The misfortunes were redoubling. From Poitou the persecution had extended through all the provinces. Superintendent Foucauld obtained the conversion in mass of the province of Bearn. He egged on the soldiers to torture the inhabitants of the houses they were quartered in, commanding them to keep awake all those who would not give in to other tortures. The dragoons relieved one another so as not to succumb themselves to the punishment they were making others undergo. Beating of drums, blasphemies, shouts, the crash of furniture which they hurled from side to side, commotion in which they kept these poor people in order to force them to be on their feet and hold their eyes open, were the means they employed to deprive them of rest. To pinch, prick, and haul them about, to lay them upon burning coals, and a hundred other cruelties, were the sport of these butchers. All they thought most about was how to find tortures which should be painful without being deadly, reducing their hosts thereby to such a state that they knew not what they were doing, and promised anything that was wanted of them in order to escape from those barbarous bands. Languedoc, Guienne, Angoumois, Saintonge, all the provinces in which the Reformers were numerous, underwent the same fate. The self-restraining character of the Norman people, their respect for law, were manifested even amidst persecution; the children were torn away from Protestant families, and the chapels were demolished by act of Parliament; the soldiery were less violent than elsewhere, but the magistrates were more inveterate. “God has not judged us unworthy to suffer ignominy for His name,” said the ministers condemned by the Parliament for having performed the offices of their ministry. “The king has taken no cognizance of the case,” exclaimed one of the accused, Legendre, pastor of Rouen; “he has relied upon the judges; it is not his Majesty who shall give account before God; you shall be responsible, and you alone; you who, convinced as you are of our innocence, have nevertheless condemned us and branded us.” “The Parliament of Normandy has just broken the ties which held us bound to our churches,” said Peter du Bosq. The banished ministers took the road to Holland. The seaboard provinces were beginning to be dispeopled. A momentary disturbance, which led to belief in a rising of the Reformers in the Cevennes and the Vivarais, served as pretext for redoubled rigor. Dauphiny and Languedoc were given up to the soldiery; murder was no longer forbidden them, it was merely punishing rebels; several pastors were sentenced to death; Homel, minister of Soyon in the Vivarais, seventy-five years of age, was broken alive on the wheel. Abjurations multiplied through terror. “There have been sixty thousand conversions in the jurisdiction of Bordeaux, and twenty thousand in that of Montauban,” wrote Louvois to his father in the first part of September, 1685; “the rapidity with which this goes on is such, that, before the end of the month, there will not remain ten thousand religionists in the district of Bordeaux, in which there were a hundred and fifty thousand on the 15th of last month.” “The towns of Nimes, Alais, Uzes, Villeneuve, and some others, are entirely converted,” writes the Duke of Noailles to Louvois in the month of October, 1685; “those of most note in Nimes made abjuration in church the day after our arrival. There was then a lukewarmness; but matters were put in good train again by means of some billets that I had put into the houses of the most obstinate. I am making arrangements for going and scouring the Uvennes with the seven companies of Barbezieux, and my head shall answer for it that before the 25th of November not a Huguenot shall be left there.”
And a few days later, at Alais—“I no longer know what to do with the troops, for the places in which I had meant to, post them get converted all in a body, and this goes on so quickly that all the men can do is to sleep for a night at the localities to which I send them. It is certain that you may add very nearly a third to the estimate given you of the people of the religion, amounting to the number of a hundred and eighty-two thousand men, and, when I asked you to give me until the, 25th of next month for their complete conversion, I took too long a term, for I believe that by the end of the month all will be settled. I will not, however, omit to tell you that all we have done in these conversions will be nothing but useless, if the king do not oblige the bishops to send good priests to instruct the people who want to hear the gospel preached. But I fear that the king will be worse obeyed in that respect by the priests than by the religionists. I do not tell you this without grounds.” “There is not a courier who does not bring the king great causes for joy,” writes Madame de Maintenon, “that is to say, conversions by thousands. I can quite believe that all these conversions are not sincere, but God makes use of all ways of bringing back heretics. Their children, at any rate, will be Catholics; their outward reunion places them within reach of the truth; pray God to enlighten them all; there is nothing the king has more at heart.”
In the month of August, 1684, she said, “The king has a design of laboring for the entire conversion of the heretics. He often has conferences about it with M. Le Tellier and M. de Chateauneuf, whereat I was given to understand that I should not be one too many. M. de Chateauneuf proposed measures which are not expedient. There must be no precipitation; it must be conversion, not persecution. M. de Louvois was for gentleness, which is not in accordance with his nature and his eagerness to see matters ended. The king is ready to do what is thought most likely to conduce to the good of religion. Such an achievement will cover him with glory before God and before men. He will have brought back all his subjects into the bosom of the church, and will have destroyed the heresy which his predecessors could not vanquish.”
The king’s glory was about to be complete; the gentleness of Louvois had prevailed; he had found himself obliged to moderate the zeal of his superintendents; “nothing remained but to weed out the religionists of the small towns and villages;” by stretching a point the process had been carried into the principality of Orange, which still belonged to the house of Nassau, on the pretext that the people of that district had received in their chapels the king’s subjects. The Count of Tesse, who had charge of the expedition, wrote to Louvois, “Not only, on one and the same day, did the whole town of Orange become converted, but the state took the same resolution, and the members of the Parliament, who were minded to distinguish themselves by a little more stubbornness, adopted the same course twenty-four hours afterwards. All this was done gently, without violence or disorder. There is only a parson named Chambrun, patriarch of the district, who persists in refusing to listen to reason; for the president, who did aspire to the honor of martyrdom, would, as well as the rest of the Parliament, have turned Mohammedan, if I had desired it. You would not believe how infatuated all these people were, and are still, about the Prince of Orange, his authority, Holland, England, and the Protestants of Germany. I should never end if I were to recount all the foolish and impertinent proposals they have made to me.” M. de Tesse did not tell Louvois that he was obliged to have the pastors of Orange seized and carried off. They were kept twelve years in prison at Pierre-Encise; none but M. de Chambrun, who had been taken to Valence, managed to escape and take refuge in Holland, bemoaning to the end of his days a moment’s weakness. “I was quite exhausted by torture, and I let fall this unhappy expression: ‘Very well, then, I will be reconciled.’ This sin has brought me down as it were into hell itself, and I have looked upon myself as a dastardly soldier who turned his back on the day of battle, and as an unfaithful servant who betrayed the interests of his master.”
The king assembled his council. The lists of converts were so long that there could scarcely remain in the kingdom more than a few thousand recalcitrants. “His Majesty proposed to take an ultimate resolution as regarded the Edict of Nantes,” writes the Duke of Burgundy in a memorandum found amongst his papers. “Monseigneur represented that, according to an anonymous letter he had received the day before, the Huguenots had some expectation of what was coming upon them, that there was perhaps some reason to fear that they would take up arms, relying upon the protection of the princes of their religion, and that, supposing they dared not do so, a great number would leave the kingdom, which would be injurious to commerce and agriculture, and, for that same reason, would weaken the state. The king replied that he had foreseen all for some time past, and had provided for all; that nothing in the world would be more painful to him than to shed a single drop of the blood of his subjects, but that he had armies and good generals whom he would employ in case of need against rebels who courted their own destruction. As for calculations of interest, he thought them worthy of but little consideration in comparison with the advantages of a measure which would restore to religion its splendor, to the state its tranquillity, and to authority all its rights. A resolution was carried unanimously for the suppression of the Edict of Nantes.” The declaration, drawn up by Chancellor Le Tellier and Chateauneuf, was signed by the king on the 15th of October, 1685; it was despatched on the 17th to all the superintendents. The edict of pacification, that great work of the liberal and prudent genius of Henry IV., respected and confirmed in its most important particulars by Cardinal Richelieu, recognized over and over again by Louis XIV. himself, disappeared at a single stroke, carrying with it all hope of liberty, repose, and justice, for fifteen hundred thousand subjects of the king. “Our pains,” said the preamble of the edict, “have had the end we had proposed, seeing that the better and the greater part of our subjects of the religion styled Reformed have embraced the Catholic. The execution of the Edict of Nantes consequently remaining useless, we have considered that we could not do better, for the purpose of effacing entirely the memory of the evils which this false religion has caused in our kingdom, than revoke entirely the aforesaid Edict of Nantes, and all that has been done in favor of the said religion.”
The edict of October 15, 1685, supposed the religion styled Reformed to be already destroyed and abolished. It ordered the demolition of all the chapels that remained standing, and interdicted any assembly or worship; recalcitrant (opiniatres) ministers were ordered to leave the kingdom within fifteen days; the schools were closed; all new-born babies were to be baptized by the parish priests; religionists were forbidden to leave the kingdom on pain of the galleys for the men and confiscation of person and property for the women. “The will of the king,” said superintendent Marillac at Rouen, “is, that there be no more than one religion in this kingdom; it is for the glory of God and the well-being of the state.” Two hours were allowed the Reformers of Rouen for making their abjuration.