The synod of 1559 was the beginning of a remarkable increase in the Reform movement; at that synod fifteen churches were represented, two years later, in 1561, the number increased to 2150. The parlements were powerless before this increase; thousands left the Catholic Church, and when it was seen that execution and popular massacre provided no solution of the difficulty the struggle was carried into the arena of national politics. On the side of the reformers were ranged some among the noblest Frenchmen of the age, Coligny, La Noue, Duplessis Mornay, Jean Cousin, Ramus, Marot, Ambroise Paré, Olivier de Serres, Bernard Palissy, the Estiennes, Hotman, Jean de Serres, with the princess Renée of France, Jeanne d’Albret, Louise de Coligny. The policy which refused liberty of conscience to the reformers and thus plunged the country into the horrors of civil war came near to causing a national catastrophe. For more than fifty years the history of the Huguenots is that of France (1560-1629). Francis II., who succeeded Henry II. at the age of sixteen, married Mary Stuart, and fell under the domination of the queen’s uncles, the Guises, who were to lead the anti-Reform party. The Bourbons, the Montmorencies, the Chatillons, out of hostility to them, became the chiefs of the Huguenots.
The conspiracy of Amboise, formed with the object of kidnapping the king (March 1560), was discovered, and resulted in the death of the plotters; it was followed by the proclamation of the Edict of Romorantin which laid an interdict upon the Protestant religion. But the reformers had become so powerful that Coligny, who was to become their most famous leader, protested in their name against this violation of liberty of conscience. The Guise party caused the prince of Condé to be arrested and condemned to death, but the sentence was not carried into effect, and at this moment Catherine de’ Medici became regent on the accession of Charles IX. She introduced Italian methods of government, alternating between concessions and vigorous persecution, both alike devoid of sincerity. For a moment, at the colloquy of Poissy (Oct. 1561), at which Roman Catholic and Protestant divines were assembled together and Theodore Beza played so important a part, it seemed as though a modus vivendi would be established. The attempt failed, but by the edict of January 1562, religious liberty was assured to the Huguenots. This, however, was merely the prelude to civil war, the signal for which was given by the Guises, who slaughtered a number of Huguenots assembled for worship in a barn at Vassy (March 1, 1562). The duke of Guise, entering Paris in triumph, transferred the court to Fontainebleau by a daring coup d’état in defiance of the queen regent. It was then that Condé declared “qu’on ne pouvait plus rien espérer que de Dieu et ses armes,” and with the Huguenot leaders signed at Orleans (April 11, 1562) the manifesto in which, having declared their loyalty to the crown, they stated that as good and loyal subjects they were driven to take up arms for liberty of conscience on behalf of the persecuted saints. The first civil war had already broken out; till the end of the century the history of France is that of the struggle between the Huguenots upholding “The Cause” (La Cause) and the Roman Catholics fighting for the Holy League (La Sainte Ligue). The leading events only will be related here (see also [France]: History). The Huguenots lost the battle of Dreux (Dec. 19, 1562), the duke of Guise was assassinated by Poltrot de Méré (Feb. 18, 1563) and finally Condé signed the Edict of Amboise which put an end to this first war. But the League gradually extended its action and Catherine de’ Medici entered into negotiations with Spain. The Huguenots, seeing their danger, renewed hostilities, but after their defeat at St Denis (Nov. 10, 1567) and the revolt of La Rochelle, peace was concluded at Longjumeau (March 23, 1568). This truce lasted only a few months. Pope Pius V. did not cease to demand the extermination of the heretics, and the queen mother finally issued the edict of the 28th of September 1568, which put the Huguenots outside the protection of the law. The Huguenots once more took up arms, but were defeated at Jarnac (March 13, 1569), and Condé was taken prisoner and assassinated by Montesquiou. But Jeanne d’Albret renewed the courage of the vanquished by presenting to them her son Henri de Bourbon, the future Henry IV. Coligny, whose heroic courage rose with adversity, collected the remnants of the Protestant army and by a march as able as it was audacious moved on Paris, and the Peace of St Germain was signed on the 8th of August 1570.
For a moment it seemed reasonable to hope that the war was at an end. Coligny had said that he would prefer to be dragged through the streets of Paris than to recommence the fighting; Charles IX. had realized the nobility and the patriotism of the man who wished to drive the Spaniards from Flanders; Henri de Bourbon was to marry Marguerite of France. Peace seemed to be assured when on the night of the 24th of August, 1572, after a council at which Catherine de’ Medici, Charles IX., the duke of Anjou and other leaders of the League assisted, there occurred the treacherous Massacre of St Bartholomew (q.v.) in which Coligny and all the leading Huguenots were slain. This date marks a disastrous epoch in the history of France, the long period of triumph of the Catholic reaction, during which the Huguenots had to fight for their very existence. The Paris massacre was repeated throughout France; few were those who were noble enough to decline to become the executioners of their friends, and the Protestants were slain in thousands. The survivors resolved upon a desperate resistance. It was at this time that the Huguenots were driven to form a political party; otherwise they must, like the Protestants of Spain, have been exterminated. This party was formed at Milhau in 1573, definitely constituted at La Rochelle in 1588, and lasted until the peace of Alais in 1629. The delegates selected by the churches bound themselves to offer a united opposition to the violence of the enemies of God, the king and the state. It is a profound mistake to attribute to them, as their enemies have done, the intention of overthrowing the monarchy and substituting a republic. They were royalists to the core, as is shown by the sacrifices they made for the sake of setting Henry IV. on the throne. It is true, however, that among themselves they formed a kind of republic which, according to the historian J. A. de Thou, had its own laws dealing with civil government, justice, war, commerce, finance. They had a president called the Protector of the Churches, an office held first by Condé and afterwards by the king of Navarre up to the day on which he became king of France as Henry IV. (1589). The fourth religious war, which had broken out immediately after the Massacre of St Bartholomew, was brought to an end by the pacification of Boulogne (July 16, 1573), which granted a general amnesty, but the obstinate intolerance of the League resulted in the creation of a Catholic party called “les Politiques” which refused to submit to their domination and offered aid to the Huguenots against the Guises. The recollections of the horrors of St Bartholomew’s night had hastened the death of Charles IX., the last of the Valois; he had been succeeded by the most debauched and effeminate of monarchs, Henry III. Once more war broke out. Henry of Guise, “le Balafré,” nephew of the cardinal of Lorraine, became chief of the League, while the duke of Anjou, the king’s brother, made common cause with the Huguenots. The peace of Monsieur, signed on the 5th of May 1576, marked a new victory of liberty of conscience, but its effect was ephemeral; hostilities soon recommenced and lasted for many years, and only became fiercer when the duke of Anjou died on the 10th of June 1584.
The fact that on the death of Henry III. the crown would pass to Henry of Navarre, the Protector of the Churches, induced the Guise party to declare that they would never accept a heretical monarch, and, at the instigation of Henry of Guise, Cardinal de Bourbon was nominated by them to succeed. Henry of Navarre since 1575 leader of the Huguenots, had year by year seen his influence increase, and now, faced by the machinations of the Guises, who had made overtures to Spain, declared that his only object was to free the feeble Henry III. from their influence. On the 20th of October 1587 he won the battle of Coutras, but on the 28th the foreign Protestants who were coming to his aid were routed by Guise at Montargis. The new body, known as “the Sixteen of Paris,” thereupon compelled Henry III. to sign the “Edict of Union” by which the cardinal of Bourbon was declared heir presumptive. The king could not, however, endure the humiliation of hearing Henry of Guise described as “king of Paris” and on the 23rd of December 1588 had him murdered together with the cardinal of Lorraine at the château of Blois. The League, now led by the duke of Mayenne, Guise’s brother, declared war to the knife upon him and caused him to be excommunicated. In his isolation Henry III. threw himself into the arms of Henry of Navarre, who saved the royalist party by defeating Mayenne and escorted the king with his victorious army to St. Cloud, whence he proposed to enter Paris and destroy the League. But Henry III., on the 1st of August 1589, was assassinated by the monk Jacques Clement, on his deathbed appointing Henry of Navarre as his successor.
This only spurred the League to redoubled energy, and Mayenne proclaimed the cardinal of Bourbon king with the title of Charles X. But Henry IV., who had already promised to maintain the Roman Church, gained new adherents every day, defeated the Leaguers at Arques in 1589, utterly routed Mayenne at Ivry on the 14th of March 1590, and laid siege to Paris. Cardinal de Bourbon having died in the same year and France being in a state of anarchy, Philip II. of Spain, in concert with Pope Gregory XIV., who excommunicated Henry IV., supported the claims of the infanta Isabella. Mayenne, unable to continue the struggle without Spanish help, promised to assist him, but Henry neutralized this danger by declaring himself a Roman Catholic at St Denis (July 25, 1593), saying, “Paris after all is worth a mass, in spite of the advice and the prayers of my faithful Huguenots.” “It is with anguish and grief,” writes Beza, “that I think of the fall of this prince in whom so many hopes were placed.” On the 22nd of March 1594 Henry entered Paris. The League was utterly defeated. Thus the Huguenots after forty years of strife obtained by their constancy the promulgation of the Edict of Nantes (April 13, 1598), the charter of religion and political freedom (see [Nantes, Edict of]).
The Protestants might reasonably hope that Henry IV., in spite of his abjuration of their faith, would remember the devoted support which they had given him, and that his authority would guarantee the observance of the provisions of the Edict. Unhappily twelve years afterwards, on the 14th of May 1610, Henry was assassinated by Ravaillac, leaving the great work incomplete. Once more France was to undergo the misery of civil war. During the minority of Louis XIII. power resided in the hands of counsellors who had not inherited the wisdom of Henry IV. and were only too ready to favour the Catholic party. The Huguenots, realizing that their existence was at stake, once more took up arms in defence of their liberty under the leadership of Henri de Rohan (q.v.). Their watchword had always been that, so long as the state was opposed to liberty of conscience, so long there could be no end to religious and civil strife, that misfortune and disaster must attend an empire of which the sovereign identified himself with a single section of his people. Richelieu had entered the king’s council on the 4th of May 1624; the destruction of the Huguenots was his policy and he pursued it to a triumphant conclusion. On the 28th of October 1628, La Rochelle, the last stronghold of the Huguenots, was obliged to surrender after a siege rendered famous for all time by the heroism of its defenders and of its mayor. The peace of Alais, which was signed on the 28th of June 1629, marks the end of the civil wars.
The Huguenots had ceased to exist as a political party and, in the assurance that liberty of conscience would be accorded to them, showed themselves loyal subjects. On the death of Louis XIII., the declaration of the 8th of July 1643 had guaranteed to the Protestants “free and unrestricted, exercise of their religion,” thus confirming the Edict of Nantes. The synods of Charenton (1644) and Loudun (1659) asserted their absolute loyalty to Louis XIV., a loyalty of which the Huguenots had given proof not only by their entire abstention from the troubles of the Fronde, but also by their public adherence to the king. The Roman Catholic clergy had never accepted the Edict of Nantes, and all their efforts were directed to obtaining its revocation. As long as Mazarin was alive the complaints of the clergy were in vain, but when Louis XIV. attained his majority there commenced a legal persecution which was bound in time to bring about the ruin of the reformed churches. The Edict of Nantes, which was part of the law of the land, might seem to defy all attacks, but the clergy found means to evade the law by demanding that it should be observed with literal accuracy, disregarding the changes which had been produced in France during more than half a century. The clergy in 1661 successfully demanded that commissioners should be sent to the provinces to report infractions of the Edict, and thus began a judicial war which was to last for more than twenty years. All the churches which had been built since the Edict of Nantes were condemned to be demolished. All the privileges which were not explicitly stated in the actual text of the Edict were suppressed. More than four hundred proclamations, edicts or declarations attacking the Huguenots in their households and their civil freedom, their property and their liberty of conscience were promulgated during the years which preceded the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. In spite of all sufferings which this rigorous legislation inflicted upon them they did not cease to resist, and in order to crush this resistance and to compel them to accept the “king’s religion,” there were organized the terrible dragonnades (1683-1686) which effected the forcible conversion of thousands of Protestants who gave way under the tortures which were inflicted upon them. It was then that Louis XIV. declared that “the best of the larger part of our subjects, who formerly held the so-called reformed religion, have embraced the Catholic religion, and therefore the Edict of Nantes has become unnecessary”; on the 18th of October 1685 he pronounced its revocation. Thus under the influence of the clergy was committed one of the most flagrant political and religious blunders in the history of France, which in the course of a few years lost more than 400,000 of its inhabitants, men who, having to choose between their conscience and their country, endowed the nations which received them with their heroism, their courage and their ability.
There is perhaps no example in history of so cruel a persecution as this, which destroyed a church of which Protestant Europe was justly proud. At no period in its career had it numbered among its adherents so many men of eminence, Abbadie, Claude, Bayle, Du Bosc, Jurieu, Élie Benoist, La Placette, Basnage, Daillé, Mestrezat, Du Quesne, Schomberg, Ruvigny. There were no Huguenots left in France; those who, conquered by persecution, remained there were described as “New Catholics.” All the pastors who refused to abjure their faith were compelled to leave the country within fifteen days. The work was complete. Protestantism, with its churches and its schools, was destroyed. As Bayle wrote, “France was Catholic to a man under the reign of Louis the Great.”
Persecution had succeeded in silencing, but it could not convert the people. The Huguenots, before the ruins of their churches, remembered the early Christians and held their services in secret. Their pastors, making light of death, returned from the lands of their exile and visited their own churches to restore their courage. If any one denied the Catholic faith on his death-bed his body was thrown into the common sewers. The galleys were full of brave Huguenots condemned for remaining constant to the Protestant faith. For fifteen years the exiles continuously besought Louis XIV. to give them back their religious liberty. For a moment they hoped that the Treaty of Ryswick (1697) would realise their hopes, but Louis XIV. steadily declined to grant their requests. Despair armed the Cévennes, and in 1702 the war of the Camisards broke out, a struggle of giants sustained by Jean Cavalier with his mountaineers against the royal troops (see [Camisards] and [Cavalier], Jean). The Huguenots seemed to be finally conquered. On the 8th of March 1715 Louis XIV. announced that he had put an end to all exercise of the Protestant religion; but in this very year, on the 21st of August, while the king was dying at Versailles, there assembled together at Monoblet in Languedoc, under the presidency of a young man twenty years of age, Antoine Court, a number of preachers, as the pastors were then called, with the object of raising the church from its ruins. This was the first synod of the Desert. To re-establish the abandoned worship, to unite the churches in the struggle for liberty of conscience, such was the work to which Court devoted his life, and which earned for him the name of the “Restorer of Protestantism” (see [Court, Antoine]). In spite of persecution the Protestants continued their assemblies; the fear of death and of the galleys were alike powerless to break their resistance. On the demand of the clergy all marriages celebrated by their pastors were declared null and void, and the children born of these unions were regarded as bastards.
Protestantism, which persecution seemed to have driven from France, drew new life from this very persecution. Outlawed, exiles in their own country, deprived of all civil existence, the Huguenots showed an invincible heroism. The history of their church during the period of the Desert is the history of a church which refused to die. Amongst its famous defenders was Paul Rabaut, the successor of Antoine Court. Year by year the churches became more numerous. In 1756 there were already 40 pastors; several years later, in 1763, the date of the last synod of the Desert, their number had increased to 65. The question of Protestant marriages roused public opinion which could not tolerate the idea that Frenchmen, whose sole crime was their religious belief, should be condemned to civil death. The torture of Jean Calas, who was condemned on a false charge of having killed his son because he desired to become a Catholic, caused general indignation, of which Voltaire became the eloquent mouthpiece. Ideas of tolerance, of which Bayle had been the earliest advocate, became victorious, and owing to the devotion of Rabaut Saint-Étienne, son of Paul Rabaut, and the zeal of Lafayette, the edict of November 1787, in spite of the fierce opposition of the clergy, renewed the civil rights of the Huguenots by recognizing the validity of their marriages. Victories even greater were in store; two years later liberty of conscience was won. On the 22nd of August 1789 the pastor Rabaut Saint-Étienne, deputy for the sénéchaussée of Nîmes to the States General, cried out, “It is not tolerance which I demand, it is liberty, that my country should accord it equally without distinction of rank, of birth or of religion.” The Declaration of the Rights of Man affirmed the liberty of religion; the Huguenots had not suffered in vain, for the cause for which their ancestors and themselves had suffered so much was triumphant, and it was the nation itself which proclaimed the victory. But religious passions were always active, and at Montauban as at Nîmes (1790) Catholics and Protestants came to blows. The Huguenots, having endured the persecutions of successive monarchs, had to endure those of the Terror; their churches were shut, their pastors dispersed and some died upon the scaffold. On the 3rd of Ventose, year II. (February 21, 1795), the church was divorced from the state and the Protestants devoted themselves to reorganization. Some years later Bonaparte, having signed the Concordat of the 15th of July 1801, promulgated the law of the 18th of Germinal, year X., which recognized the legal standing of the Protestant church, but took from it the character of free church which it had always claimed. So great was the contrast between a past which recalled to Protestants nothing but persecution, and a present in which they enjoyed liberty of conscience, that they accepted with a profound gratitude a régime of which the ecclesiastical standpoint was so alien to their traditions. With enthusiasm they repeated the words with which Napoleon had received the pastors at the Tuileries on the 16th of Frimaire, year XII.: “The empire of the law ends where the undefined empire of conscience begins; law and prince are powerless against this liberty.”