Madame de Maintenon, having quarrelled with Father La Chaise, and being, moreover, no longer anxious about her future [condition], also seemed to side with the Archbishop de Noailles, Fénélon, and the Jansenists. She wrote [to this effect] to one of her relations: “You have been converted; do not meddle with the conversion of others. I avow to you that I do not wish to be responsible to God nor the king for all these conversions.”
But the unbounded pride of Louis XIV., which revolted from the idea of confessing to his people and Europe that he had been mistaken, the remembrance of the praises that had been bestowed upon him for this measure, the influence of Father La Chaise, who treated as prevarication every project of milder proceedings, and the negative answers of the majority of the bishops to M. de Noaille’s letter of consultation, as to the steps it would be advisable to take,—all prevented the plan of the Jansenists from succeeding.
These laborious negotiations only elicited the Edict of the 13th of April, 1698, which solemnly confirmed the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Not one of the laws of torture and blood was abolished: only it was commanded that new means should be employed for the better instruction of the united subjects.
The conduct of the governors and the intendants was not changed in the least by it. They acted towards the Reformers like proconsuls, possessed of the enormous privilege of imprisoning, condemning to the galleys, dragging to the scaffold, shooting, abducting children, and confiscating property, without a single judicial form. Intolerance had subjected the Protestant population to the régime of Turkey.
Of all these intendants, the most notorious was Lamoignon de Bâville, who for thirty-three years had been the supreme administrator, or, as he was called, the King of Languedoc. His motto was: “Ever ready, never hurried.” He was a calm, methodical, hard man, without a passion but that of power, coolly ordering the most frightful executions, hanging, beheading, quartering sixty or eighty persons at a time, devastating whole cantons, burning towns and villages, not out of religious zeal, but for state reasons. His character was a compound of Louis XI., Richelieu, and Robespierre, and he would subordinate to his policy the sufferings, tortures, and murder of a whole people without compunction. Bâville was, indeed, to use the phrase of a contemporary, “the terror and the horror of Languedoc.”
He did not approve of the Revocation; but from the moment it was pronounced, his advice was to carry it into extreme execution against the obstinate. “It is requisite, in order to insure the tranquillity of the state,” he wrote, “to change their will, to regulate ourselves upon what we have already done, to reduce them to a full submission, by tearing the prejudices of birth from their hearts, and by compelling them, authoritatively, to adopt the religion of the state.” It was of little importance to him whether the religion were false or true, accepted or rejected by the conscience of the new converts; it was the religion of the state, and submission must be made thereto. “Let them be damned, provided they obey,” was the saying of a military commander of the same epoch. Supreme and vilest expression of the moral degradation of being a persecutor without being even a fanatic!
This ferocious proconsul was exasperated at the obstinacy of the Protestants in holding their meetings. He surrounded them with troops, and charged them with the bayonet and the sword. The most notable of the prisoners were hanged upon the first trees, the others were sent to the galleys, and there were numbered, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, two thousand of these unfortunate convicts, who were worse treated than highway robbers.
The priests of these parts, receiving nothing but marks of aversion and contempt from those whom they regarded as their flocks, partook, for the most part, of Bâville’s anger, and helped him to assuage it. They spied out the delinquents, denounced them to the authorities, put themselves at the head of the soldiers, and displayed all the more barbarity, in that it was not in their calling to be cruel.
The most bloodthirsty of all was one Chayla, an inspector of missions, and arch-priest. He had turned his presbytery into a stronghold, or a cavern of bandits, and seemed to feel an exquisite delight in the torments of his victims. “Sometimes,” says Count de Gébelin, “he tore out their beards or their eyebrows with pincers, sometimes he put hot coals into their hands, which were then forcibly clenched, so long as the coals could burn; sometimes he enveloped their fingers with cotton steeped in oil or tallow, and then setting fire to it, would sear their hands until they cracked, or were consumed to the bone.”[104]
Having arrested a band of fugitives, and shut them up in pens like animals, among whom were two ladies, related to the most important families of the country, a band of forty or fifty determined men presented themselves before the door of his house at Pont-de-Montvert, singing a psalm. These avengers of blood first broke open the dungeons, and delivered the prisoners, whose swollen bodies and fractured limbs were scarcely able to bear the motion that restored them to liberty.