A Popular History of France from the Earliest Times, Volume 6

by François Guizot

The Bishop of Frejus had nursed his power more skilfully; he kept the list of benefices, and he alone, it was said, knew how to unloosen the king’s tongue; but he had not calculated upon the pernicious and all-powerful influence of the Marchioness of Prie, favorite “by appointment” (attitree) to the duke. Clever, adroit, depraved, she aspired to govern, and chose for her minister Paris-Duverney, one of the four Dauphinese brothers who had been engaged under the regency in the business of the visa, and the enemies as well as rivals of the Scotsman Law. Whilst the king hunted, and Fleury exercised quietly the measure of power which as yet contented his desires, the duke, blinded by his passion for Madame de Prie, slavishly submissive to her slightest wishes, lavished, according to his favorite’s orders, honors and graces in which she managed to traffic, enriching herself brazen-facedly. Under Louis XIV. Madame de Maintenon alone, exalted to the rank of wife, had taken part in state affairs; amidst the irregularity of his life the Regent had never accorded women any political influence, and the confusion of the orgie had never surprised from his lips a single important secret; Madame de Prie was the first to become possessed of a power destined to frequently fall, after her, into hands as depraved as they were feeble.

The strictness of the views and of the character of Paris-Duverney strove, nevertheless, in the home department, against the insensate lavishness of the duke, and the venal irregularities of his favorite; imbued with the maxims of order and regularity formerly impressed by Colbert upon the clerks of the treasury, and not yet completely effaced by a long interregnum, he labored zealously to cut down expenses and useless posts, to resuscitate and regulate commerce; his ardor, systematic and wise as it was, hurried him sometimes into strange violence and improvidence; in order to restore to their proper figure values and goods which still felt the prodigious rise brought about by the System, Paris-Duverney depreciated the coinage and put, a tariff on merchandise as well as wages. The commotion amongst the people was great; the workmen rioted, the tradesmen refused to accept the legal figure for their goods; several men were killed in the streets, and some shops put the shutters up. The misery, which the administration had meant to relieve, went on increasing; begging was prohibited; refuges and workshops were annexed to the poorhouses; attempts were made to collect there all the old, infirm, and vagabond. The rigor of procedure, as well as the insufficiency of resources, caused the failure of the philanthropic project. Lightly conceived, imprudently carried out, the new law filled the refuges with an immense crowd, taken up in all quarters, in the villages, and on the high roads; the area of the relieving-houses became insufficient. “Bedded on straw, and fed on bread and water as they ought to be,” wrote the comptroller-general Dodun, “they will take up less room and be less expense.” Everywhere the poor wretches sought to fly; they were branded on the arm, like criminals. All this rigor was ineffectual; the useful object of Paris-Duverney’s decrees was not attained.

Other outrages, not to be justified by any public advantage, were being at the same time committed against other poor creatures, for a long while accustomed to severities of all kinds. Without freedom, without right of worship, without assemblies, the Protestants had, nevertheless, enjoyed a sort of truce from their woes during the easy-going regency of the Duke of Orleans. Amongst the number of his vices Dubois did not include hypocrisy; he had not persecuted the remnants of French Protestantism, enfeebled, dumb, but still living and breathing. The religious enthusiasm of the Camisards had become little by little extinguished; their prophets and inspired ones, who were but lately the only ministers of the religion in the midst of a people forcibly deprived of its pastors, had given place to new servants of God, regularly consecrated to His work and ready to brave for His sake all punishments. The Church under the Cross, as the Protestants of France then called themselves, was reviving slowly, secretly, in the desert, but it was reviving. The scattered members of the flocks, habituated for so many years past to carefully conceal their faith in order to preserve it intact in their hearts, were beginning to draw near to one another once more; discipline and rule were once more entering within that church, which had been battered by so many storms, and the total destruction of which had been loudly proclaimed. In its origin, this immense work, as yet silently and modestly progressing, had been owing to one single man, Antony Court, born, in 1696, of a poor family, at Villeneuve-de-Berg in the Vivarais. He was still almost a child when he had perceived the awakening in his soul of an ardent desire to rebuild the walls of holy Sion; without classical education, nurtured only upon his reading of the Bible, guided by strong common sense and intrepid courage, combined with a piety as sincere as it was enlightened, he had summoned to him the preachers of the Uvennes, heirs of the enthusiastic Camisards. From the depths of caverns, rocks, and woods had come forth these rude ministers, fanatics or visionaries as they may have been, eagerly devoted to their work and imbued with their pious illusions; Court had persuaded, touched, convinced them; some of the faithful had gathered around him, and, since the 11th of August, 1715, at the first of those synods in the desert, unknown to the great king whose life was ebbing away at Versailles, the Protestant church of France had been reconstituting itself upon bases as sound as they were strong; the functions of the ancients were everywhere re-established; women were forbidden to hold forth at assemblies; the Holy Scriptures were proclaimed as the only law of faith; pastoral ordination was required of preachers and ministers of the religion; Corteis, a friend of Court’s, went to Switzerland to receive from the pastors of Zurich the imposition of hands, which he transmitted afterwards to his brethren. Everywhere the new Evangelical ministry was being recruited. “I seek them in all places,” said Court, “at the plough, or behind the counter, everywhere where I find the call for martyrdom.” Of the six devoted men who signed the statutes of the first synod, four were destined to a martyr’s death. The restorer of French Protestantism had made no mistake about the call then required for the holy ministry. The synods of the desert became every year more numerous; deputies from the North, from the West, from the Centre, began to join those of the South. Persecution continued, but it was local, more often prompted by the fanatical zeal of the superintendents than by the sovereign impulse of government; the pastors died without having to sorrow for the church, up-risen from its ruins, when a vague echo of this revival came striking upon the ears of the Duke and Madame de Prie, amidst the galas of Chantilly. Their silence and their exhaustion had for some time protected the Protestants; fanaticism and indifference made common cause once more to crush them at their reawakening.

The storm had now been brewing for some years; the Bishop of Nantes, Lavergne de Tressan, grand almoner to the Regent, had attempted some time before to wrest from him a rigorous decree against the Protestants; the Duke of Orleans, as well as Dubois, had rejected his overtures. Scarcely had the duke (of Bourbon) come into power, when the prelate presented his project anew; indifferent and debauched, a holder of seventy-six benefices, M. de Tressan dreamed of the cardinal’s hat, and aspired to obtain it from the Court of Rome at the cost of a persecution. The government was at that time drifting about, without compass or steersman, from the hands of Madame de Prie to those of Paris-Duverney. Little cared they for the fate of the Reformers. “This castaway of the regency,” says M. Lemontey, “was adopted without memorial, without examination, as an act of homage to the late king, and a simple executive formula. The ministers of Louis XVI. afterwards found the minute of the declaration of 1724, without any preliminary report, and simply bearing on the margin the date of the old edicts.” For aiming the thunderbolts against the Protestants, Tressan addressed himself to their most terrible executioner. Lamoignon de Baville was still alive; old and almost at death’s door as he was, he devoted the last days of his life to drawing up for the superintendents some private instructions; an able and a cruel monument of his past experience and his persistent animosity. He died with the pen still in his hand.

The new edict turned into an act of homage to Louis XIV. the rigors of Louis XV. “Of all the grand designs of our most honored lord and great-grandfather, there is none that we have more at heart to execute than that which he conceived, of entirely extinguishing heresy in his kingdom. Arrived at majority, our first care has been to have before us the edicts whereof execution has been delayed, especially in the provinces afflicted with the contagion. We have observed that the chief abuses which demand a speedy remedy relate to illicit assemblies, the education of children, the obligation of public functionaries to profess the Catholic religion, the penalties against the relapsed, and the celebration of marriage, regarding which here are our intentions: Shall be condemned: preachers to the penalty of death, their accomplices to the galleys for life, and women to be shaved and imprisoned for life. Confiscation of property: parents who shall not have baptism administered to their children within twenty-four hours, and see that they attend regularly the catechism and the schools, to fines and such sums as they may amount to together; even to greater penalties. Midwives, physicians, surgeons, apothecaries, domestics, relatives, who shall not notify the parish priests of births or illnesses, to fines. Persons who shall exhort the sick, to the galleys or imprisonment for life, according to sex; confiscation of property. The sick who shall refuse the sacraments, if they recover, to banishment for life; if they die, to be dragged on a hurdle. Desert-marriages are illegal; the children born of them are incompetent to inherit. Minors whose parents are expatriated may marry without their authority; but parents whose children are on foreign soil shall not consent to their marriage, on pain of the galleys for the men and banishment for the women. Finally, of all fines and confiscations, half shall be employed in providing subsistence for the new converts.”

Just as the last edicts of Louis XIV., the edict of 1724 rested upon an absolute contradiction: the legislators no longer admitted the existence of any reformers in the kingdom; and yet all the battery of the most formidable punishments was directed against that Protestant church which was said to be defunct. The same contradiction was seen in the conduct of the ecclesiastics: Protestants could not be admitted to any position, or even accomplish the ordinary duties of civil life, without externally conforming to Catholicism; and, to so conform, there was required of them not only an explicit abjuration, but even an anathema against their deceased parents. “It is necessary,” said Chancellor d’Aguesseau, “either that the church should relax her vigor by some modification, or, if she does not think she ought to do so, that she should cease requesting the king to employ his authority in reducing his subjects to the impossible, by commanding them to fulfil a religious duty which the church does not permit them to perform.”

At this point is revealed a progress in ideas of humanity and justice: the edict of 1724 equalled in rigor the most severe proclamations of Louis XIV.; it placed the peace, and often the life, of Reformers at the mercy not only of an enemy’s denunciation, but of a priest’s simple deposition; it destroyed all the bonds of family, and substituted for the natural duties a barbarous and depraving law; but general sentiment and public opinion were no longer in accord with the royal proclamations. The clergy had not solicited the edict, the work of an ambitious man backed up by certain fanatics; they were at first embarrassed by it. When the old hatreds revived, and the dangerous intoxications of power had affected the souls of bishops and priests, the magistracy, who had formerly been more severe towards the Reformers than even the superintendents of the provinces had been, pronounced on many points in favor of the persecuted; the judges were timid; the legislation, becoming more and more oppressive, tied their hands; but the bias of their minds was modified; it tended to extenuate, and not to aggravate, the effects of the edict. The law was barbarous everywhere, the persecution became so only at certain spots, owing to the zeal of the superintendents or bishops; as usual, the south of France was the first to undergo all the rigors of it. Emigration had ceased there for a long time past; whilst the Norman or Dauphinese Reformers, on the revival of persecution, still sought refuge on foreign soil, whilst Sweden, wasted by the wars of Charles XII., invited the French Protestants into her midst, the peasants of the Uvennes or of the Vivarais, passionately attached to the soil they cultivated, bowed their heads, with a groan, to the storm, took refuge in their rocks and their caverns, leaving the cottages deserted and the harvests to be lost, returning to their houses and their fields as soon as the soldiery were gone, ever faithful to the proscribed assemblies in the desert, and praying God for the king, to whose enemies they refused to give ear. Alberoni, and after him England, had sought to detach the persecuted Protestants from their allegiance; the court was troubled at this; they had not forgotten the Huguenot regiments at the battle of the Boyne. From the depths of their hiding-places the pastors answered for the fidelity of their flocks; the voice of the illustrious and learned Basnage, for a long while a refugee in Holland, encouraged his brethren in their heroic submission. As fast as the ministers died on the gallows, new servants of God came forward to replace them, brought up in the seminary which Antony Court had founded at Lausanne, and managed to keep up by means of alms from Protestant Europe. It was there that the most illustrious of the pastors of the desert, Paul Rabaut, already married and father of one child, went to seek the instruction necessary for the apostolic vocation which he was to exercise for so many years in the midst of so many and such formidable perils. “On determining to exercise the ministry in this kingdom,” he wrote, in 1746, to the superintendent of Languedoc, Lenain d’Asfeldt, “I was not ignorant of what I exposed myself to; so I regarded myself as a victim doomed to death. I thought I was doing the greatest good of which I was capable in devoting myself to the condition of a pastor. Protestants, being deprived of the free exercise of their own religion, not seeing their way to taking part in the exercises of the Roman religion, not being able to get the books they would require for their instruction, consider, my lord, what—might be their condition if they were absolutely deprived of pastors. They would be ignorant of their most essential duties, and would fall either into fanaticism, the fruitful source of extravagances and irregularities, or into indifference and contempt for all religion.” The firm moderation, the courageous and simple devotion, breathed by this letter, were the distinctive traits of the career of Paul Rabaut, as well as of Antony Court; throughout a persecution which lasted nearly forty years, with alternations of severity and clemency, the chiefs of French Protestantism managed to control the often recurring desperation of their flocks. On the occasion of a temporary rising on the borders of the Gardon, Paul Rabaut wrote to the governor of Languedoc, “When I desired to know whence this evil proceeded, it was reported to me that divers persons, finding themselves liable to lose their goods and their liberty, or to have to do acts contrary to their conscience, in respect of their marriages or the baptism of their children, and knowing no way of getting out of the kingdom and setting their conscience free, abandoned themselves to despair, and attacked certain priests, because they regarded them as the primal and principal cause of the vexations done to them. Once more, I blame those people; but I thought it my duty to explain to you the cause of their despair. If it be thought that my ministry is necessary to calm the ruffled spirits, I shall comply with pleasure. Above all, if I might assure the Protestants of that district that they shall not be vexed in their conscience, I would pledge myself to bind over the greater number to stop those who would make a disturbance, supposing that there should be any.” At a word from Paul Rabaut calmness returned to the most ruffled spirits; sometimes his audience was composed of ten or twelve thousand of the faithful; his voice was so resonant and so distinct, that in the open air it would reach the most remote. He prayed with a fervor and an unction which penetrated all hearts, and disposed them to hear, with fruits following, the word of God. Simple, grave, penetrating rather than eloquent, his preaching, like his life, bears the impress of his character. As moderate as fervent, as judicious as heroic in spirit, Paul Rabaut preached in the desert, at the peril of his life, sermons which he had composed in a cavern. “During more than thirty years,” says one of his biographers, “he had no dwelling-place but grottoes, hovels, and cabins, whither men went to draw him like a ferocious beast. He lived a long while in a hiding-place, which one of his faithful guides had contrived for him under a heap of stones and blackberry bushes. It was discovered by a shepherd; and such was the wretchedness of his condition, that, when forced to abandon it, he regretted that asylum, more fitted for wild beasts than for men.”

The hulks were still full of the audience of Paul Rabaut, and Protestant women were still languishing in the unwholesome dungeon of the Tower of Constance, when the execution of the unhappy Calas, accused of having killed his son, and the generous indignation of Voltaire cast a momentary gleam of light within the sombre region of prisons and gibbets. For the first time, public opinion, at white heat, was brought to bear upon the decision of the persecutors. Calas was dead, but the decree of the Parliament of Toulouse which had sentenced him, was quashed by act of the council: his memory was cleared, and the day of toleration for French Protestants began to glimmer, pending the full dawn of justice and liberty.

We have gone over in succession, and without break, the last cruel sufferings of the French Protestants; we now turn away our eyes with a feeling of relief mingled with respect and pride; we leave the free air of the desert to return to the rakes and effeminates of Louis XV.‘s court. Great was the contrast between the government which persecuted without knowing why, and the victims who suffered for a faith incessantly revived in their souls by suffering. For two centuries the French Reformation had not experienced for a single day the formidable dangers of indifference and lukewarmness.