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

by G. de Félice

Still, the position of the Protestants at the time we have reached, was singularly anomalous. There was [in it] nothing definitive, or regular: moral order was enforced by means of legal disorder. The arbitrary principle appeared at every turn; long circumlocutions [were used] to avoid the letter of the laws without directly violating them; the pastors [were] half-recognised, half-proscribed, being neither public nor private persons; the civil condition of so large a number of French people [was] delivered up to uncertain chances; justice [was] wavering and contradictory; royalty soliloquized that it must do something, and did nothing; the subordinate agents of Church and State turned this precarious and disordered establishment to their profit by infamous bargains—a position which it is to be hoped, for the honour of France, will never be witnessed again.

The political and philosophical writers of the eighteenth century contributed largely to the triumph of toleration; but, it must be avowed, they were influenced neither by zeal nor sympathy for the fate of the French Protestants. Although they were so prompt in raising bold and delicate questions, they did not attack the cruel ordinances of Louis XIV., and never seemed to have heard of the lengthened sorrows of more than a million of their fellow-citizens.

Montesquieu, who has something to say on every subject in his Lettres Persanes, does not mention the oppressed Huguenots. In his Spirit of the Laws, he seems to be rather adverse than favourable to them; for he accuses the Calvinists of inclining to republican institutions; and when he would recommend toleration, he pleads through the lips of a Lisbon Jewess. He says, in another place: “This is the fundamental principle of political laws in the matter of religion. When it is optional in a state to receive a new religion, or not to receive it, it ought not to be established; but when it is established, it ought to be tolerated.”[132]

This left the question as regards the Reformed of France, entirely undecided; for the laws precisely denied that they had yet been established in the kingdom.

Helvetius, Diderot, and D’Alembert vouchsafed them not a word of benevolence. Rousseau, the child of the town of Geneva, displayed much greater desire to attack (Roman) Catholicism than to defend Protestantism, and his correspondence shows that when he was invited by some of his friends to write in favour of the victims of the laws of Louis XIV., he refused. He thought it enough to sketch in a few lines the argument of a plea, which he never resumed; and in his Social Contract he supported the principles of a state religion.

Voltaire did the Protestants a service in the affair of Calas, and by his treatise on toleration; but further than this, he never made himself exactly acquainted with the sufferings of this greatly oppressed people, or showed any care to advocate a remedy for them. In his book upon the Siècle de Louis XIV., he speaks of Calvinism in a slighting tone, and dwells upon petty curious details, rather than upon useful matters. In his Précis du Siècle de Louis XIV., he explains at great length the quarrels with regard to the bull Unigenitus, the refusal of the sacraments, and the expulsion of the Jesuits; but says not a word about the Protestants.

There are many causes that will explain this indifference. The Huguenots, as we believe we have remarked before, have borne the penalty, not of the evil they had done, but of that which had been inflicted upon them. After being violently cut off from the rest of the French nation, they were treated as strangers, whose misfortunes deserved no sympathy; and their isolation enabled their adversaries to assail them, from generation to generation, with calumnies which have found a ready credence in the minds of even cultivated men.

Let this be added, that the writers of the philosophic school regarded the Calvinistic doctrines with no affection. They entertained a repugnance for the austere principles and rigid discipline maintained by the Reformed churches. (Roman) Catholicism and Protestantism were for them nothing more than two forms of the same superstitions. There is a saying of Voltaire that denotes exactly what he thought thereon. When a Protestant was presented to him, who had been released from the hulks of Toulon through his intercession with the Duke de Choiseul, he said to him: “What would they have done with you? How could they find it in their conscience to chain and place a man at the oar, who had committed no crime, but that of praying to God in bad French!”

It may be conceived that the pastors of the desert were not very anxious to have recourse to the assistance of the philosophers; they feared the influence such auxiliaries might exercise upon their flocks, and perhaps over themselves. The pastor Pierre Encontre wrote to Paul Rabaut upon the subject of the treatise on toleration: “As for myself, who have read it very hastily, I have found in it much good, but sadly mixed with poison!” And the veteran defender of the Protestant faith observed in his turn: “Penetrated with grief at the sight of the ravages made by the books of the infidels, I can only moderate it by the thought that so dire a situation cannot endure.” (1769.)