My husband and I used to haunt the bookstores of Berkeley.
Many are gone now, but hopefully not Moe's. On one of our trips I found this
wonderful old book on the Huguenots of France. The book is not the first
printing but the one I own was published in 1877. The author of The
Huguenots in France after the Revocation of Nantes, Samuel Smiles, was
interested in both the region and the religious movement. I had said in my
first posting about various Christian groups and the persecution they endured
from mostly the state but also other religious groups that the Anabaptist were
probably the most persecuted of the Reformation groups but at least the Huguenots
are in competition.
While the Anabaptist were pacifist the Huguenots were not.
Some of them, but not all, participated in the bloody religious wars that
engulfed France as well as other European countries.
The Huguenots were part of the Reformed movement which began
with Calvin. At the time of their movement the government was ruled by kings
and Catholicism was the religion of the state. The Huguenots were prosperous
farmers and businesspeople; they were also among the intellectuals of that
time. Jumping ahead for just a bit, with persecution, France lost over 200, 000
of their most prosperous and industrious citizens as they fled to safer places
such as Switzerland, England, and America. But in writing this I am interested
in those who stayed in France and endured until freedom came.
There was often persecution of protestants in all of Europe
and some controversy about a particular persecution, that is called the massacre
of St. Bartholemew in Paris in 1572 where a royal wedding was used to trap some
Huguenots in the city. Almost all were killed and much of the controversy is
over how many were killed. Eventually some freedoms were given to the Huguenots
by the Edict of Nantes but in 1685 King Louis the XIV rescinded the edict. The
Revocation of Nantes made the Huguenot’s faith illegal. They could not meet for
worship, nor sing the Psalms which was part of their worship. Many were forced
to submit to Catholicism. And many fled, as I have written above.
At first this seemingly brought the worship, the meetings,
the preaching of the Huguenots to an end. But two movements began. One was the
bloody reprisals of the so called Camisards, groups of Huguenot men who went to
war against the state and the catholic bishops. The groups and leaders of the
Camisards in their outrage and radicalism listened to and followed those they
called prophets. At first, they won many of their battles but in the end they
either submitted to authorities or were tortured and killed.
The other movement consisted of pastors and preachers who
yearned to bring the church members together in worship and to teach the word
of God. Some of these preachers and pastors were those who had slipped out of
the country but hearing how the Huguenot people had no one to shepherd them
slipped back into the country. They were not without methods. Their worship was
referred to as “the church in the desert.” Word would go out to a neighborhood
of the meeting and one by one, in the evening, they would travel to the place of
worship. Too often authorities would find out and attack the worshipers. The
men would be sent to work in the galleys where they would set in the same
place, rowing, eating and sleeping, as well as being whipped until they died.
The women and children were sent to nunneries but often to the dungeon of a
castle. And the pastor would be sometimes racked but always hung.
The churches were in such desperate conditions spiritually
that their development needed to be restored. Because of the lack of Bibles
both boys and girls were given chapters to memorize for their meetings. Training
for pastors was usually outside. As one pastor put it:
“I have often pitched my professor’s chair,” said Court, “in
a torrent underneath a rock. The sky was our roof, and the leafy branches
thrown out from the crevices in the rock overhead were our canopy. There I and
my student would remain for about eight days; it was our hall, our lecture
room, and our study. To make the most of our time, and to practice the students
properly, I gave them a text of Scripture to discuss before me—say the first
eleven verses of the fifth chapter of Luke. I would afterwards propose to them
some point of doctrine, some passage of Scripture, some moral precept, or
sometimes I gave them some difficult passages to reconcile. After the whole had
stated their views upon the question under discussion, I asked the youngest if
he had anything to state against the arguments advanced; then the others were
asked in turn; and after they had finished, I stated the views which I
considered the most just and correct. When the more advanced students were
required to preach, they mounted a particular place, where a pole had been set
across some rocks in the ravine, and which for the time served for a pulpit.
And when they had delivered themselves, the others were requested by turns to
express themselves freely upon the subject of the sermon witch they had heard.”
[i]
Eventually a seminary was founded at Lausanne. It was funded
by many refugees in various countries. Even the king of England gave
five-hundred guinens yearly. [ii]
The preachers traveled by night sometimes across pasture and
often disguised. Eventually the worship gatherings grew even by thousands. This led to greater persecutions since not
only was there a greater awareness of the meetings but also a greater
vengefulness toward leaders and the persistent faithful. One later pastor. Paul
Rabaut, had to counter a desire of some to return to the time of the Camisards,
those who wished to fight against their enemies. Smiles writes:
“Besides being zealous, studious, and pious, Rabaut was
firm, active, shrewd, and gentle. He stood strongly upon moral force. Once,
when the Huguenots had become more than usually provoked by the persecutions practiced
on them, they determined to appear armed at the assembles. Rabaut peremptorily
forbade it. If they persevered, he would forsake their meetings. He prevailed
and they came armed with only their Bibles.”
In the end this was their usual stance against the horrific
persecution they faced. Eventually the persecutions came to an end because of
the work of a man who was a surprising gift to the Huguenots, Voltaire. In case
you do not know who he was; he was an important philosopher and activist at the
time and more importantly an atheist. Voltaire hated both the Catholic and
Protestant religions. He did care a great deal about justice.
A father, Calas whose son had committed suicide was
convicted of murder by Catholic leaders. It was not unusual at the time for
Catholic officials to blame Protestant parents for the death of their children,
insisting they had killed them to keep them from converting to Catholicism.
Calas was convicted and hung. His wife and family fled to Switzerland where
they met Voltaire. He became obsessed with the case; writing and speaking about
Calas’ trial and death. Although already dead French officials retried him and acquitted
him. The same event occurred with the last person to be sentenced to the galleys.
A young man who, purposely taking his fathers place, suffering for six years
was helped by Voltaire’s writing and speeches.
While the Declaration of Rights in 1789 gave greater freedom
to the Huguenots much was lost with the reign of terror. With the rise of Napolean
Buonaparte Catholicism was once again established as the state religion but he
also protected Protestantism. On a visit to a church in Paris, I don’t remember
the name, we were given brochures and information including, information that
Napolean had also given the Jews freedom of worship. [iii]
As I have been writing about various persecuted Christian
groups I have searched to see if there was among them any reaction to the rise
of Nazism in Europe. At first I found no information for the Huguenots but then
I remembered stories about a town in France where all the citizens protected
the Jews from the authorities. Concerning Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in an article
on the Jewish site Forward I found an article which included this:
“Ever since the Louis XIV’s revocation in 1685 of the Edict
of Nantes, which had imposed a century of religious tolerance, the low and
sturdy stone houses had been a haven for the Huguenots, or French Protestants.
Hunted by royal troops and hounded by Catholic inquisitors, the Huguenots
nevertheless held fast to their faith. Their ministers led Sunday services in
the craggy folds of the Cévennes, and their military leaders led a guerrilla
war against the Bourbon battalions. As a result, even after the Revolution of
1789, which emancipated and enfranchised both them and French Jews, the
Huguenots remained deeply marked by the so-called “years of the desert.”
The author, Robert Zaretsky, writes of a pastor, André Trocmé, a pacifist
who led the area and town in saving thousands of Jews. He writes:
“Well before most of France, Trocmé and his flock in Chambon
were acutely aware of the future that Vichy was preparing for the Jews. In
1940, an utterly dispirited nation had embraced Marshal Philippe Pétain, head
of Vichy. Yet Trocmé kept his distance, refusing in 1940 to sign the oath of
allegiance to Pétain or to sound the church bells in 1941 to mark his birthday.
In these and similar cases, Trocmé avoided confronting the authorities
directly: holding fast to his beliefs, but not endangering his church.
All this changed, though, when a mounting stream of Jews —
in 1941 they were ordered to wear the yellow star on their outer garments —
quit the Occupied Zone and began to find their way to Chambon by train.”
The article Protestant
French Village That Resisted Vichy is a wonderfully written article I leave it to the reader to
read. In another article on the same site, Q
& A: Why The Citizens Of A French Plateau Saved Hundreds During The
Holocaust, author PJ Grisar writes:
“For centuries, its residents have taken in refugees. In the
16th century, the largely Protestant plateau sheltered its coreligionists
during religious wars. Two centuries later, the population hid Catholic priests
during the French Revolution’s anti-clerical Reign of Terror. In the 1930s,
they accepted mothers and children fleeing the Spanish Civil War.
The community continues the tradition today with a welcome
program aiding asylum-seekers from African and Eastern European countries and,
recently, Syria. But the region’s most conspicuous act of sanctuary came in the
1940s, when, in the midst of Nazi deportations, the plateau’s residents
provided hundreds of refugees, most of them Jewish children, with shelter,
clothing, food and education.”
So, one understands that those who were so badly persecuted
sheltered those who in the past had persecuted them. The persecuted Huguenots
sheltered the persecuted Catholic priests. This is faithful Christianity.
But when the Son of Man comes in His glory, and all the angels with Him, then He will sit on His glorious throne
And He will put the sheep on His right and the goats on His left.
Then the King will say to those on His right, "Come, you who are blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.
For I was hungry, and you gave me something to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave me something to drink; I was a stranger, and you invited me in;
naked, and you clothed Me, I was sick, and you visited Me; I was in prison and you came to me
Then the righteous will answer Him, "Lord, when did we see You hungry, and feed You, or thristy, and give You something to drink?
And when did we see You a stranger and invite You end, or naked and clothe You?
When did we see You sick, or in prison and come to You?
The King will answer and say to them, "Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it to the one of these brothers of mine, even the least of them, you did it to Me." Matthew 25: 31, 33-40)
[i]
Samuel Smiles, The Huguenots in France: After the Revocation of the Edict of
Nantes, (London: Daldy, Isbister 1877) 222.E
[iii]
To read a good book about this time of the Revolution, the reign of terror and Napolean
see, Mike Duncan, Hero of Two Worlds: The Marquis da Lafayette in the Age of
Revolution, (New York: Public Affairs 2021)
