A million and a half of Frenchmen were in terror and despair; yet songs of victory resounded around Louis the Great. The aged Le Tellier lifted to heaven the hand that had just signed the Revocation, and parodied, on the occasion of an edict that recalls the times of Decius and Diocletian, the canticle by which Simeon hailed the birth of the Redeemer. He died a fanatic, after having lived a cold and astute politician (October 31, 1685); he died, and the most eloquent voices of the Gallican Church broke forth in triumphal hymns, as over the tomb of a victorious hero! "Let us publish this miracle of our days," exclaimed Bossuet, in that funeral oration of Le Tellier, wherein he nevertheless exhibited apprehensions of new combats and of a sombre future for the Church; "let us pour forth our hearts in praise of the piety of Louis; let us lift our acclamations to heaven, and let us say to this new Constantine, to this new Theodosius, to this new Marcianus, to this new Charlemagne: 'You have strengthened the faith, you have exterminated the heretics; this is the meritorious work of your reign, its peculiar characteristic. Through you heresy is no more: God alone could have wrought this wonder.'" The gentle Fléchier himself echoed Bossuet, with the whole corps of the clergy with the great mass of the people. Paris and Versailles, that did not witness the horror of the details, that saw only the general prestige and the victory of unity, were deaf to the doleful reports that came from the provinces, and applauded the "new Constantine."
"This is the grandest and finest thing that ever was conceived and accomplished," wrote Madame de Sévigné. All the corporations, courts of justice, academies, universities, municipal bodies, vied with each other in every species of laudatory allusion; medals represented the King crowned by Religion "for having brought back to the Church two millions of Calvinists"; the number of victims was swollen in order to swell the glory of the persecutor. Statues were erected to the "destroyer of heresy." This concert of felicitations was prolonged for years; the influence of example, the habit of admiring, wrung eulogies even from minds that, it would seem, ought to have remained strangers to this fascination; every writer thought he must pay his tribute; even La Bruyere, that sagacious observer and excellent writer, whose acute and profound studies of manners appeared in 1687; and La Fontaine himself, the poet of free-thought and of universal freedom of action.
The Government redoubled its rigor. The penalty of death was decreed against ministers reëntering the kingdom without permission, and the galleys against whomsoever should give them asylum; penalty of death against whomsoever should take part in a meeting (July 1, 1686). And this penalty was not simply a dead letter! Whenever the soldiers succeeded in surprising Protestants assembled for prayer in any solitary place, they first announced their presence by a volley; those who escaped the bullet and the sword were sent to the gallows or the galleys. Measures almost as severe were employed to arrest emigration. Seamen were forbidden to aid the Reformers to escape under penalty of a fine for the first offence, and of corporal punishment for a second offence (November 5, 1685). They went further: ere long, whoever aided the flight of emigrants became liable to the galleys for life, like emigrants themselves (May 7, 1686). Armed barks cruised along all the coasts; all the passes of the frontier were guarded; the peasants everywhere had orders to rush upon the fugitives. Some of the emigrants perished in attempting to force an exit; a host of others was brought back manacled; they dared not place them all under the galley-master's lash; they feared the effects of their despair and of their numbers, if they should mass them in the royal galleys; they crowded the prisons with those who were unwilling to purchase pardon by abjuration. The misfortunes of the first emigrants served to render their coreligionists, not more timid, but more adroit; a multitude of pilgrims, of mendicants dragging their children after them, of nomadic artisans of both sexes and of all trades, incessantly took their way toward all the frontiers; innumerable disguises thus protected the "flight of Israel out of Egypt." Reformers selected the darkest winter nights to embark, in frail open boats, on the Atlantic or stormy Channel; the waves were seen to cast upon the shores of England families long tossed by tempests and dying with cold and hunger.
By degrees, the guards stationed along the shores and the frontiers were touched or seduced, and became saviors and guides to fugitives whom they were set to arrest. Then perpetual confinement in the galleys was no longer sufficient against the accomplices of the desertes; for the galleys an edict substituted death; death, which fell not upon those guilty of the pretended crime of desertion, was promised to their abettors (October 12, 1687). Some were given up to capital punishment; many, nevertheless, continued their perilous assistance to emigrants, and few betrayed them. Those Reformers whom the authority wished most to retain in the kingdom, the noblemen, the rich citizens, manufacturers, and merchants, were those who escaped easiest, being best able to pay for the interested compassion of the guards. It is said that the fugitives carried out of France sixty millions in five years. However this may be, the loss of men was much more to be regretted than the loss of money. The vital energy of France did not cease for many years to ooze away through this ever-open ulcer of emigration.
It is difficult to estimate, even approximately, the number of Protestants who abandoned their country, become to them a barbarous mother. Vauban estimated it at a hundred thousand, from 1684 to 1691. Benoit, the Calvinist historian of the Edict of Nantes, who published his book in 1695, estimates it at two hundred thousand; the illustrious refugee Basnage speaks vaguely of three or four hundred thousand. Others give figures much more exaggerated, while the Duke of Burgundy, in the memoir that we have cited above, reduces the emigration to less than sixty-eight thousand souls in the course of twenty years; but the truly inconceivable illusions preserved by this young prince, concerning the moral and political results of the Revocation, do not allow us to put confidence in his testimony; he was deceived, took pleasure in being deceived, and closed his ear to whomsoever desired to undeceive him. The amount from two hundred thousand to two hundred fifty thousand, from the Revocation to the commencement of the following century, that is, to the revolt of Cévennes, seems most probable. But it is not so much by the quantity as by the quality of the emigrants that the real loss of France must be measured. France was incomparably more weakened than if two hundred thousand citizens had been taken at hazard from the Catholic mass of the nation. The Protestants were very superior, on the average, if not to the Catholic middle class of Paris and the principal centres of French civilization, at least to the mass of the people, and the emigrants were the best of the Protestants. A multitude of useful men, among them many superior men, left a frightful void in France, and went to swell the forces of Protestant nations. France declined both by what she lost and what her rivals gained. Before 1689 nine thousand sailors, the best in the kingdom, as Vauban says, twelve thousand soldiers, six hundred officers, had gone to foreign countries.
The most skilful chiefs and agents of contemporaneous industry went in multitudes to settle in foreign lands. Industrial capacities, less striking than literary capacities, inflicted losses on France still more felt and less reparable. France was rich enough in literary glory to lose much without being impoverished; such was not the case with respect to industry; France was to descend in a few years, almost in a few months, from that economical supremacy which had been conquered for her by long efforts of a protective administration; populous cities beheld the branches of commerce that constituted their prosperity rapidly sinking, by the disappearance of the principal industrial families, and these branches taking root on the other side of the frontiers. Thus fell, never to rise again, the Norman hat trade—already suffering on account of regulations that fettered the Canadian fur trade. Other branches, in great number, did not disappear entirely, but witnessed the rise of a formidable competition in foreign lands, where they had hitherto remained unknown; these were so many outlets closed, so many markets lost for our exportation, lately so flourishing. A suburb of London (Spitalfields) was peopled with our workmen in silk, emigrated from Lyons and Touraine, which lost three-fourths of their looms; the manufacture of French silk was also established in Holland, with paper-making, cloth manufacture, etc. Many branches of industry were transplanted to Brandenburg, and twenty thousand Frenchmen carried the most refined arts of civilization to the coarse population thinly scattered among the sands and firs of that sombre region. French refugees paid for the hospitality of the Elector Frederick by laying the foundation of the high destinies of Berlin, which on their arrival was still but a small city of twelve or fifteen thousand souls, and which, thenceforth, took a start which nothing was to arrest. Like the Hebrews after the fall of Jerusalem, the Huguenot exiles scattered themselves over the entire world: some went to Ireland, carrying the cultivation of flax and hemp; others, led by a nephew of Duquesne, founded a small colony at the Cape of Good Hope.
France was impoverished, not only in Frenchmen who exiled themselves, but in those, much more numerous, who remained in spite of themselves, discouraged, ruined, whether they openly resisted persecution or suffered some external observances of Catholicism to be wrung from them, all having neither energy in work nor security in life; it was really the activity of more than a million of men that France lost, and of the million that produced most.
The great enterprise, the miracle of the reign, therefore miscarried; the new temple that Louis had pretended to erect to unity fell to ruin as it rose from the ground, and left only an open chasm in place of its foundation. Everything that had been undertaken by the governing power of France for a century in the direction of national, civil, and territorial unity had gloriously succeeded; as soon as the governing power left this legitimate field of unity to invade the domain of conscience and of human individuality, it raised before itself insurmountable obstacles; it concerned itself in contests wherein it was equally fatal to conquer or be conquered, and gave the first blow to the greatness of France. What a contrast between the pretensions of Louis that he could neither be mistaken nor deceived, that he saw everything, that he accomplished everything, and the illusions with which he was surrounded in regard to the facility of success and the means employed! The nothingness of absolute power, and of government by one alone, was thus revealed under the reign of the "Great King!"