The council could not yet proceed to extremities, [and] refused [to do so]. But in the following year it passed a most comprehensive act, by sanctioning, under the form of a general law, all the decrees that had been made upon particular cases by the courts of justice. The preamble stated that this law had been accorded on the demand of the assembly of the clergy. It comprised fifty-nine articles, which all tended to restrict the liberties that the Edict of Nantes had declared perpetual and irrevocable.
The first emigration dates from this epoch. The Reformed hoped no longer to meet with either justice or repose in their native land, and preferred the sufferings of exile to those of persecution.
The Protestant powers of Europe began to be moved. The elector of Brandenburg, one of the most faithful and useful allies of Louis XIV., wrote to him in favour of the Reformed. The king replied that he permitted them to live on an equality with his other subjects. “I am bound to do so,” said he, “by my royal word, and by the gratitude I feel for the proofs they have given of their fidelity during the late disturbances (of the Fronde), in which they bore arms in my service.”
These were but diplomatic phrases, that deceived no one. England and Sweden, whose neutrality was necessary to Louis XIV. after the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, expressed also their solicitude for the fate of the Reformed of France. Emigration continued; and all these circumstances induced the council to publish, in 1669, a kind of retractation of the preceding decrees. Nine articles of the declaration of 1666 were suppressed and twenty-one softened. Although this was but half-justice, the poor oppressed people esteemed themselves fortunate [in obtaining it].
Shortly afterwards the celebrated edict was published, which prohibited the king’s subjects, under pain of confiscation of liberty and property, from going to establish themselves in foreign countries without express permission, and particularly from taking service in the quality of ship-builders or sailors. This law struck all Frenchmen in their ancient liberties; but it was enforced only against those who emigrated on account of their religion.
The Marshal de Turenne had just abjured (1669). This conversion had all the importance of a general act. Turenne had resisted the invitations of Mazarin and Louis XIV., and had not even been dazzled by the offer of the constable’s sword. He changed all at once, when no one any longer expected it, and why, has never been made known.
Some (Roman) Catholic writers say that he had become enlightened by Bossuet’s Exposition of the Doctrines of the Catholic Church,—a book, indeed, well arranged, soberly penned, and of wonderful skill, in which the author hides the greatest errors of doctrine and practice of (Roman) Catholicism under the artifices of deeply-studied diction. It is possible that the old soldier did not investigate very narrowly, and that his limited information upon controversial questions might have failed to protect him against the subtilties of the theologian.
The Reformed historians explain the matter otherwise. They relate that Turenne, who was at all times lax in his religion, had only been retained in it by his wife and his sisters, Mesdames de Duras and de la Trémoille, both very zealous for the Reformed belief. When he was left alone, and had surrendered himself to gallantries little compatible with the faith, he accepted the reasoning of Bossuet.
This is the place to observe that the greater part of the court nobility,—the families of Bouillon, Châtillon, Rohan, Sully, La Trémoille,—regulating themselves by the will of the monarch, had one by one re-entered the (Roman) Catholic church. Their licentious manners had also prepared them for abjuration; these were not less inordinate than those of the rest of the courtiers, according to the testimony of Tallemant des Réaux, who was himself a Calvinist by birth.