The intendant Lenain asked him, not for his own information, but to acquit himself of the forms of his duty, if the Protestants had not a common treasury, if they were not collecting arms, and if they were not in correspondence with England. “There is not a word of truth in it,” answered the prisoner, “the ministers preach nothing but patience and fidelity to the king.” “I know it, sir,” said the intendant, deeply moved.
When sentence of death was pronounced against Désubas, both the judges and the intendant wept. “It is,” he said, “with sorrow that we condemn you, but such are the orders of the king.” “I know it, sir,” replied the pastor of the desert, in his turn.
The scaffold was erected upon the esplanade of Montpellier, whither Désubas was conducted, bareheaded and barefoot, in the midst of an innumerable concourse of spectators. The papers and books which had been found upon him, were burnt before his face; and when he sought to address the multitude, the din of fourteen drums drowned his words. He preserved a placid countenance, repulsed the Jesuits, who held a crucifix to him, pronounced a short prayer, and ascending the fatal ladder, gave up his soul to God.
We may here recognise the profound opposition that existed between the laws and the manners of the period. The magistrates, while they sentenced [Désubas], revolted against the legal text, whilst their hearts acknowledged him to be innocent whom they were compelled to condemn as guilty. All the (Roman) Catholics of any moral or intellectual education, were thunderstruck at the execution of Désubas. The Protestants, on the contrary, thanked God for having given them so heroic a martyr, and his name is still heard in the popular legends, beneath the cottage roof of the peasantry of Vivarais and Languedoc.
Yet this renewal of the persecutions had exhausted the patience of many of the Reformed. Seeing that they were absolutely denied any approximation to religious liberty, they demanded permission to sell their property and quit the kingdom. They wrote to Louis XV.: “We cannot live without following our religion, and we are compelled, however unwillingly, to supplicate your majesty, with the most profound humility and respect, that you may please to allow us to leave the realm with our wives, our children, and our effects, to retire into foreign countries, where we may freely worship God in the form we believe to be indispensable, and on which depends our eternal happiness or misery.”
Instead of granting this authority, the council replied by an aggravation of severity, particularly after the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, in 1748. The troops required employment; the court had leisure; it remembered the uneasiness which the heretics had caused it during the war, and it resolved to attempt a decisive blow that should, if possible, put an end once for all to this proscribed people.
It is painful continually to discover the hand of the (Roman) Catholic clergy in these scenes of violence, spoliation, and death. The venerable Malesherbes, the Baron de Breteuil, Rulhières, Joly de Fleury, Gilbert de Voisins, Rippert de Monclar, the gravest statesmen, the most eminent magistrates, who have written upon the religious affairs of this epoch, all proclaim this with unanimous voice. They agree in characterizing the conduct of the priests as obstinate, unrelenting, sometimes haughty, sometimes supple and humble, but ever exacting the use of extreme measures of compulsion and severity for the re-establishment of religious unity.
What is still more intolerable is, that at the very time when the clergy demanded the strict execution of the horrible ordinances of 1724 and 1745, they never ceased to declare that the Church was always adverse to all means that were not charitable and paternal. Is it possible to conceive, imagine, or dream of the possibility of so flagrant a contradiction?
What! knock at every door, besiege the offices of all the ministers, address the sovereign, threaten, solicit, pray, even offer money; and for what purpose? To oppress the conscience of more than a million of Protestants; to persecute them even in the sanctuary of domestic worship; to constrain them to have their children baptized by a priest under pain of bastardy; to compel married people to ask for the (Roman) Catholic benediction under pain of being denied any civil condition; to send soldiers, in a word, against the meetings, gaolers and hangmen against the pastors; and all this as only a labour of charity, goodness, and fraternal love!
There was a bishop of Castres, who applied for a regiment of dragoons in order to dissolve the meetings, taking care at the same time to add that the soldiers should not injure his flock, among whom he counted the re-united brethren. The bishop of Aire forwarded complaints that the custom of establishing the refusal of the sacraments at the death-bed of heretics had fallen into desuetude, and he wanted to renew the suits for the ignominious treatment of their corpses. The Count de Saint Florentin, secretary of state for religious affairs, who was not without complaisance for the clergy, was obliged to address a very severe admonition to this prelate.