While he was in prison, some priests published a Letter and Abjuration of the Sieur Molines, in his name. The Protestants answered this work of pious fraud: “We cannot conceive how his converters can have let him date his abjuration from the citadel of Montpellier. A fortress has never yet been a school of enlightenment, or a means of convincing people of the truth of religion. Every retractation that comes from a fettered hand is so eminently suspicious, that no one would dare to adduce it before a tribunal.”
XII.
We have yet to traverse the epoch of general persecutions, particularly in the province of Languedoc; happily, it was but of short duration, and it was the last.
The author of these new persecutions was a nobleman celebrated for adventures of gallantry, the most brilliant epicurean of the eighteenth century, an unbeliever, who protected Voltaire, and whom Voltaire extolled,—in a word, the Marshal de Richelieu. Assuredly, of all the parts he could play, not one became him so little as that of an inquisitor of faith.
As governor of Languedoc he had for some time shown a degree of kindness to the religionists; but on a sudden, in the month of February, 1754, he ordered a proclamation, or instruction to the military commandants, to be placarded in the principal towns and villages of the dioceses of Montpellier, Nismes, Uzès, and Alais, which re-awakened all the alarms of the Protestants. The marshal did not mention re-baptism; that affair had been too unsuccessful in its results; but he pointed now at the meetings of the desert, and threatened to apply the most rigorous dispositions of the Edict of 1724 against them.
Orders were issued to arrest the new converts, and refugees or suspected persons, who came from foreign countries without an express authorization. The meetings were to be watched with the greatest tenacity, and dispersed by force. As many prisoners were to be made as possible; particularly the preachers were to be seized, and shot if they attempted to fly, and no one was to be released until further orders. A reward of a thousand crowns was promised to any one who should capture a minister, and orders were given to arrest whomsoever should be found in the same house with him.
When this proclamation appeared, people asked what had provoked it. A tacit toleration had been established since the affair of Lédignan. The confidence of the Reformed had returned. They assembled peaceably, with very little mystery, but without ostentation, in the depth of some valley, or upon the heights of their mountains. Their relations with the [Roman] Catholics became more easy; agriculture, industry, commerce, the revenues of the states, everything gained by it. Wherefore, then, this new appeal to brutal force?
This has never been well known. The ill humour of a minister of state, some pressing letters of the clergy, the caprice or the vanity of a governor, who flattered himself that he would by ingenious combinations terminate a struggle that had lasted eighty years,—any of these things sufficed in those times to renew the persecution. But if the Duke de Richelieu had hoped to terminate the struggle by means of a strategetical plan, he was deceived. The courtier of Louis XV. judged of the conscience of the Protestants by his own.
Some meetings were immediately suspended, others were attacked. The prisons were filled; the tower of Aigues-Mortes received a further number of unfortunate females; but the greater number of the people would not submit. Richelieu reported his difficulties at Versailles, and the Count de Saint Florentin sent him an answer, that “The king’s judgment was, that it was absolutely imperative they should be sickened of their taste for assemblies.” This was an easy sentence to pen in a despatch; but the taste for assemblies, inherent in every sincere faith, was even stronger than the will of Louis XV.
The Protestants simply redoubled the precautions, with which they sought to hold their religious meetings. They procured information as to the days and hours of the troops’ excursions, the direction they took, the number of the soldiers on service, and the character, more or less rigorous, of the commanding officer. The faithful were warned even by (Roman) Catholics, who were ashamed of these brutalities, or, on the first signal of alarm, they dispersed. If, however, they were surprised, despite their precautious measures to ensure safety, their hearts accepted the suffering as a divine trial.