows that the unfortunate Calas was accused of having murdered his son, Marc-Anthony, in order to prevent him, it was said, from embracing (Roman) Catholicism. Every one knows that the priests of Toulouse inflamed the fanaticism of the populace by carrying the body of this young man in procession, who had really committed suicide, and by representing him upon a funereal bier as a skeleton holding in one hand a scroll, on which was written, abjuration of heresy, and in the other the palm-branch of the martyr. Every one, in short, knows that the magistracy and the clergy accused Calvin and his disciples of declaring abjuration a lawful cause of infanticide, and pretended that the assassination of Calas had been decided in a conventicle of Protestants.

These calumnies, which were not less stupid than detestable, were so credited by the fanatic people, that the advocate of Calas thought it necessary to procure from Geneva a solemn declaration, signed by the pastors and professors, attesting that neither synod nor any assembly whatsoever of the Reformation had ever approved of the doctrine that a father has the right of killing his child to prevent his changing his religion. Paul Rabaut published under this head, La Calumnie confondue (“Calumny Confounded”), a work in which he denied these execrable allegations with all the vehemence of a mind profoundly indignant. The Parliament of Toulouse answered it by ordering that the book should be torn and burned by the hand of the hangman.

In the most horrible agonies of the torture, Calas made no avowal, for he had none to make. He continually repeated: “Where there is no crime, there are no accomplices.” He suffered death with the serenity of innocence and the firmness of faith. His execution lasted two hours, his sentence having been to be broken on the wheel. He uttered all the while no words but those of piety and charity, breathing pardon to his judges, and expressive of his pain that the young Lavaïsse should have been implicated in his misfortunes.

Father Bourges said to him: “My dear brother, you have but a moment to live. By that God whom you invoke, in whom you hope, and who died for you, I conjure you to glorify the truth.” “I have said it,” answered Calas; “I die innocent. Jesus Christ, innocence himself, was willing to die a more cruel death.”

“Unhappy man,” cried one of his judges, “see the faggot that shall reduce thy body to ashes; confess the truth.” The old man gave him no answer; he turned away his head, and received the final blow.

“The Fathers Bourges and Caldaguès,” writes Count de Gébelin, in his twenty-third Toulousaine, “were honourable persons. These two monks have conferred the highest praises upon his memory. Although Calas died a Protestant, they have fearlessly said—Thus died our martyrs of old.”

The widow and children of Calas demanded the repeal of this iniquitous sentence. Voltaire supported their cause with his powerful voice. The most celebrated advocates, Elie de Beaumont, Mariette, Loyseau de Mauléon, interfered; and on the 9th of March, 1765, three years exactly, day for day, after the fatal execution, a decree of the council reversed the judgment of the Parliament of Toulouse, with the unanimity of fifty votes. The sentence that restored the family of Calas, tore its bloody axe from the hands of fanaticism, and branded its forehead with an ignominy that will never be effaced.

XV.

The end of this period is the counterpart of the last years which preceded it. A century before, from 1660 to 1685, each day witnessed new acts of tyranny, and laid a heavier yoke upon the neck of the Reformed people. From 1760 to 1787, on the contrary, each day lightened their burden. Four generations of persecutors and of victims had perished in the interval.

The sanguinary executions that we have just related, far from injuring the Reformed churches, turned to their advantage. Respectable people blushed to resemble, in the most distant degree, the judges and priests of Toulouse. They became tolerant as much upon a point of honour, as through a sentiment of justice. The Prince de Beauveau, who succeeded the Marshal de Thomond in the government of Languedoc, was loyal, generous, and also religious. He had several interviews with the patriarch of the desert, Paul Rabaut, and granted to the Protestants all he could under the existing régime of the laws of intolerance.

Fifteen months after the death of Rochette and Calas, in June, 1763, a national synod was held in Languedoc. All the provinces, with the exception of those of the north, were represented at it. The pastors and elders, emboldened by public opinion, addressed a new petition to the king, and held firmer language in speaking to their co-religionists. “All the members of the synod,” they said, “have renewed with a holy alacrity, as well in their own name, as in that of their provinces, the solemn promise to maintain with all their power ... that union so just and so advantageous, by persevering in the profession of the same faith, in the celebration of the same worship, the practice of the same morality, the exercise of the same discipline, and in rendering each other the mutual help and services which show that, like the first Christians, they are only of one heart and one soul.”

Local or personal vexations annoyed the churches, but without intimidating them, or disturbing their tranquillity. In Poitou and elsewhere, the faithful had prepared houses of prayer, which were demolished by order of the public authorities, and some soldiers were even billeted upon a few families. The same was also done in Béarn, which was a puerile parody of the dragonnades.

In the county of Poix, the Protestants had opened schools: they were suppressed. At Nismes, they carried seats to the places of service, and went thither in bodies: this was forbidden them. These unworthy molestations were the last breath of expiring intolerance.

The last religious meeting, said to have been surprised and attacked, was one near Orange, in 1767. Eight Protestants of respectable station allowed themselves to be sensed, and held responsible for the remainder. The officer who arrested them was more embarrassed than his captives, and offered the opportunity of evasion. They answered, however, “No; it is for the public authorities to liberate us.” They were released at the expiration of two months.

The pastor Berenger was also condemned to capital punishment in the same year, 1767, by the Parliament of Grenoble, as contumacious. He was executed in effigy in the town of Mens. Lastly, two pastors were arrested in Brie in 1774, and thrown into prison. One died there at the end of nine days; the other was set at liberty, but sent to Guienne by a lettre de cachet.

There were Protestant convicts confined at Toulon so late as 1769; exemplifying the shocking contradiction of people detained in chains for acts, which the government had ceased to punish. This was in the end understood, and they were all liberated. At the same time, too, the old tower of Constance, at Argues-Mortes, was set open. Some of the women confined there had reached extreme old age, and had passed more than half their lives in this confinement.

But the treasury was the most difficult oppressor to overcome. If there were no longer imprisonments, it was still compulsory to pay heavy fines, and suffer ruinous extortions. The religionists were squeezed at one time by the judiciary bodies, at another by the administrative power, and paid in a manner double taxes, of which a very small proportion found its way into the treasury.

Many flocks, unknown until this time, because they hid themselves in the sanctuary of the domestic roof; began to show themselves. Lyons and Marseilles had their pastors. Sancerre, Orleans, Nanteuil en Brie, Asnières, and the Protestants of Picardy and Artois, endeavoured to reconstitute their respective churches.

Normandy was more advanced. It possessed two or three pastors, Louis Campredon, Jean Godefroy, and a minister of Dauphiny, Alexandre Ranc, who established himself in the province for a couple of years. The little town of Bolbec was the centre of this Protestant population. It would appear that the abduction of young girls continued there after the year 1760; for we read in a petition of the inhabitants of Bolbec, to whom Louis XV. had granted an exemption from taxes, to help them to rebuild their town, which had been destroyed by fire: “Sire, to what purpose shall we build houses, if we are not sure of dwelling in them with our families?” (1763.)

At Paris, the Reformed attended the service of the Dutch chapel, a neutral ground, which enabled them to discharge their duties towards God, without openly contravening the ordinances.

The Protestants maintained at their common charge one or two general agents in Paris, whose official character was not, indeed, and could not be recognised by the ministers of state, but their intervention was publicly accepted, and they proffered their advice in all important affairs. This mission was confided, in 1763, to Court de Gébelin, son of the pastor Antoine Court.

He inherited from his father a great devotion for the cause of the Reformed churches. Upright, laborious, intimately connected with men of letters, and known for his philological works, he brought to the service of his co-religionists an indefatigable activity and numerous social relations. He was esteemed at court; he was sought after in the world; and if he died too soon to witness the abolition of the edicts of Louis XIV., he contributed powerfully to their abandonment.

Still, the position of the Protestants at the time we have reached, was singularly anomalous. There was [in it] nothing definitive, or regular: moral order was enforced by means of legal disorder. The arbitrary principle appeared at every turn; long circumlocutions [were used] to avoid the letter of the laws without directly violating them; the pastors [were] half-recognised, half-proscribed, being neither public nor private persons; the civil condition of so large a number of French people [was] delivered up to uncertain chances; justice [was] wavering and contradictory; royalty soliloquized that it must do something, and did nothing; the subordinate agents of Church and State turned this precarious and disordered establishment to their profit by infamous bargains—a position which it is to be hoped, for the honour of France, will never be witnessed again.

The political and philosophical writers of the eighteenth century contributed largely to the triumph of toleration; but, it must be avowed, they were influenced neither by zeal nor sympathy for the fate of the French Protestants. Although they were so prompt in raising bold and delicate questions, they did not attack the cruel ordinances of Louis XIV., and never seemed to have heard of the lengthened sorrows of more than a million of their fellow-citizens.

Montesquieu, who has something to say on every subject in his Lettres Persanes, does not mention the oppressed Huguenots. In his Spirit of the Laws, he seems to be rather adverse than favourable to them; for he accuses the Calvinists of inclining to republican institutions; and when he would recommend toleration, he pleads through the lips of a Lisbon Jewess. He says, in another place: “This is the fundamental principle of political laws in the matter of religion. When it is optional in a state to receive a new religion, or not to receive it, it ought not to be established; but when it is established, it ought to be tolerated.”[132]

This left the question as regards the Reformed of France, entirely undecided; for the laws precisely denied that they had yet been established in the kingdom.

Helvetius, Diderot, and D’Alembert vouchsafed them not a word of benevolence. Rousseau, the child of the town of Geneva, displayed much greater desire to attack (Roman) Catholicism than to defend Protestantism, and his correspondence shows that when he was invited by some of his friends to write in favour of the victims of the laws of Louis XIV., he refused. He thought it enough to sketch in a few lines the argument of a plea, which he never resumed; and in his Social Contract he supported the principles of a state religion.

Voltaire did the Protestants a service in the affair of Calas, and by his treatise on toleration; but further than this, he never made himself exactly acquainted with the sufferings of this greatly oppressed people, or showed any care to advocate a remedy for them. In his book upon the Siècle de Louis XIV., he speaks of Calvinism in a slighting tone, and dwells upon petty curious details, rather than upon useful matters. In his Précis du Siècle de Louis XIV., he explains at great length the quarrels with regard to the bull Unigenitus, the refusal of the sacraments, and the expulsion of the Jesuits; but says not a word about the Protestants.

There are many causes that will explain this indifference. The Huguenots, as we believe we have remarked before, have borne the penalty, not of the evil they had done, but of that which had been inflicted upon them. After being violently cut off from the rest of the French nation, they were treated as strangers, whose misfortunes deserved no sympathy; and their isolation enabled their adversaries to assail them, from generation to generation, with calumnies which have found a ready credence in the minds of even cultivated men.

Let this be added, that the writers of the philosophic school regarded the Calvinistic doctrines with no affection. They entertained a repugnance for the austere principles and rigid discipline maintained by the Reformed churches. (Roman) Catholicism and Protestantism were for them nothing more than two forms of the same superstitions. There is a saying of Voltaire that denotes exactly what he thought thereon. When a Protestant was presented to him, who had been released from the hulks of Toulon through his intercession with the Duke de Choiseul, he said to him: “What would they have done with you? How could they find it in their conscience to chain and place a man at the oar, who had committed no crime, but that of praying to God in bad French!”

It may be conceived that the pastors of the desert were not very anxious to have recourse to the assistance of the philosophers; they feared the influence such auxiliaries might exercise upon their flocks, and perhaps over themselves. The pastor Pierre Encontre wrote to Paul Rabaut upon the subject of the treatise on toleration: “As for myself, who have read it very hastily, I have found in it much good, but sadly mixed with poison!” And the veteran defender of the Protestant faith observed in his turn: “Penetrated with grief at the sight of the ravages made by the books of the infidels, I can only moderate it by the thought that so dire a situation cannot endure.” (1769.)

But if the philosophers could consign the condition of the Protestants to oblivion, they compelled the attention of the legists, the parliament men and statesmen. The fiction of the new converts had become untenable. Not a single honest magistrate persisted in believing, according to the letter of the law, that there were none but (Roman) Catholics in France; and the expectation of bringing the children to (Roman) Catholicism by the constraint exercised upon the parents, had been too completely deceived for any to appeal to this course again.

As the century advanced, the baptisms and marriages of the desert multiplied. Whether the priests were exacting or not in their proofs, this question, so grave in the first fifty years of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, had lost all its importance. The Protestants rejected at any price the intrusion of the (Roman) Catholic clergy into their religious duties.

What course then was to be taken? Births, marriages, burials, were all without rule, and without guarantee, for a considerable part of the nation, whilst a shocking contradiction of jurisprudence prevailed in these matters. One Parliament accepted the pastor’s certificate, and treated the marriages contracted in the desert as valid; another Parliament nullified them; and shameless collateral relations disgraced the tribunals by claiming a succession to possessions, to which, according to eternal justice, that spoke with a louder voice than iniquitous ordinances, they had no right. The confusion was intolerable.

Yet an issue must be found. It is true that the problem was more difficult than might be thought or even imagined in our days. Only complete and absolute principles can resolve questions with trenchant conciseness. Full religious liberty, and perfect equality of sects, would have cleared away every difficulty: but no politician before 1789, would have dared to make the proposition. The efforts of the times, then, were exhausted in devising middle measures and laborious compromises, which, without granting to the Protestants rights common to their fellow-citizens, should restore to them their civil condition.

The magistracy, the hierarchy of the Romish church, the superior public administrative authority, and royalty itself interposed, each distinctly and apart in this matter, until the promulgation of the Edict of 1787.

XVI.

The magistrates, as we have elsewhere seen, took a different view of the measure relating to the new converts, and also of the nature of the proofs, to which they were submitted. This misunderstanding increased with the growing struggle between the judicial and the sacerdotal orders upon other subjects. When the Parliaments commanded the burning of the bishops’ mandates, directed their temporalities to be seized, and decreed the imprisonment of curates, who molested the (Roman) Catholics by their fanatical exactions, it is clear that they would be less severe towards the Protestants, who defended the sacred rights of their domestic hearth.

It has been thought that the disputes between the Parliament and the clergy had produced a contrary effect, because the magistrates desired to establish, by the rigour of their sentences against the Protestants, the sincerity of their (Roman) Catholic faith, which had been compromised by their contests with the priests. This view is correct, if confined to certain limits, and a certain period. The general fact, however, is different. The magistracy, in their war with the clergy, were constrained to reflect upon the boundaries of ecclesiastical power, to define them, to circumscribe them in a manner constantly more precise, and from that time to fix them also in regard to dissentient creeds. Tactics sometimes prevailed over the idea of right; but right ended in obtaining the mastery.

The procurator-general, Joly de Fleury, addressed a memorial to the Council in 1752, in which he constituted himself the organ of the Parliamentary spirit, all the while that he was subordinating his thoughts to the fiction of the ordinances. “Let the priest,” said this illustrious magistrate, “be simply an officer of the civil state for the registration of baptisms and marriages; let him add no injurious qualifications to the information furnished to him; let him in respect of the nuptial benediction be content with a simple exhortation, without exacting any verbal or written abjuration, or any act specially applying to the religionists. All Frenchmen are Catholics according to law; all should be treated as such, and in the same manner.”

In 1755, another procurator-general, whom we have already named, Rippert de Monclar, went farther. Shaking off the legal fiction, he confessed that there still were Protestants in the realm, and shuddered at the idea that a hundred and fifty thousand greedy collaterals might claim the inheritance of these families, whose marriages had been blessed in the desert. He proposed, as a remedy, the publication of bans by a tribunal of justice, and the celebration of marriages before a magistrate, “according to the practice in Holland,” says he, “with regard to Catholics.” This was tantamount to asking for a separation of the civil and the spiritual authority in respect of the Protestants. Rippert de Monclar could not foresee that, thirty-five years subsequently, the measure would be applied to all citizens without distinction of creed.

In 1766, the advocate-general, Servan, maintained before the Parliament of Grenoble the rights of a wife, whose husband sought to desert her and his children, under the pretext that the marriage of the desert was null and void. “This cause,” said the eloquent lawyer, “does not strike us much at the first view. We see only a weeping woman, who interests us, without doubt; but in her cause are involved a host of other interests; her cause is that of all the other persons of her sect.... Every Protestant is aware of the misfortunes, which this female has suffered for her religion, and awaits a decision with anxiety that will perhaps influence his own destiny as well as hers. Scarcely will a decree be uttered, before it will be re-echoed among the rocks of Cevennes, and repeated from mouth to mouth, becoming a canticle of peace or an order of proscription.” The Parliament of Grenoble only granted damages and interest, the sole remedy that a deserted woman could claim; but the principle had made one further step in advance.

In the same year, Gilbert de Voisins, formerly advocate-general, and a councillor of state, drew up, at the request of Louis XV., certain memorials upon the means of restoring a civil condition to the Protestants of France. He proposed, among other things, to give some of the ministry revocable safe-conducts, and to authorize them to perform private services. The baptisms and marriages of the Reformed would thus have obtained the double sanction of a civil contract and a religious benediction, without in any way affecting the uniformity of public worship in the kingdom.

The magistracy after this never quitted the course they had adopted; and although they continued to devise strange or impracticable arrangements, in order to reconcile the civil state of the Protestants with the maintenance of external religious unity, they advanced year by year in their memorials for the legal reversal of the [laws against the] oppressed.

What line did the clergy pursue in the face of the progress of toleration? Some of their members (it is apparent that throughout the whole course of this history, we have joyfully adduced whatever was favourable to them), fell in with public opinion; and we do not speak merely of the philosophical bishops and abbés, who affected to be tolerant through bon ton or indifference, for the worthy head of the diocese which counted the greatest number of Reformed, M. de Becdelièvre, during forty-five years exhibited a praiseworthy moderation, and merited the eulogy bestowed upon him by Rabaut Saint Etienne, at his death. The abbé and doctor of theology Bourlet-Vauxelles, says in his panegyric of Saint Louis, which he pronounced before the French Academy in 1762: “The god of peace does not permit us to massacre those, who do not know Him.” The abbé Audra used his influence with the Parliament of Toulouse to legitimize a Protestant marriage. The curate Bastide opened his own house to the pastor Paul Vincent, whom soldiers were pursuing. Lastly, the bishop of Langres, M. De la Luzerne, spoke in favour of the Protestants in the assembly of Notables in 1787. “I prefer places of worship to open-air preachings,” said he, “and ministers to preachers.”

We collect all the evidence of toleration that it is possible to find in the acts of the (Roman) Catholic clergy, and doubtless many similar facts have escaped our researches. But we must add that the majority of the sacerdotal body obstinately resisted the generous views of the court, the Parliaments, and the country.

The clergy administered to Louis XVI., at his coronation, the ancient oath for the extermination of the heretics denounced by the Church, and M. Loménie de Brienne, archbishop of Toulouse, said to the monarch, “Sire, you will reprobate the counsels of a hollow peace, and the systems of a criminal toleration. We conjure you, sire, do not delay to dispel the hope, which error has conceived of having places of worship and altars among us.... It is reserved for you to strike the final blow against Calvinism in your dominions. Command the dissipation of the schismatic assemblies of the Protestants; exclude sectarians without distinction from all offices of the public administration, and you will insure among your subjects the unity of the true Christian religion.”

In 1780, the General Assembly of the clergy presented a long memorial to the king upon the enterprises of the Protestants. They complained that heresy lacerated the bosom of the Church, that tender and afflicted mother; and demanded that recourse should be had to the salutary means and repressive measures of the good days of Louis XIV. “Formerly,” said the priests, “the religionists were rigorously excluded from offices, public employments, and municipal places; now infractions of all kinds increase. Formerly they held no religious meetings; now the holding of assemblies is notorious. Formerly they were not allowed to dogmatize in public; now every day witnesses some fresh irreverence against our ceremonies and our mysteries.... We have felt it to be our duty to deposit these alarms in the paternal and religious breast of your majesty. The source of the evil can never be seriously attacked, unless the foreign preachers be for ever banished, and unless measures be taken to prevent the natives from assuming for the future these functions of pretended pastors.”

Thus they required the exclusion of the Protestants from all public charges, the banishment of the pastors, the dispersion of the assemblies; that is to say, the execution of the most odious ordinances of Louis XIV.; and after having preferred these requests, the prelates added: “The erring will ever be our fellow-citizens, our brothers, and even our children in the order of religion. Ever shall we love and cherish them. Far from us be the thought of the axe and the sword!”

It is difficult to comprehend how the conclusion of this memorial agreed with the premises, since it was absolutely impossible—impossible as proved by the experience of more than a century—to prevent fifteen hundred thousand of the French people from exercising their worship, unless they were all to be drowned in their own blood. But we will not let a word of bitterness escape us here. We will, on the contrary, express our commiseration and our sympathy for these bishops and these priests. Alas! how many of them were destined to perish in the storms of the Revolution. Their misfortunes excite our pity!

An ex-Jesuit, Father Lenfant, in 1787 published “A Discourse for the perusal of the Council upon the project of granting a civil condition to the Protestants.” His language was much less guarded than that of the episcopacy, and before reading this tract, we could never have imagined that even the blindest of fanatics could have heaped up in a few pages so many infamous libels. The Reformed became, under the pen of this ex-Jesuit, impious wretches, rebels, monsters, enemies of all laws, human and divine. We may deplore also the lot of this miserable madman; he was murdered in the prison of the Abbaye, on the 3rd of September, 1792, and it was not a Protestant hand that wielded the homicidal axe.

This opposition of the clergy did not arrest [the purposes of] the magistracy; nor was it a barrier for the statesman, who, less influenced by legal traditions than the members of the Parliaments, and more struck with the damage, which the ordinances of Louis XIV. had inflicted upon public interest, therefore went still further than the others in their propositions in favour of the Reformed.

From the year 1754, Turgot, who in many points was in advance of the times in which he lived, demanded the separation of the spiritual and civil powers for all creeds. He put these words into the king’s mouth: “Although you be in error, I will not the less treat you as my children. Show yourselves obedient to the laws, continue to be useful to the state, and you shall receive from me the same protection as my other subjects. My mission is to render you all happy.” Then, asking himself the question whether the assemblies of the dissenting creeds would not be dangerous, he answered it by saying: Yes, so long as they are interdicted; not, when they shall be authorized.

The Baron de Breteuil, a minister of the king’s household, gave instructions to Rulhières to draw up “The Historical Evidences concerning the cause of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes,” which have helped us so often in our researches; and in 1786 he presented, under his own name, a memorial to Louis XVI., upon the necessity of restoring their civil condition to the Protestants.

Nevertheless, royalty was loth to take a definitive step. Louis XV., indifferent to everything that did not concern his debasing pleasures, had constantly adjourned the serious examination of this subject. Louis XVI. was animated with generous intentions, but his intellect was narrow, his conscience easily alarmed by petty scruples of devotion, his will feeble, and he was greatly governed by a childish superstitious fear at the bare idea of touching the laws of his predecessors. Louis XIV. had contemptuously cast aside “the perpetual and irrevocable” edict of Henry IV., and Louis XVI. trembled to correct in the slightest degree that monstrous iniquity of Louis XIV.

Rulhières and the Baron de Breteuil were compelled to invent subtle distinctions to prove that Louis XIV. did not intend to deprive the Protestants of their civil rights; and that they might better quiet the conscience of the new king, they represented toleration as the best means of converting the heretics. They said, “We do not abandon the hope of reuniting the French Calvinists to the Church; we would rather aim at it by a more secure way; we would return to the true course, which has been too long neglected and disregarded.”

While Louis XVI. hesitated, public opinion assumed a higher tone. The close relations of France with North America contributed to spread ideas of civil and religious liberty. General Lafayette, on his return from the War of Independence, went to Nismes and visited Paul Rabaut, embraced the old man cordially, and invited his son Rabaut Saint Etienne to follow him to Paris and plead the cause of his brethren.

The upright Malesherbes gave the Reformed the assistance of his knowledge and his virtue. He composed, in 1785 and 1786, two memoirs upon the marriage of Protestants, and annexed to them a projet de loi upon the subject. “It is but right,” said he, “that I should do the Protestants some good service, since my father did them so much injury!” Lamoignon de Malesherbes was a descendant of the ferocious Lamoignon de Bâville.

All these feelings broke out in the assembly of the Notables held in 1787. In the records of the proceedings of that meeting, we read, “The Marquis de la Fayette proposed to petition his majesty to grant the same civil condition to the Protestants as to the (Roman) Catholics, and to order the reformation of the criminal laws. He asked permission to read a proposition on this subject. This having been read, the Count d’Artois observed that the object being wholly foreign to those which had been submitted to the assembly, it would be going beyond the powers of the Notables to take cognizance of it; that he would, however, willingly undertake to mention it to the king, if the meeting desired it. Consequently, he asked for the opinions of the members, and they were unanimous for adopting the motion of the Marquis de la Fayette.” A suitable address was drawn up, appealing to the king’s goodness on behalf of “this numerous portion of his subjects, who groaned under a régime of proscription that was alike injurious to the general interests of religion, to morality, to the whole population of the country, to the national industry, and to every principle of politics and morals.”

The Edict of Toleration was signed, at length, in the month of November, 1787, a hundred and two years after the Revocation, not in the form that would have been required by the principle of well-understood religious freedom, but restricted within the limits of the opinions of Louis XVI. and his most influential advisers. The name of Protestant does not occur in it; the law only spoke of non-Catholics. The preamble even announced that the king “would always countenance and favour with all his power, the means of instruction and persuasion, which should tend to bind all his subjects by a common profession of the ancient faith of the kingdom.” The 1st article states that “The Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman religion alone shall continue to enjoy the right of public worship in our realm.”

The new edict granted these four things only to the non-Catholics. The right of living in France, and of exercising a profession or a trade in the kingdom, without being disturbed on account of religion; the permission to marry legally before the officers of justice; the authority to record the births of their children before the local judge; and a regulation for the interment of those, who could not be buried according to the Roman Catholic ritual.

But these concessions, which were strict and narrow enough according to the letter of the law, necessarily involved much more in the practice. The legal existence of the Protestants was recognised. How could they be prohibited thenceforth from having pastors, at least to bless their marriages, to baptize their children, and to console the faithful on their death-bed? How could they he forbidden to assemble for the service of their worship, since they had done this under the severest tyranny? Finally, who was to distinguish between the private worship authorized by the edict, and the public worship, which it still persisted in interdicting? Moreover, there was no penal sanction whatever against the delinquents.

If this incomplete law gave but little, it allowed of everything being taken. The Protestants were not deceived in this. “The Edict of 1787,” says the younger Rabaut, “spread joy and consolation throughout the families of the Reformed, and their religious assemblies resounded with thanksgivings to God, and blessings on the king and his ministers. The execution of this beneficent edict followed close upon its promulgation, and the Reformed were soon seen hastening in crowds to the royal judges for the registration of their marriages and the births of their children.... Old men might be seen registering, together with their own marriages, those of their children and their grandchildren.”[133]

The edict raised some difficulties in the Parliament of Paris. The impetuous D’Espremenil was one of its opponents. M. de Lacretelle says that he had been initiated into the sect of the Martinists or Illuminati, and that he imagined he heard the voice of the Virgin Mary, who commanded him to speak against the Protestants. In fact, D’Espremenil exclaimed, as he displayed to his colleagues an image of Christ, “Will you crucify the Saviour again?” This oratorical incident was out of season, and after addressing some representations to Louis XVI., the Parliament registered the Edict of Toleration.

All the churches laboured from this moment to reconstitute themselves upon the bases of the ancient discipline: and we may convince ourselves that Protestantism had preserved a strong hold in the north as well as in the south, and that the blasts of the storm, however they might have bent it to the earth, had neither broken, nor uprooted it.

The last consideration that forces itself upon us, is not the least important. The Reformed people of France had suffered more and longer than any others in the world. From 1660 to 1787 they had been deprived of all favours, excluded from all employments, fettered in every liberal career, expelled from the corporations of arts and trades, and violently driven back in agriculture and commerce. At the Revocation, France lost its most illustrious men, the most opulent, the most industrious, and the most energetic and active [of its people]; the rest, overburdened with garrisoned soldiers, crushed with taxes and fines, chased to the woods and mountains, without schools, without legitimate family, without assured or certain inheritance, without civil rights, had been treated like a race of Pariahs; and yet, wonderful to behold! astonishing to relate! it was found in 1787 that the Reformed people of France had lost nothing either in intellectual and moral vigour, or in industrial power. Far from sinking into degradation, like the Irish under a régime incomparably less oppressive, it had not only maintained itself on a level with the Roman Catholic population, but had, in the main, attained a loftier step in the social scale, and possessed a more extensive and a higher degree of intelligence and instruction. This fact, which is beyond all serious doubt, offers one of the grandest spectacles in the history of mankind.