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

by G. de Félice

We have a journal written by one of the besieged, Pierre Méruault, son of the chief of the artillery of the garrison. He relates the sufferings of the inhabitants with minuteness. As the mole gradually rose before the port, the dearth increased. It became horrible from the month of June, 1628. From two to three hundred persons died every day. The famished had acquired so sad an experience of this kind of death, that they could foresee the very hour, and moment, when they would cease to live, and give directions for their own burial.

They were driven, in this extreme distress, to send bands of children, women, and old men, from the town. Louis XIII. was not so generous as his father, Henry IV., at the siege of Paris. He ordered their repulse without pity, and even caused his soldiers to fire against some of these poor creatures, who stopped to pluck roots and herbs upon the glacis, or to gather shell-fish left by the ebbing of the tide. He commanded, also, that some crops of beans, which the besieged had grown at the foot of their counterscarps, should be destroyed.

Many of the fugitives, urged by the inexorable voice of hunger, continuing to present themselves at the royal camp, gallows were erected for their summary execution; and when they came in too great numbers, lots were drawn for those who were to undergo this punishment. Others, despoiled of their clothes, were beaten and hunted out by the soldiers with rods and leathern thongs. The desire was, by sending them back into the town, that there might be more people to press upon the scanty stores.

Where were the co-religionists of the inhabitants of La Rochelle? What were they doing in this last struggle for their political existence? The Duke de Rohan went to Uzès, to Milhau, to Nismes, to Cevennes, from one end of Languedoc to the other, exhorting the Huguenots to rise for the common cause. His efforts were useless; he found none but timid spirits and cold hearts, or consciences gained by the favour of the court. He repeated the motto, of which his mother, the dowager-duchess of Rohan, had reminded him from the bottom of her asylum at La Rochelle: “Complete victory, certain peace, or honourable death;” instead of arming and following him, he was met by every one of them with recrimination.

He thus complained of this inertness in the preface to his Memoirs; his language, though bitter, is that of the chief of a falling party; but it serves to paint the aspect of the epoch: “In the two former wars, divisions appeared in some quarters; in the latter, it burst out on every side, there being no place into which corruption had not entered, and where avarice had not appeared above piety, to such an extent, that, without tarrying for our enemy’s seeking, men hastened to prostitute themselves by selling their religion, and betraying their party. Our fathers would have destroyed their children in the cradle, had they foreseen that they would become the instruments of the ruin of the churches, which they founded by the glare of the martyr-pyre, and cemented with their blood.”

Deducting from these accusations what has been exaggerated by the irritation of defeat, it remains true that the great mass of the Reformers did not take part in this last war; some, as we have already explained, on account of the national impulse which induced entire submission to the royal authority; others, because they were weary of struggles which cost so many lives, and produced no good; some, because they did not perceive the bond that united their religious liberty to their political security; others, again, through indifference, through venality, or through that kind of prudence which is keener to see the greatness of the peril, than the means of eluding it.

The thing is notable; for many historians say that the whole Reformed population rose against the crown in 1628, and was defeated. These historians are in error: the majority of the Calvinists refused to arm. If it be a title of honour to have thus acted, let them have it; if it be a disgrace, let them bear its weight.

The people of La Rochelle, however, continued to perform prodigies of valour and heroism under the leadership of their mayor, Jean Guiton, a brave and inflexible old seaman, who had said: “If there should be no more than one townsman left, it will still be his duty to keep the gates closed.”

At length, when every hope of succour from without or within had departed, when two-thirds of the population had fallen, when the streets and the houses were choked with corpses, which none had sufficient strength left to inter; when scarcely a man was to be found, who was able to bear the weight of arms, or to walk without a staff, the town surrendered. This happened on the 28th October, 1628. On that day the Reformers of France fell powerless before their enemies, and were never able to raise themselves again until one hundred and sixty years afterwards, when the principles of 1789 released them.

Misfortune had not cast down the courage of the men of La Rochelle, and it is a matter of astonishment that Richelieu, who had the capacity to understand great things, should have done them so little justice. “The audacity that ever accompanies rebellion,” says he in his Memoirs, “was so deeply impressed upon the minds of these wretches, that although they were but the shadows of living men, and had no hope of life, except from the king’s clemency, of which they were unworthy, they nevertheless dared even then to propose to the cardinal that they would make a general treaty for the whole party of the Calvinists.” This proved that they were less careful, in their adversity, concerning their own fate than with reference to that of their co-religionists.