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

by G. de Félice

The war of the Camisards, respecting which there may be different opinions, which it is not our province to examine here, had a double result; it reassured the Protestants, who nearly all returned to their former faith, and it inspired the court of Versailles with salutary apprehensions. The men, whom justice and respect for conscience did not restrain, were arrested by fear, during the remainder of the eighteenth century, from pushing the intrepid mountaineers to extremities, who had once risen from beneath the axe of the executioner.

V.

There cannot be a more painful subject for consideration than the reign of Louis XIV. This aged king, nearly alone, outliving all the great men of his era; the irreparable void left in his court by the death of his children and his grandchildren; an unhappy war, exposing the frontiers of his kingdom to the enemy; three millions of debt; the people overwhelmed with imposts which they could no longer pay; commerce destroyed, industry extinguished, a part of the country lying fallow; the monarch hated by the nation, of which he had once been the idol, consuming his days in the duties of a puerile etiquette, or of a devotion more puerile still, and supporting with difficulty a royalty, whose splendour and prestige, were decaying with him. What an expiation was this for his despotic and insatiable pride!

The quarrels of religion pursued him unceasingly, and left him no repose. His court and council were divided upon the controversies of Jansenism and Quietism. When he thought he had appeased them on one side, they reappeared on the other, and his death-bed was also troubled by the disputes of theologians concerning the bull Unigenitus.

The Protestants were seldom, and then unwillingly, alluded to before him, and he himself also avoided mentioning them. [Their repression] was an undertaking that had failed, and he sought a refuge in oblivion from his humiliating miscalculations.

The Reformed of Paris were treated more than ever with caution, in order to spare the king painful reflections. The celebrated lieutenant of police, Voyer-d’Argenson, expressly recommended toleration. “The Inquisition, which is sought to be established in Paris against the Protestants, whose conversion is very doubtful,” he said, in a memorial addressed to the council, “would be attended with great difficulties. It would force them to purchase certificates, either for money or by sacrilege. It would drive away from this city those who are born subjects of neutral princes, would alienate more and more the unfriendly Protestants, blast the peace of families, excite relations to become denouncers of each other, and cause perhaps an universal murmur in the capital of the kingdom.” The council took the hint, and declined to interfere with the Protestants.

In the provinces everything depended more or less upon the humour of the governors and intendants. Bâville renewed from time to time his sanguinary expeditions, although he had ceased to conceal from himself their impotency. “There are districts of twenty and thirty parishes,” he wrote, “where the curate is the most unhappy and the most useless of all the inhabitants, and where, whatever care may have been taken, not a single Catholic has been made, nor even one established from without.”

The Protestants bore the burdens of the state, as soldiers, sailors, and tax-payers, without enjoying any of the benefits which should have belonged to all, of common right. The gentlemen served in the army, where they were less scrupulous than elsewhere about acts of Catholicity. The men of the middle class applied themselves to agriculture and commerce; and they prospered, in spite of the oppression of the laws, through that spirit of individuality and activity which so eminently distinguishes Protestantism. The Marquis d’Aguesseau avowed this, when new measures of severity were proposed against them in 1713. “By an unfortunate fatality,” he said, “in nearly every kind of art, the most skilful workmen, as well as the richest merchants, belong to the pretended Reformed religion; it would therefore be very dangerous to exact that they should become Catholics.”

Things would probably have been allowed to continue under this semi-toleration, but that the Jesuit Letellier, who had succeeded in 1709 to Father La Chaise in the office of confessor to the king, would not permit it. “He was,” says the Duke de Saint-Simon, “a man of hard and obstinate temper, of incessant application, and of only one idea—the triumph of his order and the overthrow of every other school. His nature was cruel and ferocious; his personal appearance no less unpromising; he would have excited fear, if met with in a wood. His physiognomy was dark, gloomy, false, and terrible, and his eyes were fierce, evil, and extremely sinister: one was struck on seeing him.”[110]

Letellier extorted from the king, then verging on decrepitude and death, the declaration of the 8th March, 1715. The title alone of this law “makes one’s blood curdle,” to use the expression of the Baron du Breteuil to Louis XVI. It is as follows: “It shall be a law, that those who shall have declared that they will persist and die in the pretended Reformed religion, whether they have abjured or not, shall be reputed as having relapsed.” It therefore acted upon the monstrous fiction that there were no longer any Protestants in France, and that there could never be any more! All were held to be legally (Roman) Catholics, since the refusal of the sacraments exposed them to suffer the frightful penalties pronounced against those who relapsed! It is with reason that Lamontey says in his book upon the monarchical establishment of Louis XIV.: “The annals of the world do not offer another example of a code wholly based upon a lie.”[111]