History of the Protestants of France, from the commencement of the Reformation to the present time

by G. de Félice

The Calvinists, continually disturbed in the exercise of their religion, forced to carry arms to the very doors of their churches, and threatened with the loss of all the rights they had obtained by the Edict of Nantes, had become embittered against royalty. They suspected it of concealed thoughts and perfidious projects. They accused it of encouraging, at least by its inertness, the Jesuits, the monks, the bishops, the violent magistrates, and the populace, who not only heaped upon them numberless vexations, but loudly announced the approaching extirpation of heresy.

It necessarily resulted from this, that from being a simple religious communion, the French Reformation became every day more and more a political party, and thus from the very nature of things, as the struggle was prolonged, the ideas and passions of the Reformers were led into increased hostility against the crown. The spirit of independence had grown among the Huguenots with the persecutions, with which they were stricken, and with the menaces of destruction that were held over their heads, and many fostered the thought of a republican establishment.

They therefore constituted a considerable party in the first years of the reign of Louis XIII., relying for support, within the kingdom, upon the malcontents of all kinds;—without, upon Protestant Europe. They communicated by La Rochelle with England, by Sédan with Germany, by Geneva with the Swiss cantons, and seemed ever ready to divide the strength of the state.

Such an organization was intolerable to the crown, and was so much the more the object of its dislike, as the principle of national unity gradually succeeded in freeing itself from the ruins of the old feudality. The lower the great families were reduced before the royal authority, the more would the political establishment of the Huguenots be regarded as a singular and dangerous anomaly; and the council was right in desiring enfranchisement from it at any price.

But through the unhappy confusion, which universally existed, at this epoch, in temporal and spiritual matters, royalty, while announcing that it fought only against the political privileges of the Calvinists, put many, very many more in peril, and compromised all their religious rights. People knew that there were impassioned spirits behind the statesmen, and even amongst themselves, who, after having reduced the Calvinists to become a simple sect, would constrain them to re-enter the (Roman) Catholic church, or to quit the kingdom.

It is true that the genius of the Cardinal de Richelieu, his diplomatic alliances, and the European interests of France, during half the reign of Louis XIV., retarded the complete realization of these fears. Nevertheless the plan for the extirpation of heresy was prosecuted in detail, without cessation and without pity, over the whole face of France, from the moment the Calvinist party was reduced. The capture of La Rochelle was the first act of this cruel and merciless drama, of which the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes was the dénouement.

Such then was the situation of affairs in 1622.—the Calvinists drew the sword in behalf of their political immunities in the name of their religious rights, which were unceasingly compromised and menaced; and the crown attacked these immunities in the name of the royal sovereignty and of the unity of the country, in order afterwards to arrive at the destruction of religion itself.

As for the respective forces of the two parties, they had become strengthened on one side and weakened on the other, since the wars of the sixteenth century. In spite of the enterprises of some powerful noblemen, the authority of the prince was more generally recognised, respected, and obeyed. The lesser nobility, the Tiers-état or commons, the magistrates and the army, had, under the reign of Henry IV., abandoned feudal traditions to obey royalty alone, and this new spirit had naturally modified the sentiments of many Reformers, who went, unwittingly perhaps, with the great national stream. On the other side, the Calvinist leaders and towns, who clung to their privileges, had no longer the same faith, or the same enthusiasm. There were disunions, mistrust, depression below, and defections above, in the French Reformation. It could still make itself feared in the interior or exterior complications of the kingdom; but it could not form a coalition between province and province, or dictate conditions of peace.

The dukes de Rohan and de Soubise, attacked in their personal liberty after the treaty of 1622, took up arms in Languedoc and Saintonge. The war was one of partisans only; nothing more than sieges of villages or strong castles, and devastations took place. The royal troops committed great ravages round Montauban and Castres. “At night,” say the memoirs of the time, “one might behold a thousand fires along the plain. Crops, orchards, vines, and houses were the aliments of the flames.... The destruction was so well executed that there was not left a tree or a house standing, a blade of corn, or the shoot of a vine.”

The majority of the Huguenots remained at their hearths, and the Duke de Rohan complained of this with sorrow. “It was more difficult,” he says, “to combat the cowardice, the irreligion, and infidelity of the Reformers, than the hatred of their enemies.”