The Protestants answered, that not one of their co-religionists would join the English armies, that they were all ready to perform their duty for the service of the king; that the pastors never ceased to recommend obedience, and that if they contravened the laws in matters of religion, it was under an obligation superior to all human authority.
The intendant Lenain, who had had many occasions of studying the [character of the] Protestants, did not distrust their assurances of fidelity. But it was not so at Versailles, where objects were distorted by fear and distance. The news of the national synod of 1744 produced those acts, which seemed allied to madness.
Louis XV. was made to sign, in February, 1745, two ordinances still more cruel, if that were possible, than any that had preceded them. In addition to the penalty of death against the pastors, and of perpetual imprisonment at the galleys against those who harboured them, a fine of three thousand livres was pronounced against all the Protestants of the place where a pastor should be arrested. As for the meetings, it was no longer necessary to have been present at them in order to be doomed to the galleys and [to suffer] forfeiture of property; it was sufficient not to have denounced them. Everything was a crime according to these laws; and out of fifteen hundred thousand Reformed, one-half might have been condemned, at the end of six months, to row in convict vessels, and the other half to beg their bread.
Although it was impossible to execute these ordinances literally, and although the very men, who had drawn them up, would not have suffered it, they were followed by cruel disasters. The Protestants might send petitions upon petitions to the king, to the ministers, to the intendants, to every one who had power to help them; these requests, wherein they stated in the humblest language their sufferings and their unalterable sentiments of fidelity, did not reach their address, and if they did arrive there, were never read. Some were burned or fixed to the pillory by the hand of the executioner, as if their complaints were less just because they were stamped with ignominy.
Antoine Court has written an historical memoir upon the persecutions that recommenced after the synod of 1744. His integrity is as free from suspicion as his perfect acquaintance with the events, and we therefore borrow from him the facts we are about to relate.
The abduction of children multiplied in the provinces, and particularly in Normandy. Court gives a list, and it is very lengthy, name by name. This kidnapping was usually carried on at night, like a brigand’s descent, by companies of archers headed by the parish curates. When there was a delay in opening the doors of the houses, they were burst in, and then the soldiers, sabre in hand, with oaths upon their lips, overthrowing everything in the search after their prey, insulting the despair no less than the shrieks of the mothers, and beating the fathers who dared to complain, carried off the children, the young girls in preference, and dragged them away to the convents. The parents were obliged to furnish a pension for their maintenance, and if one of the victims escaped, they were made responsible for it. These horrors provoked a fresh emigration. Six hundred families of Normandy profited by their proximity to the sea to fly from the kingdom with everything they could take with them.
Lettres de cachet were again used against the people of importance. The religionists of less consideration underwent the sentences of the judiciary or administrative sentences. The Parliaments of Grenoble, Bordeaux, Toulouse, and the intendants of Saintonge, Guienne, Dauphiny, Quercy, and Languedoc, relentlessly pursued the Reformed, who had had their children baptized, or their marriages blessed in the desert.
The religious meetings were spied, and attacked most unmercilessly. On the 17th of March, 1745, two troops of dragoons fell upon an assembly in the neighbourhood of Mazamet, killed several persons, wounded a greater number, and carried off many prisoners. Scenes of the same kind were enacted near Montauban, Uzès, Saint Hippolyte, Saint Ambroix, and in other places. It was again necessary to have recourse to night meetings.
From 1744 to 1746 we count three hundred persons who were condemned to be flogged, to be degraded from the nobility, to be imprisoned for life, to the galleys, or to death, by the single Parliament of Grenoble, which showed a most pitiless spirit, because it administered justice in a border province, and at only a few steps from the enemy’s camp upon the Alps. The fines were enormous. In a petition addressed to the king in 1750, the Protestants of Dauphiny stated that they had been obliged to pay more than two hundred thousand livres, and that from the depth of their prisons, they heard their goods and their inheritances sold by auction.
The same things happened in the provinces of the south, though to a less extent. Nismes paid upwards of sixty thousand livres. The intendants coined money out of heresy, as was afterwards done in 1793 out of the aristocracy.