XIV.
The approach of the year 1760 witnessed a sensible relaxation of persecution. The laws of intolerance were not, indeed, abrogated, but they were relaxed by desuetude; for knowledge, public opinion, the interest of the state, the relations of commerce and society, tended every day to approximate the (Roman) Catholics to the Protestants. The differences of confession were rapidly disappearing before the common name and quality of Frenchmen.
The clergy perceived this with dismay, and in their general assembly of 1760, they addressed urgent remonstrances to the king against this remission of the laws: “Nearly every barrier opposed to Calvinism,” they said, “has been successively broken down. Ministers and preachers, reared in heretical schools and foreign nations, have inundated some of our provinces. They have held consistories and synods, and are constantly presiding over assemblies, sometimes secret, sometimes solemn. They baptize, administer the [the Lord’s] supper, preach their erroneous doctrines, and perform the marriage ceremony. At first the Calvinists only demanded the power of celebrating their marriages in a purely civil and profane form; and although they feigned to limit themselves to this permission, it was evident that it would, of itself, lead to the entire toleration of Calvinism. Now this toleration is openly and loudly preached!”
Toleration, it would hence appear, was in the eyes of the priests, an impious and immoral maxim. Their sayings were unheeded, and the nation kept the even tenor of its new way.
Military and civil authorities, governors, intendants, subordinates, officers, magistrates, were alike ashamed, both before the tribunal of their own conscience and that of public opinion, of persecuting individuals whom they were compelled to esteem as men of honour and good citizens. Rulhières cites some curious instances of this: “Even the troops,” he says “softened the inhumanity of the orders they had to execute. The officers slackened the march of their detachments, that the assembled religionists might have time to escape. They took care that a sufficient warning should precede their approach; and they purposely followed circuitous roads, to throw their soldiers off the scent.”[129]
Sometimes the Protestants were still summoned by official means, to return to the strict execution of the edicts: but this was nothing more than the last discharge of artillery after a lost battle.
Thus, in 1761, the Marshal de Thomond, who had been appointed to the government of Languedoc, commanded the religionists to reverse their marriages and the baptisms of their children within six days. This order caused much astonishment, but no dismay. No one feared any serious conflict, and the simple force of inertia effectively defeated the measure; whilst the marshal himself undertook the charge of transmitting the petitions of the pastors to Louis XV. In three months the whole affair was forgotten.
Two synods were convoked in Lower Languedoc, in the year 1760. One comprised twenty pastors and fifty-four elders; the other fifteen pastors and thirty-eight elders. These gatherings were not publicly announced, but neither were they held in secret; appearances were preserved, though the law was disregarded.
Gradually, as persecution relaxed, the language of the leaders of the churches became more resolute, as might be expected. Paul Rabaut and his colleague, Paul Vincent, in 1761, addressed a pastoral letter to the Reformed of Nismes, exhorting them to abstain from the slightest act of adhesion to the Church of Rome. They were no longer to assist at mass, to have their marriages blessed by the priest, or their children baptized at the (Roman) Catholic church, even when the curates remitted altogether their exactions; they were enjoined to be entirely and constantly faithful to the practices of the Reformed faith. The pastors were true to their duty in imposing these injunctions; they could not require less, since it is of the essence of every religion to be sufficient for the wants of its own members. The Romish clergy did the same thing after the 9th Thermidor.
The meetings became more regular; they were held nearer and nearer to the towns and villages; for proximity, to use the customary phrase, largely increased the number of assistants. These meetings were held in some places under the eye of the magistrates. The Protestants of Nismes performed their religious services within cannon-shot of the citadel, and those of Montauban in the suburbs.
Dating from 1755, the religionists confined at Toulon, the captives detained in the different provinces of the kingdom, and the prisoners of the tower of Constance, began to be set at liberty with greater facility, but only one by one, and frequently, it must be confessed, through the intervention of foreign influences, or by means of ransom. The liberation of a religious convict was effected for nothing, on a letter from Voltaire, or some Protestant prince; otherwise, it cost a thousand crowns; and afterwards, two thousand livres; the rate of ransom gradually lowering with the advance of public morals. Yet in 1759 there were forty-one prisoners still confined at the galleys, whose only crime was that they had been present at a desert meeting, or had sheltered a pastor.
This improved condition was, however, disturbed in a horrible manner by the capital execution of four persons in one case, and of a venerable old man in another. It was the sad privilege of the town of Toulouse, which had erected the first scaffold against the disciples of the Reformation in 1532, to spill the last blood on account of an heretical offence in 1762.
Toulouse, which has made a considerable advance in enlightenment since this period, was at that time almost altogether wanting in intelligence and commercial spirit. It was filled with nobles and Parliament men, who had bent beneath the servile yoke of their traditional prejudices. By their side swarmed legions of priests and monks, more Spanish than French, who kept up an abject superstition by then processions, their relics, and their confraternities. Below them vegetated an ignorant and fanatic people. Every year the Church pompously celebrated at Toulouse the commemoration of the great southern massacre of Saint Bartholomew in 1562; and Toulouse was the stage of the last executions.
François Rochette, a pastor, aged twenty-five years, who performed the service of the numerous churches of Quercy, had gone to recruit his exhausted health by means of the mineral waters of Saint Antonin. He was invited, on the road, to administer baptism, and while crossing the country in the neighbourhood of Caussade, during the night of the 13th of September, 1761, was arrested with the two peasants who were acting as his guides. They were suspected of belonging to a band of robbers who infested the province. The mistake was soon perceived; and as Rochette was not surprised in the exercise of his functions, he might easily have escaped by concealing his profession. Those, who interrogated him went even so far as to point out to him this means of acquittal, but he refused to buy his deliverance by the least disavowal of truth.
The morning spread the news of his arrest with the rapidity of lightning through the whole country. The sorrowing and anxious Protestants assembled together, and urgently solicited the liberation of their pastor. A fair was held that day at Caussade, and the town was crowded with people. The (Roman) Catholics conceived the notion that the Huguenots had flown to arms, and intended a universal massacre. The tocsin was sounded on every side; the villages rose en masse, and the (Roman) Catholic peasantry stuck a white cross in their hats, in imitation of the assassins of Saint Bartholomew. The night of the 14th was spent in casting bullets, preparing cartouches, and many a curate joined in and hastened the arming. The next day, the whole population was on the alert, ready for the direst excesses, and it was with the utmost difficulty the magistrates could restrain them.
Three brothers named Grenier, glass-manufacturers in the county of Foix, happened to be at this time in Montauban. Hearing that the pastor Rochette had been arrested, that the Protestants were threatened with attack, and that a terrible contest was imminent, they hastened to the spot of danger, with the first arms they could snatch up in their haste, a sword and two guns. They were pursued, butchers’ dogs were put upon their track, and at length they were captured and dragged to the prison of Rochette.
The Parliament of Toulouse took cognizance of the matter, as if it were an affair of state, and the trial was conducted with the most glaring partiality. Paul Rabaut and his companions, astounded with a severity so long forgotten, fruitlessly petitioned the Duke de Richelieu, the Duke de Fitz-James, and Marie-Adelaide de France. The accused sent long justificatory memorials to the court in vain. A sentence, passed on the 18th of February, 1762, condemned François Rochette to death, as convicted of having exercised the functions of a Protestant minister, and the three brothers Grenier, as guilty of armed sedition. The other accused, who were poor peasants that had never committed the shadow of a crime, were condemned to the galleys.
When the sentence was read to Rochette and his three fellow-sufferers, they exclaimed with one voice, “Well! since we must die, let us beseech God to accept the sacrifice we offer Him.” The pastor prayed with his friends, and the court wept at the sight.
Four curates came to exhort them to abjure, and one of them threatened the religionists with hell, if they persisted in their heresy. “We are about to appear,” replied the pastor, “before a more equitable judge than you, even before Him who shed His blood for our salvation.”
They spent their time in prayer and pious exhortations, and encouraged each other for the final struggle. All the assistants, sentries, and gaolers, were moved at their calm and noble resignation. Rochette, seeing a soldier more concerned than the rest of his comrades, said to him, “My friend, are you not ready to die for the king; why then should you grieve that I should die for God?”
The curates renewed their efforts to proselytize. “It is for your salvation,” said they, “that we are here.” The answer of one of the prisoners was, “If you were at Geneva, ready to die in your bed (for no one is slain there on account of his religion), would you be pleased if four ministers came, under the pretence of zeal, to persecute you until your last breath? Do not, then, unto others that which you would not wish to be done unto yourselves.”
On the 19th of February, at two o’clock in the afternoon, the mournful procession started on its way. Rochette was, according to the terms of the sentence, bareheaded, barefooted, with a halter hung about his neck, from which, before and behind, labels were suspended, with these words, Minister of the pretended Reformed religion.
When the array passed before the church of Saint Etienne, an attempt was made to force him, in pursuance of the terms of the Parliament’s condemnation, to kneel with a torch of yellow wax in his hand, and to ask pardon of God, the king, and justice, for all his crimes and misdeeds.
Rochette stepped down from the tumbril, and instead of abjuring or making a confession which his heart denied, he pronounced on his knees the following words: “I beseech God to pardon me for all my sins, and I firmly believe that they have been washed away by the blood of Jesus Christ, who has redeemed us so dearly. I have no pardon to ask of the king, whom I have ever honoured as the Lord’s anointed, and loved as the father of my native land; I have ever been a good and faithful subject, and of this I believe my judges to be convinced. I have always preached to my flock patience, obedience, and submission; and my sermons, which you possess, are summed up in these words, ‘Fear God, honour the king.’ If I have contravened the law touching religious assemblies, it was by God’s commandments I contravened them; God must be obeyed before men. As for justice and the law, I am guilty of no offence against them, and I pray God may pardon my judges.”
Every door, balcony, window, roof, and approach near to the place of execution, was covered with spectators. “Toulouse,” says Count de Gébelin, an eyewitness, who related these circumstances, “Toulouse, that city drunk with the blood of martyrs, seemed a Protestant town. People asked what was the creed of these heretics; and when they heard our martyrs speak of Jesus Christ and of his death, every one was surprised and afflicted. They were infinitely touched, also, with the lofty, yet mild bearing of the three brothers, which compelled their admiration almost as much as the inexpressible serenity of the minister, whose graceful and spiritual physiognomy, whose words full of firmness and courage, and whose youth, filled every beholder with interest, knowing, as all did, that he only died because he disdained to save his life by a lie.”[130]
Rochette was executed first. He exhorted his companions until the end, and sang the canticle of the Protestant martyrs: This is the blessed day. “Die a Catholic,” said the executioner, moved with pity. “Judge which is the better religion,” replied Rochette, “that which persecutes, or that which is persecuted.”
The youngest of the three brothers (he was only twenty-two years of age), hid his face in his hands to shut out this tragic scene. The two others contemplated it with calmness. As they were gentlemen,[131] their sentence was, to be beheaded They embraced each other, recommending their souls to God. The eldest offered his head to the axe first. When it came to the turn of the last, the executioner said: “You have seen your brothers die; change, lest you perish like them.” “Do thy duty,” said the martyr, and his head rolled upon the scaffold.
Count de Gébelin adds, as he concludes his recital: “Every one present returned home in silence, in a state of consternation, and unable to persuade themselves that there could be such courage and such cruelty in the world; and I, who describe it, cannot refrain from tears of joy and sadness, as I contemplate their blessed lot, and that our church should be still capable of affording examples of piety and firmness that will compare with the most illustrious monuments of the primitive church.”
Eighteen days afterwards, on the 9th of March, 1762, the scaffold rose again at Toulouse for the execution of Jean Calas, an old man of sixty-eight. The whole world is familiar with his trial, and all its circumstances. Every one knows that the unfortunate Calas was accused of having murdered his son, Marc-Anthony, in order to prevent him, it was said, from embracing (Roman) Catholicism. Every one knows that the priests of Toulouse inflamed the fanaticism of the populace by carrying the body of this young man in procession, who had really committed suicide, and by representing him upon a funereal bier as a skeleton holding in one hand a scroll, on which was written, abjuration of heresy, and in the other the palm-branch of the martyr. Every one, in short, knows that the magistracy and the clergy accused Calvin and his disciples of declaring abjuration a lawful cause of infanticide, and pretended that the assassination of Calas had been decided in a conventicle of Protestants.
These calumnies, which were not less stupid than detestable, were so credited by the fanatic people, that the advocate of Calas thought it necessary to procure from Geneva a solemn declaration, signed by the pastors and professors, attesting that neither synod nor any assembly whatsoever of the Reformation had ever approved of the doctrine that a father has the right of killing his child to prevent his changing his religion. Paul Rabaut published under this head, La Calumnie confondue (“Calumny Confounded”), a work in which he denied these execrable allegations with all the vehemence of a mind profoundly indignant. The Parliament of Toulouse answered it by ordering that the book should be torn and burned by the hand of the hangman.
In the most horrible agonies of the torture, Calas made no avowal, for he had none to make. He continually repeated: “Where there is no crime, there are no accomplices.” He suffered death with the serenity of innocence and the firmness of faith. His execution lasted two hours, his sentence having been to be broken on the wheel. He uttered all the while no words but those of piety and charity, breathing pardon to his judges, and expressive of his pain that the young Lavaïsse should have been implicated in his misfortunes.
Father Bourges said to him: “My dear brother, you have but a moment to live. By that God whom you invoke, in whom you hope, and who died for you, I conjure you to glorify the truth.” “I have said it,” answered Calas; “I die innocent. Jesus Christ, innocence himself, was willing to die a more cruel death.”
“Unhappy man,” cried one of his judges, “see the faggot that shall reduce thy body to ashes; confess the truth.” The old man gave him no answer; he turned away his head, and received the final blow.
“The Fathers Bourges and Caldaguès,” writes Count de Gébelin, in his twenty-third Toulousaine, “were honourable persons. These two monks have conferred the highest praises upon his memory. Although Calas died a Protestant, they have fearlessly said—Thus died our martyrs of old.”
The widow and children of Calas demanded the repeal of this iniquitous sentence. Voltaire supported their cause with his powerful voice. The most celebrated advocates, Elie de Beaumont, Mariette, Loyseau de Mauléon, interfered; and on the 9th of March, 1765, three years exactly, day for day, after the fatal execution, a decree of the council reversed the judgment of the Parliament of Toulouse, with the unanimity of fifty votes. The sentence that restored the family of Calas, tore its bloody axe from the hands of fanaticism, and branded its forehead with an ignominy that will never be effaced.