The Abbé du Chayla ordered his servants to repel these persons with fire-arms, and one of the assailants fell. The others set fire to the presbytery, seized the arch-priest, made him gaze upon his victims, their mangled limbs and lacerated bodies, and then all, after this frightful act of accusation, stabbed him with their weapons. He received fifty-two wounds. Such was the beginning of the war of the Camisards.
IV.
This last struggle of the French Reformation bears no comparison with any that preceded it. Admiral Coligny and Henry of Navarre were backed by entire provinces, and half the nobility of the kingdom. The Duke de Rohan also was a redoubtable chief, and a skilful leader, who with his followers fought pitched battles. In this instance there were only poor peasants, without weapons but those which they wrenched from [the hands of] their enemies, ignorant of the art of war, and reduced to sell their lives dearly, behind the copses and rocks of their mountains. They were led on by no nobles; they were not even supported by the Reformed bourgeoisie of the plains and towns; this time it was the meanest of the people who spilled their blood, and died around the standard on which they had inscribed: “Freedom of religion!”
The Camisards were led by men, whom they regarded as inspired, or prophets. A new convert, half abbé, half playwright, who curiously mingled comedy with controversy,—Bruyëis, has attacked these prophets with irony and gall in his History of Fanaticism. Other (Roman) Catholic writers have followed him. Even the Bishop Fléchier pursues the prophets of Languedoc with his cold and harsh antitheses.
Rulhières was more just: he had the good faith to accuse the persecutors of the Cévenoles of these mental aberrations. “Can we forget then,” he asks, “that their places of worship had been cast down; their country delivered up to military pillage; their children carried off; the houses of those styled obstinate, razed; that the most zealous of their pastors had been broken upon the wheel, while no one had instructed them in our religion?”[105]
Such, in effect, were the causes of these wild ecstasies, or inspirations—the want of spiritual leaders and of schools, spoliations, sufferings, threatened executions, the continual fear of the hulks and the gibbet. The minds of these unfortunates became excited; and finding no support on earth, they easily believed that they had supernatural communications from on high.
This religious exaltation began in the province of Vivarais, from the time of the dragonnades and the Revocation [of the Edict of Nantes]. The fourth pastoral letter of Jurieu, dated the 15th of October, 1686, mentions that a man belonging to Codognan, imagined that he had seen a vision and heard a voice, which said to him, “Go, and console my people.” In Béarn and elsewhere, simple people fancied they had heard the singing of psalms in the air, and had witnessed miraculous apparitions.
Shortly afterwards, Isabeau Vincent appeared, the Shepherdess of Dauphiny, a young girl of sixteen or seventeen years of age, who could neither read nor write. She had ecstasies. “For the first five weeks,” says Jurieu, “she spoke during her ecstasies no language but that of her country, because her only auditors were the peasantry of her village. The noise of this miracle having spread, people came to see her who understood and spoke French. She then began to speak French, and with a diction as correct as if she had been brought up in the first houses of Paris. She composed admirable and excellent prayers. Her action had no violence. Her lips moved slightly, and without the least appearance of convulsion.”[106]
It was then as if a moral contagion had spread over the whole of Vivarais and Languedoc. Prophets were counted by hundreds. They were people of the lower classes, who had read nothing but the Bible; they quoted passage after passage, which they continually applied on every occasion. They particularly invoked the texts of the books of prophecies in the Old Testament and Apocrypha. Even children felt these inspirations, and persisted in them, notwithstanding the severe corrections of their parents, who were held responsible for these strange phenomena.