VII.
The Calvinist party had definitively ceased to exist after the taking of La Rochelle, and the history of the Reformers is no longer mixed up with the great affairs of the kingdom, until the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
It was in vain that persons of the highest birth, who belonged to the (Roman) Catholic communion, provoked them to resort to arms; Huguenots were no longer to be found in the ranks of the adversaries of royalty.
In 1632, the Duke Henri de Montmorency, supported by Gaston d’Orléans, brother of Louis XIII., essayed to re-awaken the religious passions in Languedoc, where he was governor. He addressed himself to the noblemen of the religion, to the pastors, the consistories, and the synods, and met with nothing but refusals. He had five or six bishops in his party, but not a single Reformer. The second consul of Nismes preserved the town for the king, by expelling the bishop and the first consul, who was a (Roman) Catholic. The inhabitants of Montauban offered to march against the troops of Montmorency, and, memorable fact! the miserable remnants of the population of Privas defended their town for the service of the king, and Cardinal de Richelieu could but say of the Reformers, “They have done more than all the rest.”
About twenty years afterwards, during the troubles of the Fronde, the great Condé, counting upon the old associations of his house, sought to attract them to his standard, and employed emissaries, who sowed sinister rumours. They went from church to church, saying that the regent Anne d’Autriche, had promised the clergy that the Edict of Pacification should be revoked, that her first minister, Mazarin, was an Italian cardinal without good faith, that it was force alone which would preserve the Reformers from utter ruin, and that the Prince de Condé would guarantee full liberty of conscience and of worship. But these appeals were also fruitless.
The people of La Rochelle took the side of the regent against their own governor. Those of Montauban exhausted their men and wealth for the same purpose. The town of Saint Jean d’Angély, which had nothing but dismantled walls, defended itself against the rebels. The province of the Vivarais and the Cevennes furnished devoted soldiers, and nearly all the Reformed nobility of the southern provinces, rising against the Prince de Condé, kept Languedoc, Saintonge, and a part of Guienne for the king.
These services were of great importance; Mazarin said, “I have no cause to complain of the little flock; if they browse on bad herbage, at least they do not stray away.” When he mentioned the pastors of Montauban, he styled them his good friends, and the Count d’Harcourt said to the deputies of the same town, “The crown tottered on the king’s head, but you have fixed it there.”
Louis XIV. expressed his gratitude more than once, but particularly in his declaration of the 21st of May, 1682, in which he said, “Forasmuch as our subjects of the pretended Reformed religion have given us proofs of their affection and fidelity, notably in the present circumstances, of which we rest well satisfied, we make known that for these causes they be maintained and guarded, as now we maintain and guard them, in the full and entire enjoyment of the Edict of Nantes.”
But it was this very same king, who made those who had fixed the crown upon his head, to suffer the longest and the more odious persecutions! It was he who in 1685 signed the fatal Edict of Revocation! What were the causes of so many violences and misfortunes? We are about to enter on one of the most interesting problems of this history.
The most implacable enemy of the Reformed was the spiritual power. In the foremost rank the Jesuits figured, who had purposely been created for the extirpation of Protestantism in Europe, the born adversaries of the Huguenots, monks doubly redoubtable by their office of confessors to kings, and because their code of morality authorized them the use of any and every means. Lying, deceit, iniquity, the traffic of consciences, brutal force, spoliations, exile, even murder,—all things were lawful, provided they only conduced to their ends.
After the Jesuits came the secular clergy, who—except a few, such as Richelieu and Mazarin, who were rather politicians than ecclesiastics—were never weary of inventing new measures of oppression and persecution against heretics. They had the advantage over the poor and humble ministers of the French Reformation, of number, birth, position, authority, fortune, and high offices, and might do anything to crush them without fear of reprisals.
Every five years the secular clergy held assemblies, which were never dissolved, as we have already remarked, without the repeal of some portion of the laws of toleration. “The clergy,” says Rulhières, “gave the king money. His servants negotiated with this first body of the state, to obtain for the requirements of the kingdom, what was called the gratuitous gift; and the Protestants, on the contrary, wanted money from the king for the maintenance of their ministers and the holding of their synods. Each time they wished to meet, it was a pecuniary favour they solicited, and each time that the clergy assembled, it was a kind of favour that they conferred upon the state. Consequently each assembly of the clergy was distinguished by some advantage gained over the Reformed, while each synod, on the contrary, received from the court some mark of disfavour.... The demands of the clergy were in a degree moderate, so long as the Calvinists were to be feared; but they extended to open persecution as soon as the Calvinists had become peaceable citizens.”[80]
Lastly, after the Jesuits and the (secular) clergy, swarmed legions of Capuchins, Recollets, Carmelites, Franciscans, and others; an ignorant and reckless horde, who fanned the fanaticism of the populace, and were ever ready to attack heresy.
So much for the spiritual authority! As for the men of the temporal power, the foremost adversaries of the Reformation were the kings themselves, who had received a false and imperfect education. Their preceptors had placed them as much as possible under the yoke of a narrow and intolerant devotion, that was full of little scruples upon certain points, and easy of relaxation upon others. Louis XIII. had neither greatness of mind, nor dignity of character. A weak, hypochondriac prince, putting his kingdom under the protection of the Virgin, after assassinating the favorites of his mother, he possessed no other merit than that of allowing himself to be governed by Richelieu. Louis XIV., with a proud genius and true kingly qualities, united gallantry to bigotry, and we shall have occasion to see that in his strange compromises with his conscience, the more scandal he occasioned to his court by his licentiousness, the more he made it a point to edify it by his severity against the Reformed.
Each of these kings held the policy of weakening Calvinism as a state maxim, as if men and circumstances were the same as they had been under Charles IX. These princes had been taught that the Reformation was the enemy of thrones, and they thought they could never do enough against this vain phantom of their imagination.
The result was, that the chief employments at court and in the army, of the magistracy and the finances, were systematically refused to the Calvinists, except in extraordinary cases. Turenne and Duquesne broke through this barrier by the splendour of their services; the others were left disregarded, or condemned to grow grey in inferior situations. The Edict of Nantes had, no doubt, made the Reformed admissible to office, but it did not guarantee to them the favours of the court; “and royalty,” to use the expression of Louis XIV. himself, “restricted them to the narrowest limits that justice and a regard for appearances would permit.” Even these conditions, however, were not long respected.
Louis XIV. has, moreover, said, in the memoirs which he dictated for the instruction of the dauphin: “As for the favours that depended upon me alone, I resolved, and I have punctually kept that resolution ever since, not to grant any to the people of that religion, and this out of kindness, and not from hatred, that they might be obliged thereby to consider from time to time by themselves, and apart from violence, whether they were acting wisely in voluntarily depriving themselves of the advantages they might enjoy in common with my other subjects.” Nothing can be more naïf and instructive than these avowals.
The ministers of state naturally followed the bent of the prince. No favour [was to be allowed] to heretics; ill-will [was to be accorded,] when it was possible [to manifest it] without too open an attack upon acquired rights; and a constant inequality of treatment, that urged the lukewarm and the ambitious to change their religion.
The intendants of the provinces—the new creation of a government, that aspired to a stronger national unity—anxious to make themselves agreeable to the court and the council, did not omit to pronounce for the Jesuits against the pastors, and for the bishops against the provincial synods or the consistories, whenever there was a pretext, however frivolous, that could be made available.
Nearly all the Parliaments pursued the same course, not through religious fanaticism, but through that spirit which in all ages, among the Pagans as in Christendom, has constituted the magistracy the guardians of ancient laws and traditional customs. The advocate-general, Omer Talon, said, in the great days of Poitiers, in 1634, that the pretended Reformed, being only suffered by toleration, the matters regarding them ought not to be counted as favourable, and that the most rigorous interpretation ought, on the contrary, to be applied against them.
Thus in the questions brought before the tribunals, they could only count upon the strict right, or rather upon what it was not possible to deny to them without flagrant injustice. Out of every severe decree, a hostile law immediately arose against them, and by one restriction and another, they successively lost what the Edict of Nantes had conceded to them.
The universities and colleges, where clerical influence was dominant, invented difficulty upon difficulty, against conferring academic degrees upon the religionists, and at length these degrees were only granted upon certificates of attendance at mass.
As for the relations between private individuals of the two religions, there is a distinction to be drawn. The men of letters, and the people of the middle class, the respectable folks—to use the language of the period—generally lived on good terms with each other. We know that the French Academy was founded by members of both communions. Such was also the origin of many learned societies, at Nismes and elsewhere. “Long before the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes,” says Segrais, “the (Roman) Catholics and Huguenots lived here [at Caen] on good terms; they ate, drank, played, and took their amusements together, and left each other freely, some for the mass, others for the sermon, without any scandal on one side or the other.”
But in the body of the people, more subjected to the teaching of the priesthood, prejudices and hatreds were rife. Whence resulted vexatious interferences with the rights of freedom, local privileges, as the corporations of trades, and in the small appointments in the gift of the municipal councils. Whence also arose acts of violence on the least pretence, against the places of worship, against the property, against the persons; and when it was dared, attacks became more regular and more general, and were habitually headed by some ignorant parish vicar, or some abject monk.
By what has been said, we may judge of the condition of the Reformed after the Edict of Grace. They had, at intervals, days of repose, which permitted them to apply themselves to theological learning, to develop their ordinary instruction, and to cultivate the industrial arts. But this rest was uncertain, this calm unquiet, so to speak, and persecution soon went on increasing, until the favourable moment appeared for the annihilation of the French Reformation. We shall only relate what is most important.[81]