Generous protestations were speedily raised as soon as it became generally known what evils had followed upon the Revocation of the edict, and to what extremities the council was reduced in order to maintain the delusive fiction of the unity of faith in the kingdom.
The Jansenists must be first mentioned. They declared that their blood curdled at the thought of the sacrilegious communions forced upon the heretics, and rejected as a monstrous offence against the Deity himself, a proselytism only successful under the terror of dragoons, the galleys, and gibbets.
The bishops of Grenoble and Saint-Pons deserve an honourable mention. The former addressed a letter condemnatory of the forced communions to the curates of his diocese. The latter wrote to the commander of the troops, that all compulsion in such a matter was impious. “It is,” he said, “veritable sacrilege. And it could be wished that the unhappy wretches who are guilty of these abominations, and the ministers of the altar who are the instruments of them, were cast into the sea, according to the words of the Scripture, with a millstone about their necks; for they not only confirm the Huguenots in their unbelief, but they also shake the thereby wavering faith of the Catholics.”
Many honest and pious curates, moreover, refused to discharge the office of informers, and to torture until the actual moment of death, the souls that declined their ministry. But the Jesuits and the great body of the clergy persisted in urging and employing measures of severity. Fénélon wrote from Saintonge in 1686, “The Jesuits here are a set of obstinates, who have no other words for the Protestants than fines and imprisonment in this world, and the devil and hell in the next. We have had infinite trouble to stop these good fathers from bursting into violent exclamations against our mildness.”
It is at first sight a singular thing, to see on one side the Jesuits so notorious for their equivocal piety, for their accommodative morality, the inventors of easy devotion, soliciting the most violent measures against the Protestants; and, on the other side, the Jansenists, so rigid in their articles of faith, and so austere in their practice, insisting upon a moderate course. But surprise ceases when we reflect that the former sought only for power, the latter were chiefly solicitous for sincerity. The first were contented with (Roman) Catholics of any kind, provided they bent their necks to the yoke of the Church; the second wanted none but true Catholics, and would not take them at the hands of soldiers and hangmen.
The nomination of M. de Noailles (afterwards a cardinal), to the see of Paris, gave some strength to the Jansenist party, who had never been completely banished from the court or the councils. The archbishop presented a memorial to the king, in which he exhorted him to adopt measures more conformable with Christianity. He was seconded by many persons of importance, who had studied the political side of the question with attention. The superintendent Pontchartrain regretted the loss of so many artisans and industrious citizens. The Marquis d’Aguesseau, the Duke de Beauvilliers, the Marquis de Pompone, and the Marshal Catinat, avowed the same opinions. They were above all struck with the progress of public poverty. They saw with affright that the force of destruction had at that epoch infinitely surpassed the power of production, and that the finances of the state were in a deplorable condition.
Vauban wrote the following lines to Louvois, which prove that the Revocation was not so popular with the enlightened classes as was pretended. “The forced conversions have inspired a general horror of the conduct of the ecclesiastics. If it is to be pursued, the necessity arises of exterminating the pretended new converts as rebels, or of banishing them as relapsed, or of confining them as madmen;—execrable projects, contrary to all the Christian virtues, moral and civil!”
Even the timid Racine himself raised his voice, in the tragedy of Esther, represented in 1689. “The choice of the subject,” says one of the commentators of this great poet, “permitted the strongest allusions. At the very moment when the Protestants were persecuted, the poet dared to make known the true maxims of the Gospel. He defended the oppressed in the presence of the royal oppressor. Lastly, he painted Louvois in the most odious light; and that there might be no possibility of his not being recognised, he put in the mouth of Haman the very words which had escaped from the minister in the delirium of his pride.”[103]
Fénélon prepared a memoir of remarkable boldness for the perusal of Louis XIV. This composition, which was for a long time unknown, was first published in 1825. In it the archbishop of Cambray represents Father La Chaise as a man of a gross and limited mind, afraid of sound virtue, loving only profane and libertine people, nourishing the king’s ignorance, and as a blind man leading another. He reproaches Louis himself in terms more severe than any we have used towards him in this history: “You do not love God,” Fénélon thus addresses him; “you only fear Him with the fear of a slave; it is hell, and not God, whom you dread. Your religion only consists of superstition, and petty superficial practices. You are scrupulous about trifles, and callous with regard to terrible evils. You care for nought but your own glory and pleasure. You centre everything in yourself, as if you were the God of the earth, and all the rest had been created only to be sacrificed to you!”