A Chapter in Huguenot History

THE great religious movements of the past have a peculiar fascination for all readers of history. Like Hamlet and Faust, they have something in them to meet the demands of every mood. Nowhere else in history do we find such a curious interplay of human interests and passions. Religion and its multitudinous perversions have, like love, the power of drawing out the worst as well as the best in mankind. In the history of religious dissension, from the crusade against the strangely confused enlightenment of southern France in the thirteenth century to the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, many of the actors stand out as exponents of cardinal virtues and vices, not unlike Don Quixote, Macbeth, or L’Avare. Religion has proved a most elastic term, and its heroes form a motley collection : St. Louis, Jerome of Prague, Waldstein, Joan of Arc, Alexander VI., Savonarola, Louvois, Servetus, Richelieu, Æneas Sylvius, Ulrich von Hutten, Madame de Maintenon, Torquemada, Henry VIII., — a list where the contrasts are of too obvious a nature to require comment. History has shown that men may revolt from the established church because they come to differ from the majority upon more or less subtle matters of faith, or because they are losing money, or — more rarely, indeed — because they are tired of their wives.

The financial motive has been much neglected by historians. But Luther does not hesitate to invoke it, and to arouse the German nobility by the taunt that the Romans commonly held the drunken Germans to be too “ dead-stupid ” to know when they were being swindled. In short, in so-called religious history we find all gradations from the sublime to the ridiculous, from the solemn tragedies of Huss and Savonarola to the effort of the French government under Louis XIV. to save Huguenot souls at a specified number of livres each. The story of Protestantism in France during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is in no way wanting in the peculiar interest attaching to great religious struggles, and Professor Baird can therefore rely upon the indulgence of the public in presenting the theme he has chosen.1

It is unfortunate, however, that our author should have deemed it best to devote over half of his first volume to the dreary period of Huguenot history intervening between the death of Henry IV. and the fall of La Rochelle. Nowhere could the work have been condensed better than here. The important events and issues were susceptible of being treated in half the space, with great advantage to the reader’s patience.

Among the lesser trials of the Huguenots during the period of toleration was their official designation as adherents of la religion prétendu réformée. a term employed in the Edict of Nantes itself. Professor Baird, strangely enough, seems to be under a misapprehension respecting this title, since he consistently employs the English word “ pretended ” as an equivalent for prétendu. and lays stress upon the “ insulting ” character of the epithet. But prétendre cannot commonly. if ever, be rendered by “pretend.” It means to assert, claim, or allege, and carries with it no suggestion of deception or bad faith. It is not likely that Henry intended to insult his late co-religionists. The expression was a natural, almost an inevitable one to apply to a really small fraction of the French nation, who by assuming the title of “ reformed ” asserted a preeminence over the great mass of Christian believers.

While the Huguenots had much to suffer during the earlier years of the reign of Louis XIIL, a time of comparative quiet followed after the jealousy of Richelieu had been allayed by the fall of La Rochelle. The fortifications of the strong places assigned to the Protestants as “ a retreat in case of oppression contrary to his Majesty’s will” had been demolished after the last unsuccessful revolt, and the Calvinists no longer retained the powers of resistance granted them by the Edict of Nantes. This state of inoffensiveness and the absorbing foreign policy of the Thirty Years’ War resulted in the Protestants being left to their own devices. The period of about thirty years following the destruction of the military power of the Huguenots was probably the season of their greatest material prosperity. Deprived of their former political and military importance, they turned to manufacture and trade, forming the most intelligent and energetic class of the French nation. Their numbers have been generally much exaggerated. It would appear that in the early part of the seventeenth century, of the fifteen million Frenchmen, a million, or somewhat more, were Huguenots. They thus constituted but a little over one fifteenth of the people, and were of course very unequally distributed throughout the provinces.

“ In the membership of the Huguenot churches all ranks of society were represented. Persecution, however, had sifted out many of those who, in the initial stages of the history of the Reformation, attached themselves to it from interested motives, — both the ambitious nobles who sought support in political contentions, and that restless and unruly class whom contemporaries styled ‘ atheists and Epicureans,’ leaders in insubordination and iconoclastic exploits. Yet if the lower populace was not now strongly Protestant, the Protestant nobles and gentry were still considerable in numbers and in influence. Many a church was composed almost exclusively of the best families of the region. . . . But in the large towns and cities the strength of the ‘ pretended Reformed religion ’ lay in the great middle classes. Trade, foreign and domestic, banking, manufactures, came more and more to fall into the hands of the Huguenots. Excluded, as time passed on, from hope of preferment in the various departments of the royal service, they pressed into those callings in which men of all creeds meet substantially as equals. Later in the century, a Venetian ambassador, Girolamo Venier, in a report to his government, asserted that at the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes the Huguenot merchants transacted two thirds of the business of the country. This was, doubtless, a gross exaggeration even then. However this may be, there were many places where, as at Dieppe, the Roman Catholic merchants were few in number and of little wealth as compared with their Protestant townsmen.” When the proverb “ Rich as a Huguenot ” became current Professor Baird professes himself unable to say. It is curious to note, in view of this estimate of the Venetian ambassador, that a marked jealousy of Protestant political leaders has shown itself in France under the Third Republic.

The truce could not endure for long. The periodic assemblies of the Church of France offered opportunities for abusing the Protestants, and for the formulation of appeals to the king urging the suppression of heresy. Both the government and the courts regarded the Huguenots with dislike and suspicion. The presumption was, naturally, always against the Protestant. The Edict of Nantes was not, as a prominent jurist explained, to be construed gracieusement, but strictly according to the letter, since Protestantism was only tolerated out of the goodness of the king’s heart. Louis XIV. had scarcely assumed control of the government before matters changed much for the worse. The perpetual nagging and injustice which the Protestants suffered at all times began to take a more serious form. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes was not an abrupt or isolated act, but the culmination of a process of repression which, it was asserted, had been so successful as to render the edict no longer necessary.

The Huguenots had always been carefully limited as to their places of worship. Upon one pretense or another, the interdiction or demolition of nearly six hundred of their “ temples ” was sanctioned between 1660 and 1684. The worshipers were forced to resort to the churches which still remained, even if these were at great distance from their homes, and in spite of the insecurity of the roads. We are told that it was not rare to see ten or twelve thousand at a single service. Besides the constant unfair interpretation of the edict (and there are secret orders preserved, addressed to the judges, requiring them to withhold justice in the case of the Protestants), two decrees preceding the final revocation may be taken as sufficiently characteristic of the tendencies. The first, a subtly conceived bit of legislation, related to Protestants who, in the hope of having a share in the sums distributed to the newly converted or for other reasons, had embraced Catholicism only to relapse soon after into heresy. Such instable sons of the Church seem not to have been negligible factors in the situation. It was therefore decreed in 1679 that after the names of such apostates had been once announced to the ministers and consistories of the Protestant churches, should any such persons be admitted to divine worship, the consistory of the church in question was to be suppressed, and the minister deprived of the right to officiate. It was obviously open to any ill-disposed individual, by entering a large assembly where he could easily escape notice, to deprive a whole community of its services by simply asserting, under oath, that he had, since his conversion to Catholicism, been present at a Protestant service. This appears to have been exactly the way in which the law worked, and it excellently illustrates what the Huguenots suffered from the application of laws which seem at first thought neither harsh nor unjust.

A better known and much more shocking antecedent of the revocation was the decree of 1681, authorizing children to renounce Protestantism and embrace Roman Catholicism upon reaching the age of seven. This meant that if a child could be induced, by the offer of a toy or a bonbon, to say, for example, the words “ Ave Maria,” it was sufficient to indicate in the sight of the law a hopeful subject for conversion, if not an actual convert. The child was not permitted to retract its words, and could be abducted from its parents and placed in one of the institutions designed for this class of youth-' ful converts. This miserable business is best understood from a document of pathetic simplicity, a list of the Huguenots of Alençon, drawn up by order of the government, upon which a later, doubtless clerical hand has jotted down the sentence for each family, indicating the children who were to be taken from their parents and placed in Catholic institutions. This Professor Baird reproduces as follows : Thus Martha Boullay, a widow living in the Grande Rue, lias three children: Jean aged six years, Anne Marie aged five, and Joseph aged six months. ‘ Take Jean and Anne Marie.' A man of more importance, Jean le Conte, and his wife have but one little girl, Anne, ‘ four years old and weakly.’ ‘ Take Anne if she is in condition’ Pierre Thifaine and his wife have three children : Ivan, a boy of three ; Louise, a girl of eight; and Marie, a girl of five. ‘ Take Louise and Marie.’ . . . With regard to the little family of the widow Anne Ardesoif, consisting of four children, whose ages unfortunately run from four to twelve years, ‘ all are to be taken.' ” The dragonnades themselves can hardly be ranked with this measure as a source of domestic misery.

The fact that the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes was but part and parcel of the public policy pursued in France during the preceding quarter of a century serves in a measure to explain the favorable attitude of liberal-minded Catholics towards the measure. Madame de Sévigné wrote to her cousin: “ You have doubtless seen the edict by which the king revoked the Edict of Nantes. Nothing is so beautiful as all that it contains, and never has any king done, none will ever do, anything more memorable.” Mademoiselle de Scudéry declares the king’s act to he “ a Christian and royal work.” The king was applauded by the French Academy, which found a spokesman in the mild-mannered La Fontaine. This attitude towards what seems to us so notoriously gross and ill advised a breach of good faith is nevertheless perfectly explicable. It was due to a fatal misapprehension as to the success of the king’s persevering efforts to convert his Protestant subjects. The statement, was so often made as finally to be generally believed, that only an insignificant and seditious remnant survived of the once influential body of Protestants. It seemed justifiable now to proclaim that the longed-for unity in belief was once more established in France, after a century and a half of discord. The better heretics had seen the error of their ways, and the opprobrious Edict of Nantes, which in the eyes of the nation at large was a recognition of the most hateful of national weaknesses, religious schism, was joyfully done away with, as no longer necessary. This view was carefully inculcated by the Church. The Protestant religion, it was claimed, no longer had the support of an intellectual and powerful element of French society, but was “ now despised, abased, and henceforth reduced to seeing itself abandoned by all rational persons.” These results, the clergy asserted, had been accomplished “without violence, without arms,” nor so much by the force of the king’s edicts as by his “ exemplary piety.” The Archbishop of Rouen congratulated Louis upon first gaining the hearts of the heretics, and suggested that perhaps they might never have returned to the bosom of the Church in any other way than “by the path strewn with flowers,” opened to them by the king. This was doubtless very generally believed ; and in spite of the anxiety which the emigration of the Huguenots caused the more thoughtful men connected with the administration, the revocation must have appealed to most Frenchmen as it did to Madame de Sévigné, — as nothing less than la plus grande et la plus belle chose qui ait été imaginée et executes. This view was supported by the absence of any attempt upon the part of the Huguenots to resort to arms before the circumscribed if persistent revolt of the Camisards in 1702. Yet Saint-Simon, in one of his bits of penetrating comment, views the matter in much the light in which the modern historian leads us to see it.

Professor Baird devotes over two hundred pages to the episode of the Camisards. He can scarcely hope to hold the interest of the average reader in so detailed a treatment of this local revolt. The reader cannot be severely reprehended if he finds more to the point the account Mr. Stevenson has given us of this matter in recounting his travels with patient Modestine. In no way unexampled as a medley of fanaticism and self-restraint, of religious vagary and heroic martyrdom, this insurrection furnishes an instance of the difficulty governments have always had in coping with such intensive revolts. It shows clearly, moreover, what a change Protestant influence had undergone in France since the wars of religion when a Protestant gentleman bid fair to gain such an ascendency over the mind of the king himself as to arouse the blind jealousy of the queen mother.

Professor Baird’s chapters upon the Desert and the final recognition of the rights of Protestantism by the edict of toleration issued in 1787 form a valuable account of a neglected phase in the history of the eighteenth century. The laws relating to the Protestants were codified in the royal declaration of 1824. It was not new legislation, but a repetition of the old with a view to more complete execution. It thus furnishes a means of reviewing the legal status of the French Protestant. “On only one point,” Professor Baird observes, “did a feeling of shame compel a slight alleviation. While reënacting the pains against the person and memory of those who died as relapsed persons, the infliction upon the corpses of Huguenots of that inhuman treatment which had raised the indignation of civilized Europe was purposely omitted. . . . But no more mercy was shown than heretofore to the living. Death remained the penalty for the Huguenot preacher. Indeed, the clause was added that this penalty should not hereafter be regarded as comminatorg ; that is, a penalty that might be inflicted or not at the discretion of the judges. The minister or preacher that fell into their hands must be sent to the gallows.” The baptisms and marriages performed by Protestant ministers “ in the desert,” as the secret conventicles were picturesquely called, had of course no validity in the eyes of the law, and evidence based upon such ceremonies served only to convict the one urging it of unlawful attendance at forbidden assemblies. The legal registration of births and marriages was inextricably confused with the most sacred rites of the Catholic Church, and the Protestant who refused to conform knew that his marriage was but concubinage in the eye of the law, and his children bastards with no rights of inheritance. The last execution of a Protestant preacher took place in 1762. In November, 1787, the civil status of non-Catholics was at last recognized.

Professor Baird’s work indicates upon every page scholarly erudition and untiring industry, He has utilized much new, or at least comparatively unknown material, although he has very properly availed himself of the guidance of the careful Huguenot historian, Benoist, who completed a voluminous history of the revocation of the edict shortly after that event. While in no way bigoted, Professor Baird writes from a distinctly Protestant standpoint. He takes no pains to explain why the French government pursued so perverted a policy. He exhibits none of the scientific sympathy with the oppressor which is after all essential to the best historical work.

With all their stalwart virtues, the reader will surely agree that the volumes are sadly long. Our author fails conspicuously to stimulate his readers. And yet, with the mass of seductive reading bidding for its attention, the public becomes more impatient every day, and less inclined to supply by an honest effort to be interested what the historian has failed to furnish by a vivacious and philosophical handling of his subject. It is generally supposed that with the Florentine historians, Macliiavelli, Guicciardini, and the rest, the old form of chronicles was replaced by more intelligent treatments of the past. Doubtless this is, in a way, very true, but as in the matter of superstition and intolerance, in forecasting the weather by the tilt of the moon, if not our fortunes by the stars, we can trace plenty of survivals of mediaeval intellectual frailty, so in historical writing even nowadays we often find little more grasp of the facts and little more historical insight than in the Annals of Lauresheim or the Chronicles of Monstrelet.

There are indications that those who write history feel the necessity of a change. Whether the new history be institutional, economic, or genetic, it is at least pretty well assured that the public will no longer patiently pass the winter evenings in its chimney corner, taking up volume after volume of the once classical narrative histories of the past. Bancroft and Thiers are still sold, but it may be doubted if they are often read. Every writer must needs be an impressionist in a measure. He must have an aim and calculate his effects. Much in Prescott’s works is as out of date as Hans Mending’s Seven Joys of Mary. Too much attention to the petals of the daisies and the embroidered facings of the tunics has frustrated the artist’s aim. Perhaps the details of ceremonial connected with the abdication of Charles V. or the individual deeds of the valorous Camisards do but blur rather than clarify our historical conceptions. And then there are the grievous omissions, — essentials crowded out by non-essentials. A legend still passes current that the Renaissance began with the fall of Constantinople; for who can learn anything of Petrarch and bis role in our histories ? Endless illustrations could be given of common misapprehensions of no less magnitude. There are as every student knows, undreamed-of possibilities in writing European history. From this standpoint Professor Baird s book is lamentably deficient. His style is, moreover, unfortunately wanting in those qualities which make the mere story a joy. It is therefore to be regretted that he did not content himself with an account in a single volume, which would have sufficed amply to give both the student and the general reader all that was of real importance.