The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12

by Unknown

A last article, probably obtained by the representations of the Colberts, declared that the Reformers, "till it should please God to enlighten them like others, should be permitted to dwell in the kingdom, in strict loyalty to the King, to continue there their commerce and enjoy their goods, without being molested or hindered under pretext of the said religion."

The Edict of Revocation was sent in haste to the governors and intendants, without waiting for it to be registered, which took place in the Parliament of Paris, October 22d. The intendants were instructed not to allow the ministers who should abandon the country to dispose of their real estate, or to take with them their children above seven years of age: a monstrous dismemberment of the family wrought by an arbitrary will that recognized neither natural nor civil rights! The King recommended a milder course toward noblemen, merchants, and manufacturers; he did not desire that obstinacy should be shown "in compelling them to be converted immediately without exception" "by any considerable violence."

The tone of the ministerial instructions changed quickly on the reception of despatches announcing the effect of the edict in the provinces. This effect teaches us more in regard to the situation of the dragooned people than could the most sinister narratives. The edict which proscribed the Reformed worship, which interdicted the perpetuation of the Protestant religion by tearing from it infants at their birth, was received as a boon by Protestants who remained faithful to their belief. They saw, in the last article of the edict, the end of persecution, and, proud of having weathered the storm, they claimed the tolerance that the King promised them, and the removal of their executioners. The new converts, who, persuaded that the King desired to force all his subjects to profess his religion, had yielded through surprise, fear, want of constancy in suffering, or through a worthier motive, the desire of saving their families from the license of the soldiers, manifested their regret and their remorse, and were no longer willing to go to mass.

All the leaders of the dragonades, the Noailles, the Foucaults, the Basvilles, the Marillacs, complained bitterly of a measure that was useless to them as to the demolition of Protestant churches and the prohibition of worship, and very injurious as to the progress of conversions. They had counted on rooting out the worship by converting all the believers. The revocation of the Edict of Nantes sinned, therefore, in their eyes by excess of moderation! Louvois hastened to reassure them in this respect, and authorized them to act as if the last article of the edict did not exist. "His majesty," he said, "desires that the extremest rigors of the law should be felt by those who will not make themselves of his religion, and those who shall have the foolish glory of wishing to remain the last must be pushed to the last extremity." "Let the soldiers," he said elsewhere, "be allowed to live very licentiously!" (November, 1685).

The King, however, did not mean it thus, and claimed that persecution should be conducted with method and gravity. But men do not stop at pleasure in evil: one abyss draws on another. The way had been opened to brutal and cynical passions, to the spirit of denunciation, to low and mean fanaticism; the infamies with which the subaltern agents polluted themselves recoiled upon the chiefs who did not repress them, and on this proud government that did not blush to add to the odium of persecution the shame of faithlessness! The chiefs of the dragonades judged it necessary to restrain the bad converts by making example of the obstinate; hence arose an inundation of horrors in which we see, as Saint Simon says, "the orthodox imitating against heretics the acts of pagan tyrants against confessors and martyrs." Everything, in fact, was allowed the soldiers but rape and murder; and even this restriction was not always respected; besides, many of the unfortunate died or were maimed for life in consequence of the treatment to which they had been subjected; and the obscene tortures inflicted on women differed little from the last outrage, but in a perversity more refined.

All the diabolic inventions of the highwaymen of the Middle Ages to extort gold from their captives were renewed here and there to secure conversions: the feet of the victims were scorched, they were strappadoed, suspended by the feet; young mothers were tied to the bedposts, while their infants at the breast were writhing with hunger before their eyes. "From torture to abjuration, and from this to communion, there was often not twenty-four hours' distance, and their executioners were their guides and witnesses. Nearly all the bishops lent themselves to this sudden and impious practice." Among the Reformed whom nothing could shake, those who encouraged others to resistance by the influence of their character or social position were sent to the Bastille or other state prisons; some were entombed in subterranean dungeons—in those dark pits, stifling or deadly cold, invented by feudal barbarism. The remains of animals in a state of putrefaction were sometimes thrown in after them, to redouble the horror! The hospital of Valence and the tower of Constance at Aigues-Mortes have preserved, in Protestant martyrology, a frightful renown. The women usually showing themselves more steadfast than the men, the most obstinate were shut up in convents; infamous acts took place there; yet they were rare. It must be said to the honor of the sex, often too facile to the suggestions of fanaticism, that the nuns showed much more humanity and true religion than the priests and monks. Astonished to see Huguenot women so different from the idea they had formed of them, they almost became the protectors of victims that had been given them to torment.

The abduction of children put the final seal to the persecution. The Edict of Revocation had only declared that children subsequently born should be brought up in the Catholic religion. An edict of January, 1686, prescribed that children from five to sixteen years of age should be taken from their heretical relatives and put in the hands of Catholic relatives, or, if they had none, of Catholics designated by the judges! The crimes that we have just indicated might, in strictness, be attributed to the passions of subaltern agents; but this mighty outrage against the family and nature must be charged to the Government alone.

With the revocation, the dragonade was extended, two places partially excepted, over all France. When the great harvest had been sufficiently gathered in the South and West, the reapers were sent elsewhere. The battalions of converters marched from province to province till they reached the northern frontier, carrying everywhere the same terror. Metz, where the Protestants were numerous, was particularly the theatre of abominable excesses. Paris and Alsace were alone, to a certain extent, preserved. Louvois did not dare to show such spectacles to the society of Versailles and Paris; the King would not have endured it. The people of Paris demolished the Protestant church of Charenton, an object of their ancient animosity; the ruling power weighed heavily upon the eight or nine thousand Huguenots who remained in the capital, and constrained two-thirds of them, by intimidation, to a feigned conversion; but there were no striking acts of violence, except perhaps the banishment of thirty elders of the consistory to different parts of the kingdom, and the soldiers did not make their appearance. The lieutenant of police, La Reinie, took care to reassure the leading merchants, and the last article of the Edict of Revocation was very nearly observed in Paris and its environs. As to Lutheran Alsace, it had nothing in common with the system of the Edict of Nantes and the French Calvinists: the Treaty of Westphalia, the capitulation of Strasburg, all the acts that bound it to France, guaranteed to it a separate religious state. An attempt was indeed made to encroach upon Lutheranism by every means of influence and by a system of petty annoyances; but direct attacks were limited to a suppression of public worship in places where the population was two-thirds Catholic. The political events that soon disturbed Europe compelled the French Government to be circumspect toward the people of this recently conquered frontier.

The converters indemnified themselves at the expense of another frontier population, that was not dependent on France. The Vaudois, the first offspring of the Reformation, had always kept possession of the high Alpine valleys, on the confines of Piedmont and Dauphiny, in spite of the persecutions that they had repeatedly endured from the governments of France and Piedmont. The Piedmontese Vaudois had their Edict of Nantes; that is, liberty of worship in the three valleys of St. Martin, La Luzerne, and La Perouse. When the dragonade invaded Dauphiny, the Vaudois about Briançon and Pignerol took refuge in crowds with their brethren in the valleys subject to Piedmont. The French Government was unwilling to suffer them to remain in this asylum. The Duke Victor Amadeus II enjoined the refugees to quit his territory (November 4th). The order was imperfectly executed, and Louis XIV demanded more. The Duke, by an edict of February 1, 1686, prohibited the exercise of heretical worship, and ordered the schools to be closed under penalty of death. The barbes (ministers), schoolmasters, and French refugees were to leave the states of the Duke in a fortnight, under the same penalty. The Vaudois responded by taking up arms, without reflecting on the immense force of their oppressors. The three valleys were assailed at the same time by French and Piedmontese troops. The French were commanded by the governor of Casale, Catinat, a man of noble heart, an elevated and philosophic mind, who deplored his fatal mission, and attempted to negotiate with the insurgents, but Catinat could neither persuade to submission these men resolved to perish rather than renounce their faith, nor restrain the fury of his soldiers exasperated by the vigor of the resistance. The valleys of St. Martin and La Perouse were captured, and the victors committed frightful barbarities. Meanwhile the Piedmontese, after having induced the mountaineers, who guarded the entrance of the valley of La Luzerne, to lay down their arms, by false promises, slaughtered three thousand women, children, and old men at the Pré de la Tour! The remotest recesses of the Alps were searched; a multitude of unfortunates were exterminated singly: more than ten thousand were dragged as prisoners to the fortresses of Piedmont, where most of them died of want. A handful of the bravest succeeding in maintaining themselves among the rocks, where they could not be captured, and, protected by the intervention of Protestant powers, and especially of the Swiss, finally obtained liberty to emigrate, both for themselves and their coreligionists.

There has often been seen in history much greater bloodshed than that caused by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, scenes of destruction planned more directly and on a vaster scale by governments, and sometimes the same contrast between an advanced state of civilization and acts of barbarity; but no spectacle wounds moral sense and humanity to the same degree as this persecution carried on coldly and according to abstract ideas, without the excuse of struggle and danger, without the ardent fever of battle and revolution. The very virtues of the persecutors are here but an additional monstrosity: doubtless, there is also seen, at a later period, among the authors of another reign of terror, this same contrast that astounds and troubles the conscience of posterity; but they, at least, staked each day their own lives against the lives of their adversaries, and, with their lives, the very existence of the country involved in their cause!