II.
The Protestants—we may now employ this name, as its use became general even in ecclesiastical documents—the Protestants, who had remained in the kingdom, were still the prey of the dragonnades, after the Edict of Revocation, each time they endeavoured to raise themselves. Those of the principality of Orange and the Messin country, who had hoped to find in their privileged position a guarantee against violence, were compelled to submit to that [which had been inflicted upon others]. The Lutherans of Alsace alone were spared, on account of their numbers and the recent diplomatic conventions, which protected them.
At Paris, some little moderation was observed, for fear of disturbing, as we have already remarked, the fêtes and the repose of Louis. Nevertheless, four days after the Revocation, the place of worship at Charenton was demolished to the last stone, and the members of the flock were ordered to join the religion of the king without delay.
As they showed no alacrity in obeying, the principal elders were imprisoned by means of lettres de cachet. Next, the Marquis de Seignelay summoned a hundred of the Notables to his mansion, and desired them, in the presence of the procurator-general and the lieutenant of police La Reynie, immediately to sign an act of union. On several exclaiming against this brutal conduct, the doors were immediately shut, and they were told with vehement threats that they would not be permitted to return until they had signed—an unworthy ambush, an act of violence and extortion more characteristic of a bandit of Calabria, than of a secretary of state, and the grandson of the great Colbert.
All the Protestants of France were required, according to the terms of the edict, to send their children to (Roman) Catholic schools, and to have them taught the (Roman) Catholic catechism. A new ordinance directed that the children, from five to six years old, of those who were suspected of still adhering to the Reformed religion, should be taken away from them and confided to (Roman) Catholic relations, or be placed elsewhere. But this measure overstepped the possibility of execution. There were not sufficient colleges, convents, or hospitals in France to hold so many victims. The administrators of the laws were obliged to confine themselves to the children of the rich, who could afford to pay an alimentary pension, and in particular to girls of tender age. This detestable kidnapping continued during a great part of the century, and many families still preserve a painful remembrance of the losses they experienced by such abductions.
War was declared against books as well as individuals. The district commanders received orders to visit the houses of the Reformed with the index of the archbishop of Paris, already mentioned, and to seize all suspected writings. These domiciliary visits, which were repeated at intervals, have destroyed to the very last copy, a great number of previous works. The Bible even, was especially confiscated and burned with implacable hatred.
The priests were not able to give regular instruction to this multitude of pretended converts. Capuchin friars and the like were employed, who were gross, impudent, unlettered, and, in many cases, most immoral men. They filled the Protestants with disgust and contempt. Children stopped their mouths with their objections, and persons of mature age imbibed a deeper aversion for a church that employed ministers of such a character.
Recourse was had to new measures of rigour to drag from the reluctant acts of Catholicity. The curates made a roll-call of “the re-united brethren” who were placed upon benches apart from the true Catholics; and those who were so unfortunate as not to be present at the service, or the communion, were exposed to severe punishment. The military supported this inquisition to the utmost, and some intendants, who were desirous of avoiding restitution of the property of which the Reformers had been deprived, established an inspector in each parish, whose business it was to examine whether the new converts went regularly to mass, how they behaved there, whether they attended the Paschal communion, and faithfully observed the commandments of the Church. The régime, in fine, of the ninth and tenth centuries was restored, and Frenchmen were treated in the same manner as the savages of Paraguay had been by the Jesuits. The king perceived that matters had been carried too far, and secretly wrote to the intendants not to interfere any further to such an extent in the transactions of private life.
In spite of the rigour of the laws, and in some manner owing to that very rigour, Protestants reappeared on all sides. Full of horror with respect to (Roman) Catholicism, they had feigned to embrace it under the sabres of the dragoons, and cursing the law which, by an infamous sacrilege, compelled them to receive the communion in the Church of Rome, although they did not believe in its dogmas,—shame, remorse, the desire of expiating the error they had committed, all served to reanimate their energy. They held meetings in the wilds, on the summit of mountains, in deep ravines, and vowed, in the name of God, to live and die in the Reformed faith.
This opposition particularly manifested itself in Lower Languedoc, Vivarais, and Cevennes, which abounded in retreats almost inaccessible to the soldier. The principal events of our history are henceforth concentrated in those provinces. At the commencement of the French Reformation, the provinces around Paris took the first rank. Then came the turn of Béarn, Poitou, Guienne, and Saintonge. Next the Reformation was apparent only in the mountain-heights of Languedoc. The other provinces of the south followed the movement, but at a later period and with less lustre. The centre, the west, and the north long confined themselves to the silence of domestic worship.
It will be observed also that the meetings of the Protestants at the end of the seventeenth century, and the opening of the eighteenth, presented a striking feature of resemblance to those of the first days of Farel and Calvin; for they comprised scarcely any but the poor, and people of low degree. The peasantry of Cevennes united with the artisans of Meaux; but the nobles, and the rich inhabitants, had abjured, or sought an asylum in foreign lands, and nearly all those who had neither fallen nor fled, secluded themselves from the rest. From 1559 to 1685 the French Reformation reckoned great families, who perhaps brought with them less religious vitality than political passions; after the Revocation, it again recruited itself from the popular masses, and gathered there a strength, a devotion, and a constancy, to which it had for some time been a stranger.
Upon the news of these meetings, some of the pastors returned to France; and as they were not numerous enough for the task, they took assistants with them, who received the name of preachers. These were labourers, workmen, and shepherds, who without other preparation than their fervid zeal, rose in the meetings, and addressed pious exhortations to the audience, out of the abundance of their hearts. Some disorder of belief and conduct flowed from this, of which we shall have to speak.
Learning that the pretended converts were again beginning to celebrate their worship, the anger of the king, of his ministers, and of the Jesuits, was kindled to an excess of fury that knew no bounds. It was a phrenzy. The punishment of death was pronounced, in the month of July, 1686, against the pastors who had returned to France; the infliction of perpetual confinement in the galleys, against those who afforded them help, an asylum, or assistance of any kind; a reward of five thousand five hundred livres was promised to whoever should take a minister, or cause him to be taken; lastly, the punishment of death was pronounced against those who were discovered at a meeting. One is tempted to ask if such laws could have issued from the polished court of Louis XIV., that would have disgraced a race of cannibals.
On all sides the soldiers flew to the occupation of tracking the Reformers. It was, according to Voltaire’s expression, “a hunt in a great enclosure.” The Marquis de la Trousse, nephew of Madame de Sévigné, who commanded in Cevennes, scoured and beat the country continually with his troops. When he heard the Protestants praying, or chanting psalms, he made his soldiers fire upon them, as if they were wild beasts. Yet these poor people were unarmed; they did not defend themselves; and if they could not escape by flight, they awaited death upon their knees, raising their hands to heaven, or embracing each other. The veracious and honest pastor, Antoine Court, says that “he was furnished with an exact list of the meetings massacred in different places, and that there were encounters in which three or four hundred persons, old men, women, and children, remained dead on the spot.”
In the times of the Albigenses, or of the slaughters of Mérindol, an end would have been put to these meetings by an universal butchery, in which not even the infant at the domestic hearth would have been spared.
In the time of Louis XIV. manners had already become less barbarous than the laws; the arm of the smiter was partially arrested, and after sanguinary effusions, compelled to stay.
This was not the only retrograde step. When the Reformers were on their death-bed, fearing no longer the punishments of men, and awaiting the judgment of God, they refused to receive the sacraments of the [Roman Catholic] church. The result of this was [the promulgation of] a fresh law, not less atrocious than the preceding, but which it was impossible to carry into execution for any great length of time. Perpetual confinement at the galleys, or imprisonment for life, with confiscation of property, was decreed against the sick, who should recover after having rejected the viaticum; and against those who should die, in the same refusal, vengeance upon their corpses, which were doomed to be drawn upon hurdles, and then flung into the common sewers.
Rulhières says that to obtain the signature of Louis to this law, he was persuaded that it was simply one of commination. However, it was applied in some places by the priests and the dregs of the populace, and the soil of France was polluted by these hideous sights.
Some moribund Protestants themselves caused the priests to be summoned to their bedside, in order that they might declare their rejection of the sacraments of the Church, because they saw in this an act of reparation before God and man. Then their corpses, or their mangled members, were dragged through the streets along the gutters, amidst the execrations of a drunken mob; so horrible was such a spectacle at Calais, that an executioner fled to avoid participating in it, and nothing but the fear of death could induce him to return. Elsewhere, the Protestants themselves were forced to drag the bodies of their brethren. When one of them fell fainting to the ground, and was killed by the soldiers, he was thrown upon the same hurdle. Guards were placed about the corpses to prevent their being carried off by relations and buried in secret.
This was outstepping anew the limit of possibility in the reign of Louis XIV. All respectable people, (Roman) Catholics as well as Reformed, raised a shout of horror; and although the law was not formally repealed, the intendants were ordered not to execute it except in extreme cases. The secretary of state for ecclesiastical affairs wrote to them, on the 6th of February, 1687, that his majesty released them in some degree from the execution of this ordinance. “With regard to those,” he said, “who, when dying, make similar declarations (the refusal of the sacraments) through a mere motive of obstinacy, and whose relations disapprove of such rejection, it will be well not to raise the question and not to prosecute. Therefore, his majesty thinks fit that you should inform the ecclesiastics that they are, on these occasions, enjoined not to summon so readily judges as witnesses, in order that it may not be necessary to execute the declaration in its fullest extent.” This applied to the curates, who, viaticum in hand, went to the houses of the heretics, escorted by judges and ushers, in order to inflame the passions of the populace.
Thus difficulties sprang up at the very moment when it was expected that they had all been overcome. There was only one course to take, since it was no longer possible to butcher a million of Frenchmen: this was to retrace the steps that had been taken; but the court had not the courage to do this, in spite of the advice of Vauban, who, from the year 1686, had dared to pronounce the word retractation, and it floated between the impossibility of overcoming and the shame of acknowledging its error.
The prisons were overflowed; the galleys choked; and as there were no means of lodging so many convicts, a great number were transported to America, where they nearly all miserably perished. Among those who remained in the convict vessels, or were condemned to capital punishment, many displayed great examples of fidelity and resolution. Jurieu enumerated these instances in his Pastoral Letters, published every fortnight, immediately after the Revocation. We will extract only one or two.
A retired captain of the merchant service, Elie Neau, had been sent to the hulks of Marseilles for having attempted to fly his country. There he became a missionary and preacher. He exhorted his brethren, consoled them, and set them an example of patience and virtue. “I do not,” he wrote to his pastor, a refugee in Holland, “I do not wish any evil to those who have placed me in fetters. On the contrary, while they thought they did me harm, they have in reality done me much good; for I understand now that true freedom consists in being liberated from sin.”
The (Roman) Catholic almoner, seeing that he strengthened his companions in misery, styled him a plague-spot and a poisoner, and even protested that he would not say mass while this man remained on the galley. Elie Neau was therefore shut up in a dungeon of the citadel in 1694.
He remained there for several years, deprived of light, air, and frequently of food, covered with a sack, a convict cap placed upon his head, and deprived of all books, even (Roman) Catholic books, and yet he wrote to his pastor: “If I told you that in place of the sun, the light of nature, the sun of grace shines with its divine rays in our hearts (he had two companions in his dungeon)!... It is true that we have many sad moments, which are terrible to the flesh; but God is always near, to impose silence upon us, and to soften the bitterness by His infinite goodness.”
Elie Neau was restored to liberty with other victims of the Protestant faith, through the intervention of the king of England. It will be remembered that France had already suffered a like disgrace in the reign of Henry II.[102]
The preachers and the pastors were doomed to certain death. There was no chance of pardon or pity for them. The first who was led to the gallows was a young man of Nismes, named Fulcran Rey. He had just completed his theological studies, and had not yet received pastoral ordination. He began, however, to preach, “convinced,” says Jurieu, “that when the house is on fire, it is the duty of every one to aid in extinguishing the flames.” Rey had taken the precaution to write a farewell letter to his father, knowing that he would not long escape the persecutors. He was, in effect, sold by some wretch, and arrested in the town of Anduze.
Promises and threats were simultaneously used to induce him to change his religion. The priests, the judges, and the intendants, held out to him the most signal favours if he would abjure, and a frightful death if he refused. His steadfastness was unbroken; Rey had welcomed martyrdom beforehand. He only asked one thing, and that was that he might not see his father and mother, the sight of whom he feared would unnerve him.
When the sentence was read to him that condemned him to be hanged, after the torture, he said, “I am treated more mildly than my Saviour, by being sentenced to so mild a death. I had prepared myself to be broken upon the wheel or burned.” Then raising his eyes to heaven, he thanked the Almighty.
On his way to the gallows, he met many who had abjured, and seeing them bathed in tears, he addressed fraternal exhortations to them. He would also have confessed his faith from the scaffold: “But a sermon,” says Jurieu, “from such a pulpit and by such a preacher, was too formidable, and a number of drummers had been placed round the gibbet, who were ordered to commence beating their drums all together.” Fulcran Rey perished at Beaucaire, the 7th of July, 1686, at the age of twenty-four years.
Astonishing vicissitude of human affairs! Who would have said to Louis XIV. that the grandson of his child, a king of France, would also have his voice drowned by drummers in like manner around his scaffold? O princes, be mindful how you accustom your subjects to the sight of sanguinary executions! You are but men yourselves, and the day of misfortune may overtake you likewise!
Claude Brousson was the most renowned of the martyrs of this era, and has left the deepest traces of admiration and commiseration in the memory of the Protestant people. He was born at Nismes in 1647, and practised at the bar of Castres and Toulouse. So long as he could defend the cause of the oppressed churches before the tribunal, he was desirous of no other avocation; but when he was no longer permitted to plead, he devoted his oratorical powers to preaching. He had been offered in vain the place of a counsellor of Parliament, if he would change his religion; but the conscience of Claude Brousson was one of those that could not be bought.
He was ordained to the ministry at Cevennes, amidst the sound of grape-shot, that spread death amongst the ranks of his brethren; and thenceforth, with no other shelter than savage rocks, the woods, or some isolated hut, he unceasingly preached the word of the Gospel. When he was too closely surrounded, he quitted France; but he afterwards returned, at the call of his soul and the wailings of the people. His wife and friends constantly besought him not to hazard his life, but they could not restrain him.
In 1693 a price was set upon his head, and five hundred livres were promised to whoever should deliver him up dead or alive. Brousson’s only reply to this atrocious proclamation was a calm and simple apology, addressed to the intendant of the province.
His sermons, which appeared at Amsterdam, in 1695, under the title of The Mystic Manna of the Desert, are replete with the same feeling. It might be expected that discourses composed under a forest oak, or upon the rock beside a torrent, by one proscribed, and pronounced in meetings that ofttimes terminated in fearful massacres, would be impressed with a dark and vehement exaggerated. Yet there is nothing of this in the Mystic Manna. The language of this preacher was more moderate and more gladsome than that of Saurin in the peaceful church of the Hague; he only saw in persecution the hand of God, and his words were only burning when he censured his hearers.
Claude Brousson was at length captured at Oléron, in Béarn, in the year 1698, and transferred to Montpellier. He might have escaped at the passage of the canal of Languedoc; but believing that his hour was come, he did not. In his interrogatory he accepted, without any opposition, the accusations respecting his exercising the ministerial office, but he denied in the most energetic terms a reproach which was absolutely false, that he had ever conspired to introduce Marshal Schomberg into France at the head of a foreign army.
On the 4th of November he was led to the scaffold, and his voice was stifled by the rolling of eighteen drums. “I have executed more than two hundred condemned,” said the hangman some days after, “but no one made me tremble so much as M. Brousson. When he was put to the torture, the commissioner and the judges turned pale and trembled more than he did, who raising his eyes, prayed to God. I would have fled, had I been able, rather than have put so honest a man to death. If I dared speak, I could say many things about him; certainly, he died like a saint.”