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

by G. de Félice

So much for the spiritual authority! As for the men of the temporal power, the foremost adversaries of the Reformation were the kings themselves, who had received a false and imperfect education. Their preceptors had placed them as much as possible under the yoke of a narrow and intolerant devotion, that was full of little scruples upon certain points, and easy of relaxation upon others. Louis XIII. had neither greatness of mind, nor dignity of character. A weak, hypochondriac prince, putting his kingdom under the protection of the Virgin, after assassinating the favorites of his mother, he possessed no other merit than that of allowing himself to be governed by Richelieu. Louis XIV., with a proud genius and true kingly qualities, united gallantry to bigotry, and we shall have occasion to see that in his strange compromises with his conscience, the more scandal he occasioned to his court by his licentiousness, the more he made it a point to edify it by his severity against the Reformed.

Each of these kings held the policy of weakening Calvinism as a state maxim, as if men and circumstances were the same as they had been under Charles IX. These princes had been taught that the Reformation was the enemy of thrones, and they thought they could never do enough against this vain phantom of their imagination.

The result was, that the chief employments at court and in the army, of the magistracy and the finances, were systematically refused to the Calvinists, except in extraordinary cases. Turenne and Duquesne broke through this barrier by the splendour of their services; the others were left disregarded, or condemned to grow grey in inferior situations. The Edict of Nantes had, no doubt, made the Reformed admissible to office, but it did not guarantee to them the favours of the court; “and royalty,” to use the expression of Louis XIV. himself, “restricted them to the narrowest limits that justice and a regard for appearances would permit.” Even these conditions, however, were not long respected.

Louis XIV. has, moreover, said, in the memoirs which he dictated for the instruction of the dauphin: “As for the favours that depended upon me alone, I resolved, and I have punctually kept that resolution ever since, not to grant any to the people of that religion, and this out of kindness, and not from hatred, that they might be obliged thereby to consider from time to time by themselves, and apart from violence, whether they were acting wisely in voluntarily depriving themselves of the advantages they might enjoy in common with my other subjects.” Nothing can be more naïf and instructive than these avowals.

The ministers of state naturally followed the bent of the prince. No favour [was to be allowed] to heretics; ill-will [was to be accorded,] when it was possible [to manifest it] without too open an attack upon acquired rights; and a constant inequality of treatment, that urged the lukewarm and the ambitious to change their religion.

The intendants of the provinces—the new creation of a government, that aspired to a stronger national unity—anxious to make themselves agreeable to the court and the council, did not omit to pronounce for the Jesuits against the pastors, and for the bishops against the provincial synods or the consistories, whenever there was a pretext, however frivolous, that could be made available.

Nearly all the Parliaments pursued the same course, not through religious fanaticism, but through that spirit which in all ages, among the Pagans as in Christendom, has constituted the magistracy the guardians of ancient laws and traditional customs. The advocate-general, Omer Talon, said, in the great days of Poitiers, in 1634, that the pretended Reformed, being only suffered by toleration, the matters regarding them ought not to be counted as favourable, and that the most rigorous interpretation ought, on the contrary, to be applied against them.

Thus in the questions brought before the tribunals, they could only count upon the strict right, or rather upon what it was not possible to deny to them without flagrant injustice. Out of every severe decree, a hostile law immediately arose against them, and by one restriction and another, they successively lost what the Edict of Nantes had conceded to them.

The universities and colleges, where clerical influence was dominant, invented difficulty upon difficulty, against conferring academic degrees upon the religionists, and at length these degrees were only granted upon certificates of attendance at mass.

As for the relations between private individuals of the two religions, there is a distinction to be drawn. The men of letters, and the people of the middle class, the respectable folks—to use the language of the period—generally lived on good terms with each other. We know that the French Academy was founded by members of both communions. Such was also the origin of many learned societies, at Nismes and elsewhere. “Long before the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes,” says Segrais, “the (Roman) Catholics and Huguenots lived here [at Caen] on good terms; they ate, drank, played, and took their amusements together, and left each other freely, some for the mass, others for the sermon, without any scandal on one side or the other.”