XI.
The government did not accede on all points to the demands of the bishops; it neither dared nor wished [to do so]. Nevertheless it complied with a great deal, and all the more in that it required to recruit its finances, [which had been] exhausted by the war. The prelates consented to increase their voluntary donations, but under the express condition that the extirpation of heresy should be prosecuted with more rigour.
The Protestants, for their part, did not cease by every peaceable means to petition for the redress of their grievances. Seven pastors of the desert addressed to Louis XV., on the 21st December, 1750, a new and respectful petition, in which, after having stated that they regarded the aggregate worship, baptisms, marriages, and sacraments of their communion as a matter of conscience, they said: “Your troops pursue us in the deserts as if we were wild beasts; our property is confiscated; our children are torn from us; we are condemned to the galleys; and although our ministers continually exhort us to discharge our duty as good citizens and faithful subjects, a price is set upon their heads, and when they are taken, they are cruelly executed.”
Louis XV. and his council gave no heed to this petition any more than they had done to the others. The Protestants were in the depth of the provinces; they had neither voluntary donations to offer to the government, nor powerful protectors to invoke. They were regarded with suspicion from the very fact of their being proscribed, and the injury, which had been inflicted, was the best reason for inflicting greater severity upon them.
These details of the sentiments of the court, and the incessant provocations of the clergy, serve to explain the renewal of the persecutions, which the Protestants endured from 1750 to 1755. The intendant Lenain, who was naturally a rigid man, but had treated the Protestants more mildly, as he had become better acquainted with them, was replaced in Languedoc by the Viscount Guignard de Saint Priest, who, without being either fanatically or cruelly disposed, unhesitatingly executed the most violent measures. The meetings near Cayla, Vigan, and Anduze, were again attacked. In the last of these encounters, three men were killed, others wounded, and many led to prison; whilst the pursuit was carried on with such bitter determination, that it became necessary to renounce religious service on the Sabbath.
The intendant received orders to proceed to a general re-baptism of children, and to a re-benediction of marriages throughout the whole Reformed population. The words [of this order] were as barbarous as the thing itself. With this view, he convoked the notables at Nismes and elsewhere, in 1751, and commanded them to take their children to the parochial churches within a fortnight’s time; in default of which they would be punished with the utmost rigour of the ordinances; and the curates and (Roman) Catholic consuls were directed to prepare lists of the recusants. Guignard de Saint Priest took the trouble, ridiculous under the circumstances, to start a chapter of controversy, like a doctor of the Sorbonne, and to establish that (Roman) Catholic baptism being recognised by the religionists as effective, their rejection of it would be a senseless obstinacy.
The Protestants replied to this military controversialist, that the curates interpreted the question quite differently; that they exacted the promise to rear the children in the Romish faith, that they treated and punished those of the baptized as having relapsed, who did not remain (Roman) Catholics, and that the clergy had made use of the following maxim: “The Church has power over those, who receive baptism, just as the king, neither more nor less, has full right over the coin which he issues from his mint.”
Finding his reasons fail, the Viscount de Saint Priest resumed a part better suited to his character, and pronounced the most fearful threats against the obstinate. The oppressed were terrified. They abandoned their houses, fields, workshops, and factories, and fled for safety to the woods and mountain caverns.
The intendants anger increased; and on the 1st of September, 1751, he wrote to one of his subordinates: “They are mistaken if they hope that the king’s mind will change, or that I shall omit to execute the precise orders which his majesty has given me on the subject. I am willing, however, to grant them a short delay.” But the desertion went on increasing, and Saint Priest had recommenced the dragonnades with billets conceived in these terms: “The Sieur N., cavalier of the maréchaussée, will remain in garrison at the house of * * *, until he has taken his children to the church to undergo the ceremony of baptism by the curate of the place; and he will exact, for his pay, four livres a day, until perfect obedience has been shown, at the same time informing him that the garrison will be reinforced.”
A commandant of the name of Pontuan, or Pontual, shouted in the streets of Cayla: “Let nobody deceive himself; all the Huguenots shall obey or perish, if I die myself!” The soldiers, aided by some of the [Roman] Catholics, and frequently accompanied by the local priests, tracked the children about the country, seized them as if they were malefactors, and dragged them to the church.
“Some,” says Antoine Court, “ten, twelve, and fourteen years old, absolutely refused to be led to the church, and it was necessary to drag them there by main force; some uttered piercing shrieks that went to the heart; others threw themselves like young lions upon those who tried to seize them; others, again, who had no other means of showing their despite, turned the ceremony into ridicule which they were forced to undergo: when they were covered with a white cloth, and the water was about to be sprinkled upon their heads, they exclaimed: ‘Are they going to shave us?’ The curate and the garrison of Lussan so greatly tortured the children of the village in dragging them to the church, where they shut them up under lock and key, that some of them told the curate they seemed to see the devil whenever they looked upon him, and others, still more desperate, spat in his face.”[122]
In such a state, in the midst of these brutal and degrading scenes, baptism was administered to them by force! If we were told that such acts had been committed by a horde of savages, we should scarcely believe it; and yet these things took place in France within a century of our time!
When he had effected the re-baptism of Cayla, the commandant Pontual, whose zeal increased with the gratification he experienced in the capture of the children, continued his expeditions throughout Vaunage, the whole length of the coast, placing sometimes as many as fifteen or twenty garrison soldiers in the houses of the absentees and the obstinate, whose property they sacked and demolished.
The court of Versailles was rejoiced at the news of so many re-baptized children, and ordered the work to be prosecuted in the mountains. But this was the limit of Pontual’s exploits. The old recollections of the Camisards were awakened; and some of the peasantry, rather encouraged than restrained by their minister Coste, resumed the musket, declaring that on the first act of violence against their children, blood should be spilled. Neither the curates nor the soldiers heeded the menace; and in an ambush of the Cévenoles, three priests fell on the 10th of August, 1752, two mortally wounded, as they guided the military in an expedition into Lédignan, on the banks of the Gardon.
These gunshots produced an extraordinary effect. The soldiers evacuated the hills; the intendant stopped short; Versailles took alarm; people remembered the war of the Camisards; the re-baptisms were instantly abandoned, and for ever. If the ministers of state had been fanatics, civil war would have broken out again with all its horrors; but they were only unbelievers who parodied, while they laughed at, the passions of bygone generations, and they halted at the first symptoms of a serious conflict.
Emigration also, which had been renewed upon a large scale, contributed to calm their factitious anger. It was true that the same precautions had been taken to guard the passes as in 1685; but the Protestants had used the same means to escape the vigilance of the soldiers. Languedoc, Dauphiny, Saintonge, already impoverished by the Edict of Revocation, were threatened with the loss of the last remains of their industry and commerce. The frivolity of Versailles retreated before this prospect.
A few weeks after this exhibition of insurgency, the Marquis de Paulmy, the minister of war, visited the fortresses of Languedoc. Being a man of prudence and integrity, he received the complaints of the Protestants with kindness, and forbade the subaltern officers to maltreat them.
A pastor, François Benezet, had been condemned to death during the persecutions; he was executed at Montpellier, on the 27th March, 1752. Harassed by the importunities of an abbé, who continually cried, “You are damned; hell will be your lot if you do not abjure;” he replied, “If you were persuaded that there is a hell, would you persecute me as you do? And should I have been condemned to lose my life upon the gallows, merely because I have addressed a few exhortations to my brethren?”
He endeavoured to speak at the foot of the gibbet; as usual, his voice was drowned by the noise of drums. He died singing the 51st Psalm. Benezet left behind him a child of two years old, and a pregnant wife. Like Louis Ranc and Désubas, he was only twenty-six years old.
Another pastor, Jean Molines, did not display the same courage. He abjured before the scaffold; but until his last moment he repented his weakness. He withdrew, inconsolable, to Holland; and although he was reinstated in the communion of the faithful, after having given proofs of profound remorse, he never forgave himself. An eyewitness relates, that his countenance, furrowed with wrinkles, bore the imprint of despair. His sight was dimmed with tears; and his head hung heavily upon his breast. For thirty years he wandered about insensible to everything around him, as one who reckoned himself no longer among the living, and died with the one regret of not having won the crown of martyrdom.
While he was in prison, some priests published a Letter and Abjuration of the Sieur Molines, in his name. The Protestants answered this work of pious fraud: “We cannot conceive how his converters can have let him date his abjuration from the citadel of Montpellier. A fortress has never yet been a school of enlightenment, or a means of convincing people of the truth of religion. Every retractation that comes from a fettered hand is so eminently suspicious, that no one would dare to adduce it before a tribunal.”