XV.
The end of this period is the counterpart of the last years which preceded it. A century before, from 1660 to 1685, each day witnessed new acts of tyranny, and laid a heavier yoke upon the neck of the Reformed people. From 1760 to 1787, on the contrary, each day lightened their burden. Four generations of persecutors and of victims had perished in the interval.
The sanguinary executions that we have just related, far from injuring the Reformed churches, turned to their advantage. Respectable people blushed to resemble, in the most distant degree, the judges and priests of Toulouse. They became tolerant as much upon a point of honour, as through a sentiment of justice. The Prince de Beauveau, who succeeded the Marshal de Thomond in the government of Languedoc, was loyal, generous, and also religious. He had several interviews with the patriarch of the desert, Paul Rabaut, and granted to the Protestants all he could under the existing régime of the laws of intolerance.
Fifteen months after the death of Rochette and Calas, in June, 1763, a national synod was held in Languedoc. All the provinces, with the exception of those of the north, were represented at it. The pastors and elders, emboldened by public opinion, addressed a new petition to the king, and held firmer language in speaking to their co-religionists. “All the members of the synod,” they said, “have renewed with a holy alacrity, as well in their own name, as in that of their provinces, the solemn promise to maintain with all their power ... that union so just and so advantageous, by persevering in the profession of the same faith, in the celebration of the same worship, the practice of the same morality, the exercise of the same discipline, and in rendering each other the mutual help and services which show that, like the first Christians, they are only of one heart and one soul.”
Local or personal vexations annoyed the churches, but without intimidating them, or disturbing their tranquillity. In Poitou and elsewhere, the faithful had prepared houses of prayer, which were demolished by order of the public authorities, and some soldiers were even billeted upon a few families. The same was also done in Béarn, which was a puerile parody of the dragonnades.
In the county of Poix, the Protestants had opened schools: they were suppressed. At Nismes, they carried seats to the places of service, and went thither in bodies: this was forbidden them. These unworthy molestations were the last breath of expiring intolerance.
The last religious meeting, said to have been surprised and attacked, was one near Orange, in 1767. Eight Protestants of respectable station allowed themselves to be sensed, and held responsible for the remainder. The officer who arrested them was more embarrassed than his captives, and offered the opportunity of evasion. They answered, however, “No; it is for the public authorities to liberate us.” They were released at the expiration of two months.
The pastor Berenger was also condemned to capital punishment in the same year, 1767, by the Parliament of Grenoble, as contumacious. He was executed in effigy in the town of Mens. Lastly, two pastors were arrested in Brie in 1774, and thrown into prison. One died there at the end of nine days; the other was set at liberty, but sent to Guienne by a lettre de cachet.
There were Protestant convicts confined at Toulon so late as 1769; exemplifying the shocking contradiction of people detained in chains for acts, which the government had ceased to punish. This was in the end understood, and they were all liberated. At the same time, too, the old tower of Constance, at Argues-Mortes, was set open. Some of the women confined there had reached extreme old age, and had passed more than half their lives in this confinement.
But the treasury was the most difficult oppressor to overcome. If there were no longer imprisonments, it was still compulsory to pay heavy fines, and suffer ruinous extortions. The religionists were squeezed at one time by the judiciary bodies, at another by the administrative power, and paid in a manner double taxes, of which a very small proportion found its way into the treasury.
Many flocks, unknown until this time, because they hid themselves in the sanctuary of the domestic roof; began to show themselves. Lyons and Marseilles had their pastors. Sancerre, Orleans, Nanteuil en Brie, Asnières, and the Protestants of Picardy and Artois, endeavoured to reconstitute their respective churches.
Normandy was more advanced. It possessed two or three pastors, Louis Campredon, Jean Godefroy, and a minister of Dauphiny, Alexandre Ranc, who established himself in the province for a couple of years. The little town of Bolbec was the centre of this Protestant population. It would appear that the abduction of young girls continued there after the year 1760; for we read in a petition of the inhabitants of Bolbec, to whom Louis XV. had granted an exemption from taxes, to help them to rebuild their town, which had been destroyed by fire: “Sire, to what purpose shall we build houses, if we are not sure of dwelling in them with our families?” (1763.)
At Paris, the Reformed attended the service of the Dutch chapel, a neutral ground, which enabled them to discharge their duties towards God, without openly contravening the ordinances.
The Protestants maintained at their common charge one or two general agents in Paris, whose official character was not, indeed, and could not be recognised by the ministers of state, but their intervention was publicly accepted, and they proffered their advice in all important affairs. This mission was confided, in 1763, to Court de Gébelin, son of the pastor Antoine Court.
He inherited from his father a great devotion for the cause of the Reformed churches. Upright, laborious, intimately connected with men of letters, and known for his philological works, he brought to the service of his co-religionists an indefatigable activity and numerous social relations. He was esteemed at court; he was sought after in the world; and if he died too soon to witness the abolition of the edicts of Louis XIV., he contributed powerfully to their abandonment.
Still, the position of the Protestants at the time we have reached, was singularly anomalous. There was [in it] nothing definitive, or regular: moral order was enforced by means of legal disorder. The arbitrary principle appeared at every turn; long circumlocutions [were used] to avoid the letter of the laws without directly violating them; the pastors [were] half-recognised, half-proscribed, being neither public nor private persons; the civil condition of so large a number of French people [was] delivered up to uncertain chances; justice [was] wavering and contradictory; royalty soliloquized that it must do something, and did nothing; the subordinate agents of Church and State turned this precarious and disordered establishment to their profit by infamous bargains—a position which it is to be hoped, for the honour of France, will never be witnessed again.
The political and philosophical writers of the eighteenth century contributed largely to the triumph of toleration; but, it must be avowed, they were influenced neither by zeal nor sympathy for the fate of the French Protestants. Although they were so prompt in raising bold and delicate questions, they did not attack the cruel ordinances of Louis XIV., and never seemed to have heard of the lengthened sorrows of more than a million of their fellow-citizens.
Montesquieu, who has something to say on every subject in his Lettres Persanes, does not mention the oppressed Huguenots. In his Spirit of the Laws, he seems to be rather adverse than favourable to them; for he accuses the Calvinists of inclining to republican institutions; and when he would recommend toleration, he pleads through the lips of a Lisbon Jewess. He says, in another place: “This is the fundamental principle of political laws in the matter of religion. When it is optional in a state to receive a new religion, or not to receive it, it ought not to be established; but when it is established, it ought to be tolerated.”[132]
This left the question as regards the Reformed of France, entirely undecided; for the laws precisely denied that they had yet been established in the kingdom.
Helvetius, Diderot, and D’Alembert vouchsafed them not a word of benevolence. Rousseau, the child of the town of Geneva, displayed much greater desire to attack (Roman) Catholicism than to defend Protestantism, and his correspondence shows that when he was invited by some of his friends to write in favour of the victims of the laws of Louis XIV., he refused. He thought it enough to sketch in a few lines the argument of a plea, which he never resumed; and in his Social Contract he supported the principles of a state religion.
Voltaire did the Protestants a service in the affair of Calas, and by his treatise on toleration; but further than this, he never made himself exactly acquainted with the sufferings of this greatly oppressed people, or showed any care to advocate a remedy for them. In his book upon the Siècle de Louis XIV., he speaks of Calvinism in a slighting tone, and dwells upon petty curious details, rather than upon useful matters. In his Précis du Siècle de Louis XIV., he explains at great length the quarrels with regard to the bull Unigenitus, the refusal of the sacraments, and the expulsion of the Jesuits; but says not a word about the Protestants.
There are many causes that will explain this indifference. The Huguenots, as we believe we have remarked before, have borne the penalty, not of the evil they had done, but of that which had been inflicted upon them. After being violently cut off from the rest of the French nation, they were treated as strangers, whose misfortunes deserved no sympathy; and their isolation enabled their adversaries to assail them, from generation to generation, with calumnies which have found a ready credence in the minds of even cultivated men.
Let this be added, that the writers of the philosophic school regarded the Calvinistic doctrines with no affection. They entertained a repugnance for the austere principles and rigid discipline maintained by the Reformed churches. (Roman) Catholicism and Protestantism were for them nothing more than two forms of the same superstitions. There is a saying of Voltaire that denotes exactly what he thought thereon. When a Protestant was presented to him, who had been released from the hulks of Toulon through his intercession with the Duke de Choiseul, he said to him: “What would they have done with you? How could they find it in their conscience to chain and place a man at the oar, who had committed no crime, but that of praying to God in bad French!”
It may be conceived that the pastors of the desert were not very anxious to have recourse to the assistance of the philosophers; they feared the influence such auxiliaries might exercise upon their flocks, and perhaps over themselves. The pastor Pierre Encontre wrote to Paul Rabaut upon the subject of the treatise on toleration: “As for myself, who have read it very hastily, I have found in it much good, but sadly mixed with poison!” And the veteran defender of the Protestant faith observed in his turn: “Penetrated with grief at the sight of the ravages made by the books of the infidels, I can only moderate it by the thought that so dire a situation cannot endure.” (1769.)
But if the philosophers could consign the condition of the Protestants to oblivion, they compelled the attention of the legists, the parliament men and statesmen. The fiction of the new converts had become untenable. Not a single honest magistrate persisted in believing, according to the letter of the law, that there were none but (Roman) Catholics in France; and the expectation of bringing the children to (Roman) Catholicism by the constraint exercised upon the parents, had been too completely deceived for any to appeal to this course again.
As the century advanced, the baptisms and marriages of the desert multiplied. Whether the priests were exacting or not in their proofs, this question, so grave in the first fifty years of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, had lost all its importance. The Protestants rejected at any price the intrusion of the (Roman) Catholic clergy into their religious duties.
What course then was to be taken? Births, marriages, burials, were all without rule, and without guarantee, for a considerable part of the nation, whilst a shocking contradiction of jurisprudence prevailed in these matters. One Parliament accepted the pastor’s certificate, and treated the marriages contracted in the desert as valid; another Parliament nullified them; and shameless collateral relations disgraced the tribunals by claiming a succession to possessions, to which, according to eternal justice, that spoke with a louder voice than iniquitous ordinances, they had no right. The confusion was intolerable.
Yet an issue must be found. It is true that the problem was more difficult than might be thought or even imagined in our days. Only complete and absolute principles can resolve questions with trenchant conciseness. Full religious liberty, and perfect equality of sects, would have cleared away every difficulty: but no politician before 1789, would have dared to make the proposition. The efforts of the times, then, were exhausted in devising middle measures and laborious compromises, which, without granting to the Protestants rights common to their fellow-citizens, should restore to them their civil condition.
The magistracy, the hierarchy of the Romish church, the superior public administrative authority, and royalty itself interposed, each distinctly and apart in this matter, until the promulgation of the Edict of 1787.