I.
Two opposite influences divided this period: the traditional spirit of persecution, which still excited cruel violence and frightful executions during the latter half of the eighteenth century; and the new spirit of toleration, which, passing from the conscience of men of worth into the writings of philosophers, from these writings into the convictions of the intelligent classes, from these classes into the legislature and councils of the king, at length acquired an irresistible authority, and compelled even the priesthood to bow before maxims more true, more moral, more Christian than their own.
When he affixed the seal of the state to the Edict of Revocation, the Chancellor Letellier pronounced, with accents of joy and triumph, the Nunc dimittis of Simeon. He, and Louis XIV. with him, believed that the Edict would be a final stroke [of policy]. It was then, on the contrary, that the whole strife again began.
So long as the Reformed had had anything to lose, were it only a shadow of their ancient liberty, were it only the empty name of the Edict of Henry IV., the majority had confined themselves to the limit of petitions and complaints. They always trusted that the sacredness of the law, justice, and humanity, would reappear in the heart of the monarch, and they carried their resignation to such an extent, as to originate the proverbial saying: “a Huguenot’s patience.” But everything—absolutely everything, was lost; they consulted no longer aught than what they owed to their conscience and their outraged faith; and by the persevering resolution to brave the most barbarous edicts at the cost of exile, the galleys, and death, they ended by wearying the very ferocity of their executioners.
A solemn lesson springs out of the epoch on which we are about to enter. It is easier to make martyrs than apostates; and the violence of the sword, unless there be total extermination (an impossibility in the reign of Louis XIV.), is broken by the power of thought.
The act of Revocation was rigorously executed against the pastors. The letter of the edict, which accorded fifteen days’ delay for departure, was overstepped. Claude received an order to quit [the country] within twenty-four hours, and “the man of sedition,” as Madame de Maintenon called him, was accompanied by one of the king’s servants, who never lost sight of him for an instant. The other pastors of Paris obtained two days for their preparations. Those of the provinces had a little more time extended to them, but by a complete denial of human and social rights, their children, under the age of seven years, were taken away from them. Some were even forced to abandon infants, which their mothers were nursing, and started on the road of banishment with wives, whose grievous woe scarcely left them strength to accept their support.
It had been calculated that many of the pastors would abjure; there were, however, but very few recantations; for even those ministers, who had yielded in the first movement of stupor and fear, almost all returned to their ancient faith. Old men of eighty and ninety years of age were seen bent on devoting the few remaining days of their life to distant journeys, and more than one died before he could reach an asylum where he might rest his wayworn feet and aching head.
The arrival of these pastors produced an inexpressible sensation in the foreign countries to which they went. On all sides people hastened, with indignant and pitying hearts, and tearful eyes, to salute these venerable confessors of the Gospel, who, leaning on their traveller’s staff, came ahungered and in rags, weeping for their children and their flocks, left in the hands of the persecutors, to sit beside the hearth of hospitality. A loud and fearful cry rose throughout all Protestant Christendom against Louis XIV., and even the (Roman) Catholics of those lands felt the flush of burning shame mantle upon their foreheads as they thought of their dishonoured church.
The faithful followed their leaders in crowds. It was in vain that laws, increasing in cruelty, condemned the men who tried to flee from their native soil, to perpetual imprisonment at the galleys, the women to seclusion for life, and both to forfeiture of goods; it was in vain they sentenced those to the same penalties, and shortly afterwards to death, who gave them assistance; it was in vain that a part of the victims’ spoils were promised to the informer. Emigration spread from province to province, and foiled the despotism of Louis.
We cannot in our times form any conception of such cruel laws; for, in short, if the king would endure but one religion in France, he ought at least to have sanctioned the departure from the realm, of those who were not, or refused to be, of it. This is so elementary a principle of natural justice, that even the Spanish Inquisition and the League had always permitted a choice between banishment and abjuration. Louis XIV. by an unheard-of abuse of power, would not permit it. He regarded his compromised glory alone, and did not see that no one compromised it so much as he did himself.
The language of these ordinances is as inconceivable as their grounds. Words assumed a monstrous meaning. Thus, we read that flight to foreign parts became “criminal disobedience,” as if it were a crime to abandon everything rather than deny one’s faith! Again, we read that the fugitives were guilty of ingratitude for not having profited by the permission to return to France, as if there had not been imposed as the absolute condition of their return, the necessity of rebelling against the God of their conscience. To such a depth did Louis descend under the twofold prompting of his pride and Father La Chaise!
Guards were placed at the entrance of the towns, at river-ferries, in the ports, on the bridges, the highways, at every avenue leading to the frontiers, and thousands of peasants joined the troops posted from distance to distance, that they might earn the reward promised to those who stopped the fugitives. Everything failed. The emigrants purchased passports, which were sold to them by the very secretaries of the governors, or by the clerks of the ministers of state. They bought over the sentinels with money, giving as much as six thousand and even eight thousand livres as the price of escape. Some, more daring, fought their way across the frontiers, sword in hand.
The majority marched at night, by remote and solitary paths, concealing themselves in caverns during the day. They had itineraries prepared expressly for this kind of travelling. They went down precipices, or climbed mountain-heights, and assumed all sorts of disguises. Shepherds, pilgrims, soldiers, huntsmen, valets, merchants, mendicants: they were always fugitives. Many, to avoid suspicion, pretended to sell chaplets and rosaries.
The eyewitness Bénoit has given us a minute account:—“Women of quality, even sixty and seventy years of age, who had, so to speak, never placed a foot upon the ground except to cross their apartments, or to stroll in an avenue, travelled a hundred leagues to some village, which had been indicated by a guide. Girls of fifteen, of every rank, exposed themselves to the same hazard. They drew wheelbarrows, they bore manure, panniers, and other burdens. They disfigured their faces with dyes, to embrown their complexion, with ointments or juices that blistered their skin, and gave them a wrinkled aspect. Women and girls were seen to counterfeit sickness, dumbness, and even insanity. Some went disguised as men; and some, too delicate and small to pass as grown men, donned the dress of lackeys, and followed on foot, through the mud, a guide on horseback, who assumed the character of a man of importance. Many of these females reached Rotterdam in their borrowed garments, and hastening to the foot of the pulpit, before they had time to assume a more decent garb, published their repentance of their compulsory signature.”[98]
The sea facilitated the evasion of a host of the Reformed. They hid themselves in bales of merchandise, in casks, under heaps of charcoal. They huddled together in holes in the ship’s hold, and there were children who passed whole weeks in these insupportable hiding-places without uttering a cry that might betray them. Sometimes the peril of an open boat was hazarded without a mouthful of provisions, the preparation of which might have prevented the flight of the fugitives, who thus put to sea with only a little water or snow, with which mothers moistened the lips of their babes.
Thousands of emigrants perished of fatigue, cold, hunger, or shipwreck, and by the bullets of the soldiery. Thousands of others were captured, chained to murderers, dragged across the kingdom to inspire their brethren with greater fear, and were condemned to labour at the oar on board convict vessels. The galleys of Marseilles were filled with these unfortunates, among whom were ancient magistrates, officers, people of gentle blood, and old men. The women were crowded into the convents and the tower of Constance, at Aigues-Mortes. But neither threats, nor dangers, nor executions, could prevail against the energy and heroic perseverance of an oppressed conscience.
The court became alarmed at the depopulation of the country and the ruin of industry. It thought that it was less a matter of faith that excited the French to flee from France, than the attraction of danger, and one day it therefore threw open all the outlets from the country. The next day, finding that the emigration had only multiplied, it closed them.
Touched by so great and so noble a misfortune, foreign nations rivalled each other in the display of their sympathy for the refugees. England, Switzerland, Holland, Prussia, Denmark, Sweden, generously met their first wants, and it never appeared more clearly, according to the remark of a contemporary, that the fountain of charity is inexhaustible. The more there was given, the more it seemed necessary to give. Private individuals contended with their governments in the distribution of relief. The fugitives were received with open arms: they were furnished with the means of work, with houses, and even churches; and they repaid this liberal hospitality by the example of their faith, a life of probity, and an industrious activity that enriched their adopted countries. “The French Protestants carried to England,” says Lemontey, “the secret and use of the valuable machinery which has been the foundation of her prodigious fortune, while the just complaint of these exiles cemented the avenging league of Augsburg.”[99]
It is difficult to fix the number of the refugees precisely. The figures indicated by Vauban have been already noticed. An intendant of Saintonge wrote, in 1698, that his province had lost a hundred thousand Reformers. Languedoc had lost from forty to fifty thousand before the war of the Camisards,[100] and Guienne at least as many. The emigration was proportion ably greater still in the Lyonnese and Dauphiny, on account of their proximity to the frontiers. Whole villages were abandoned, and many towns were half deserted. Manufactories were closed by hundreds; certain branches of industry entirely disappeared, and a vast extent of land went altogether out of cultivation.
Voltaire says, that in the space of three years, nearly fifty thousand families quitted the kingdom, and were followed by hosts of others. A pastor of the wilderness, Antoine Court, estimates the number at eight hundred thousand persons. Sismondi reckons that if the lowest numbers be taken, there remained in France somewhat more than a million of Reformed, and that from three to four hundred thousand established themselves in other countries. M. Capefigue, a writer hostile to the Reformation, who consulted the population tables of the general districts, calculates the emigration at two hundred and twenty-five or two hundred and thirty thousand souls, namely, one thousand five hundred and eighty ministers, two thousand three hundred elders, fifteen thousand gentlemen, and the remainder consisting almost entirely of traders and artisans. It is worthy of remark that the intendants made these returns in the first years of the Revocation, and that they were interested in showing the number of the emigrants to be as small as possible, in order to avoid the reproach of negligence.[101]
It appears probable that from the years 1669 to 1760, emigration, which was more than once renewed and suspended, according to the alternatives of persecution and repose, drove out of France, without counting those who returned at the end of a few years, four or five hundred thousand persons, who generally belonged to the most enlightened, the most industrious, and the most moral portion of the nation.
Thirteen hundred refugees passed through Geneva in one week. England formed eleven regiments of French volunteers, and twenty-two French churches rose in London. An entire suburb of that metropolis was peopled by refugees. Holland won back by the emigration more than she had been deprived of by the invasions of Louis XIV., and colonies of Huguenots were founded even in North America, and at the Cape of Good Hope. The name of these and their children has survived everywhere with honour.
This emigration has been sometimes compared with that of the year 1792; but the difference is much greater than the resemblance. The emigrants of the Revolution had only lost aristocratic privileges; the refugees of the Revocation had been despoiled of their very means of religious and civil existence. The first, at least those who emigrated at the beginning, left their country, because they would not accept the common law of equal rights; the latter, because they were deprived of that common law. The emigration of 1792 was composed of only one class of individuals, who had no other profession than that of arms; the emigration of 1685 comprised all the constituent elements of a people—merchants, manufacturers, mechanics, labourers. Moreover, the refugees founded numerous and useful establishments, of which many yet still remain, while the later emigrants have nowhere left enduring traces of their passage.
It is equally difficult to calculate the number of emigrants, who perished in the attempts to escape, in party fights, in prison, on the scaffold, and at the galleys, from the Edict of Revocation to the Edict of Toleration of Louis XVI. Sismondi thinks that the number of those who perished is equal to that of the emigrants; that is to say, according to his calculations, three or four hundred thousand. This amount would seem to be too high. Yet Boulainvillers assures us that, under the intendancy of Lamoignon de Bâville, in the single province of Languedoc, a hundred thousand persons fell victims to a premature death, and that a tenth perished by fire, strangulation, or the wheel. Probably a hundred thousand should be added for the rest of the kingdom in the eighteenth century. Thus two hundred thousand Frenchmen were sacrificed after an edict of pacification, which had lasted nearly ninety years! Such were the new and bloody hecatombs, that were immolated upon the altars of intolerance!