A Popular History of France from the Earliest Times Volume V Part 24

It is the misfortune of men, even of the greatest, to fall short of their destiny. Louis XIV. had wanted to exceed his, and to bear a burden too heavy for human shoulders. Arbiter, for a while, of the affairs of all Europe, ever absolute master in his own dominions, he bent at last beneath the load that was borne without flinching by princes less powerful, less fortunate, less adored, but sustained by the strong inst.i.tutions of free countries. William III. had not to serve him a Conde, a Turenne, a Colbert, a Louvois; he had governed from afar his own country, and he had always remained a foreigner in the kingdom which had called him to the throne; but, despite the dislikes, the bitternesses, the fierce contests of parties, he had strengthened the foundations of parliamentary government in England, and maintained freedom in Holland, whilst the ancient monarchy of France, which reached under Louis XIV.

the pinnacle of glory and power, was slowly but surely going down to perdition beneath the internal and secret malady of absolute power, without limit and without restraint.

CHAPTER XLVII.----LOUIS XIV. AND RELIGION.

Independently of simple submission to the Catholic church, there were three great tendencies which divided serious minds amongst them during the reign of Louis XIV.; three n.o.ble pa.s.sions held possession of pious souls; liberty, faith, and love were, respectively, the groundwork as well as the banner of Protestantism, Jansenism, and Quietism. It was in the name of the fundamental and innate liberty of the soul, its personal responsibility and its direct relations with G.o.d, that the Reformation had sprung up and reached growth in France, even more than in Germany and in England. M. de St. Cyran, the head and founder of Jansenism, abandoned the human soul unreservedly to the supreme will of G.o.d; his faith soared triumphant over flesh and blood, and his disciples, disdaining the joys and the ties of earth, lived only for eternity.

Madame Guyon and Fenelon, less ardent and less austere, discovered in the tender mysticism of pure love that secret of G.o.d's which is sought by all pious souls; in the name of divine love, the Quietists renounced all will of their own, just as the Jansenists in the name of faith.

Jansenism is dead after having for a long while brooded in the depths of the most n.o.ble souls; Quietism, as a sect, did not survive its ill.u.s.trious founders; faith and love have withstood the excess of zeal and the erroneous tendencies which had separated them from the aggregate of Christian virtues and doctrines; they have come back again into the pious treasury of the universal church. Neither time nor persecutions have been able to destroy in France the strong and independent groundwork of Protestantism. Faithful to its fundamental principle, it has triumphed over exile, the scaffold, and indifference, without other head than G.o.d himself and G.o.d alone.

Richelieu had slain the political hydra of Huguenots in France; from that time the Reformers had lived in modest retirement. "I have no complaint to make of the little flock," Mazarin would say; "if they eat bad gra.s.s, at any rate they do not stray." During the troubles of the Fronde, the Protestants had resumed, in the popular vocabulary, their old nickname of _Tant s'en fault_ (Far from it), which had been given them at the time of the League. "Faithful to the king in those hard times when most Frenchmen were wavering and continually looking to see which way the .

wind would blow, the Huguenots had been called _Tant s'en fault,_ as being removed from and beyond all suspicion of the League or of conspiracy against the state. And so were they rightly designated, inasmuch as to the cry, '_Qui vive?_' (Whom are you for?) instead of answering 'Vive Guise!' or 'Vive la Ligue!' they would answer, '_Tant s'en fault, vive le Roi!_' So that, when one Leaguer would ask another, pointing to a Huguenot, 'Is that one of ours?' 'Tant s'en fault,' would be the reply, 'it is one of the new religion.'" Conde had represented to Cromwell all the Reformers of France as ready to rise up in his favor; the agent sent by the Protector a.s.sured him it was quite the contrary; and the bearing of the Protestants decided Cromwell to refuse all a.s.sistance to the princes. La Roch.e.l.le packed off its governor, who was favorable to the Fronde; St. Jean d'Angely equipped soldiers for the king; Montauban, to resist the Frondeurs, repaired the fortifications thrown down by Richelieu. "The crown was tottering upon the king's head," said Count d' Harcourt to the pastors of Guienne, "but you have made it secure." The royal declaration of 1652, confirming and ratifying the edict of Nantes, was a recompense for the services and fidelity of the Huguenots. They did not enjoy it long; an edict of 1656 annulled, at the same time explaining, the favorable declaration of 1652; in 1660 the last national synod was held at Loudun. "His Majesty has resolved," said M. de la Magdelaine, deputed from the king to the synod, "that there shall be no more such a.s.semblies but when he considers it expedient."

Fifteen years had rolled by since the synod of Charenton in 1645. "We are only too firmly persuaded of the usefulness of our synods, and how entirely necessary they are for our churches, after having been so long with out them," sorrowfully exclaimed the moderator, Peter Daille.

For two hundred and twelve years the Reformed church of France was deprived of its synods. G.o.d at last restored to it this corner-stone of its interior const.i.tution.

The suppression of the edict-chambers inst.i.tuted by Henry IV. in all the Parliaments for the purpose of taking cognizance of the affairs of the Reformers followed close upon the abolition of national synods. Peter du Bosq, pastor of the church of Caen, an accomplished gentleman and celebrated preacher, was commissioned to set before the king the representations of the Protestants. Louis XIV. listened to him kindly.

"That is the finest speaker in my kingdom," he said to his courtiers after the minister's address. The edict-chambers were, nevertheless, suppressed in 1669; the half and half (_mi partie_) chambers, composed of Reformed and Catholic councillors, underwent the same fate in 1679, and the Protestants found themselves delivered over to the intolerance and religious prejudices of the Parliaments, which were almost everywhere harsher, as regarded them, than the governors and superintendents of provinces.

"It seemed to me, my son," wrote Louis XIV. in his _Memoires_ of the year 1661, "that those who were for employing violent remedies against the religion styled Reformed, did not understand the nature of this malady, caused partly by heated feelings, which should be pa.s.sed over unnoticed and allowed to die out insensibly, instead of being inflamed afresh by equally strong contradiction, which, moreover, is always useless, when the taint is not confined to a certain known number, but spread throughout the state. I thought, therefore, that the best way of reducing the Huguenots of my kingdom little by little, was, in the first place, not to put any pressure upon them by any fresh rigor against them, to see to the observance of all that they had obtained from my predecessors, but to grant them nothing further, and even to confine the performance thereof within the narrowest limits that justice and propriety would permit. But as to graces that depended upon me alone, I have resolved, and I have pretty regularly kept my resolution ever since, not to do them any, and that from kindness, not from bitterness, in order to force them in that way to reflect from time to time of themselves, and without violence, whether it were for any good reason that they deprived themselves voluntarily of advantages which might be shared by them in common with all my other subjects."

These prudent measures, "quite in kindness and not in bitterness," were not enough to satisfy the fresh zeal with which the king had been inspired. All-powerful in his own kingdom, and triumphant everywhere in Europe, he was quite shocked at the silent obstinacy of those Huguenots who held his favor and graces cheap in comparison with a quiet conscience; his kingly pride and his ignorant piety both equally urged him on to that enterprise which was demanded by the zeal of a portion of the clergy. The system of purchasing conversions had been commenced; and Pellisson, himself originally a Protestant, had charge of the payments, a source of fraud and hypocrisies of every sort. A declaration of 1679 condemned the relapsed to _honorable amends_ (public recantation, &c.), to confiscation and to banishment. The door's of all employments were closed against Huguenots; they could no longer sit in the courts or Parliaments, or administer the finances, or become medical pract.i.tioners, barristers, or notaries; infants of seven years of age were empowered to change their religion against their parents' will; a word, a gesture, a look, were sufficient to certify that a child intended to abjure; its parents, however, were bound to bring it up according to its condition, which often facilitated confiscation of property. Pastors were forbidden to enter the houses of their flocks, save to perform some act of their ministry; every chapel into which a new convert had been admitted was to be pulled down, and the pastor was to be banished. It was found necessary to set a guard at the doors of the places of worship to drive away the poor wretches who repented of a moment's weakness; the number of "places of exercise," as the phrase then was, received a gradual reduction; "a single minister had the charge of six, eight, and ten thousand persons," says Elias Benoit, author of the _Histoire de l'Edit de Nantes,_ making it impossible for him to visit and a.s.sist the families, scattered sometimes over a distance of thirty leagues round his own residence. The wish was to reduce the ministers to give up altogether from despair of discharging their functions. The chancellor had expressly said, "If you are reduced to the impossible, so much the worse for you; we shall gain by it." Oppression was not sufficient to break down the Reformers. There was great difficulty in checking emigration, by this time increasing in numbers. Louvois proposed stronger measures. The population was crushed under the burden of military billets. Louvois wrote to Marillac, superintendent of Poitou, "His Majesty has learned with much joy the number of people who continue to become converts in your department. He desires you to go on paying attention thereto; he will think it a good idea to have most of the cavalry and officers quartered upon Protestants; if, according to the regular proportion, the religionists should receive ten, you can make them take twenty." The dragoons took up their quarters in peaceable families, ruining the more well-to-do, maltreating old men, women, and children, striking them with their sticks or the flat of their swords, hauling off Protestants in the churches by the hair of their heads, harnessing laborers to their own ploughs, and goading them like oxen.

Conversions became numerous in Poitou. Those who could fly left France, at the risk of being hanged if the attempt happened to fail. "Pray lay out advantageously the money you are going to have," wrote Madame de Maintenon to her brother, M. d'Aubigne. "Land in Poitou is to be had for nothing, and the desolation amongst the Protestants will cause more sales still. You may easily settle in grand style in that province." "We are treated like enemies of the Christian denomination," wrote, in 1662, a minister named Jurieu, already a refugee in Holland. "We are forbidden to go near the children that come into the world, we are banished from the bars and the faculties, we are forbidden the use of all the means which might save us from hunger, we are abandoned to the hatred of the mob, we are deprived of that precious liberty which we purchased with so many services, we are robbed of our children, who are a part of ourselves. . . . Are we Turks? Are we infidels? We believe in Jesus Christ, we do; we believe Him to be the Eternal Son of G.o.d, the Redeemer of the world; the maxims of our morality are of so great purity that none dare gainsay them; we respect the king; we are good subjects, good citizens; we are Frenchmen as much as we are Reformed Christians." Jurieu had a right to speak of the respect for the king which animated the French Reformers. There was no trace left of that political leaven which formerly animated the old Huguenots, and made Duke Henry de Rohan say, "You are all republicans; I would rather have to do with a pack of wolves than an a.s.sembly of parsons." "The king is hood winked," the Protestants declared; and all their efforts were to get at him and tell his Majesty of their sufferings. The army remained open to them, though without hope of promotion; and the gentlemen showed alacrity in serving the king.

"What a position is ours!" they would say; if we make any resistance, we are treated as rebels; if we are obedient, they pretend we are converted, and they hoodwink the king by means of our very submission."

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Torture of the Huguenots---552]

The misfortunes were redoubling. From Poitou the persecution had extended through all the provinces. Superintendent Foucauld obtained the conversion in ma.s.s of the province of Bearn. He egged on the soldiers to torture the inhabitants of the houses they were quartered in, commanding them to keep awake all those who would not give in to other tortures.

The dragoons relieved one another so as not to succ.u.mb themselves to the punishment they were making others undergo. Beating of drums, blasphemies, shouts, the crash of furniture which they hurled from side to side, commotion in which they kept these poor people in order to force them to be on their feet and hold their eyes open, were the means they employed to deprive them of rest. To pinch, p.r.i.c.k, and haul them about, to lay them upon burning coals, and a hundred other cruelties, were the sport of these butchers. All they thought most about was how to find tortures which should be painful without being deadly, reducing their hosts thereby to such a state that they knew not what they were doing, and promised anything that was wanted of them in order to escape from those barbarous bands. Languedoc, Guienne, Angoumois, Saintonge, all the provinces in which the Reformers were numerous, underwent the same fate.

The self-restraining character of the Norman people, their respect for law, were manifested even amidst persecution; the children were torn away from Protestant families, and the chapels were demolished by act of Parliament; the soldiery were less violent than elsewhere, but the magistrates were more inveterate. "G.o.d has not judged us unworthy to suffer ignominy for His name," said the ministers condemned by the Parliament for having performed the offices of their ministry. "The king has taken no cognizance of the case," exclaimed one of the accused, Legendre, pastor of Rouen; "he has relied upon the judges; it is not his Majesty who shall give account before G.o.d; you shall be responsible, and you alone; you who, convinced as you are of our innocence, have nevertheless condemned us and branded us." "The Parliament of Normandy has just broken the ties which held us bound to our churches," said Peter du Bosq. The banished ministers took the road to Holland. The seaboard provinces were beginning to be dispeopled. A momentary disturbance, which led to belief in a rising of the Reformers in the Cevennes and the Vivarais, served as pretext for redoubled rigor. Dauphiny and Languedoc were given up to the soldiery; murder was no longer forbidden them, it was merely punishing rebels; several pastors were sentenced to death; Homel, minister of Soyon in the Vivarais, seventy-five years of age, was broken alive on the wheel. Abjurations multiplied through terror.

"There have been sixty thousand conversions in the jurisdiction of Bordeaux, and twenty thousand in that of Montauban," wrote Louvois to his father in the first part of September, 1685; "the rapidity with which this goes on is such, that, before the end of the month, there will not remain ten thousand religionists in the district of Bordeaux, in which there were a hundred and fifty thousand on the 15th of last month." "The towns of Nimes, Alais, Uzes, Villeneuve, and some others, are entirely converted," writes the Duke of Noailles to Louvois in the month of October, 1685; "those of most note in Nimes made abjuration in church the day after our arrival. There was then a lukewarmness; but matters were put in good train again by means of some billets that I had put into the houses of the most obstinate. I am making arrangements for going and scouring the Uvennes with the seven companies of Barbezieux, and my head shall answer for it that before the 25th of November not a Huguenot shall be left there."

And a few days later, at Alais--"I no longer know what to do with the troops, for the places in which I had meant to, post them get converted all in a body, and this goes on so quickly that all the men can do is to sleep for a night at the localities to which I send them. It is certain that you may add very nearly a third to the estimate given you of the people of the religion, amounting to the number of a hundred and eighty-two thousand men, and, when I asked you to give me until the, 25th of next month for their complete conversion, I took too long a term, for I believe that by the end of the month all will be settled. I will not, however, omit to tell you that all we have done in these conversions will be nothing but useless, if the king do not oblige the bishops to send good priests to instruct the people who want to hear the gospel preached. But I fear that the king will be worse obeyed in that respect by the priests than by the religionists. I do not tell you this without grounds." "There is not a courier who does not bring the king great causes for joy," writes Madame de Maintenon, "that is to say, conversions by thousands. I can quite believe that all these conversions are not sincere, but G.o.d makes use of all ways of bringing back heretics. Their children, at any rate, will be Catholics; their outward reunion places them within reach of the truth; pray G.o.d to enlighten them all; there is nothing the king has more at heart."

In the month of August, 1684, she said, "The king has a design of laboring for the entire conversion of the heretics. He often has conferences about it with M. Le Tellier and M. de Chateauneuf, whereat I was given to understand that I should not be one too many. M. de Chateauneuf proposed measures which are not expedient. There must be no precipitation; it must be conversion, not persecution. M. de Louvois was for gentleness, which is not in accordance with his nature and his eagerness to see matters ended. The king is ready to do what is thought most likely to conduce to the good of religion. Such an achievement will cover him with glory before G.o.d and before men. He will have brought back all his subjects into the bosom of the church, and will have destroyed the heresy which his predecessors could not vanquish."

The king's glory was about to be complete; the _gentleness_ of Louvois had prevailed; he had found himself obliged to moderate the zeal of his superintendents; "nothing remained but to weed out the religionists of the small towns and villages;" by stretching a point the process had been carried into the princ.i.p.ality of Orange, which still belonged to the house of Na.s.sau, on the pretext that the people of that district had received in their chapels the king's subjects. The Count of Tesse, who had charge of the expedition, wrote to Louvois, "Not only, on one and the same day, did the whole town of Orange become converted, but the state took the same resolution, and the members of the Parliament, who were minded to distinguish themselves by a little more stubbornness, adopted the same course twenty-four hours afterwards. All this was done gently, without violence or disorder. There is only a parson named Chambrun, patriarch of the district, who persists in refusing to listen to reason; for the president, who did aspire to the honor of martyrdom, would, as well as the rest of the Parliament, have turned Mohammedan, if I had desired it. You would not believe how infatuated all these people were, and are still, about the Prince of Orange, his authority, Holland, England, and the Protestants of Germany. I should never end if I were to recount all the foolish and impertinent proposals they have made to me."

M. de Tesse did not tell Louvois that he was obliged to have the pastors of Orange seized and carried off. They were kept twelve years in prison at Pierre-Encise; none but M. de Chambrun, who had been taken to Valence, managed to escape and take refuge in Holland, bemoaning to the end of his days a moment's weakness. "I was quite exhausted by torture, and I let fall this unhappy expression: 'Very well, then, I will be reconciled.'

This sin has brought me down as it were into h.e.l.l itself, and I have looked upon myself as a dastardly soldier who turned his back on the day of battle, and as an unfaithful servant who betrayed the interests of his master."

The king a.s.sembled his council. The lists of converts were so long that there could scarcely remain in the kingdom more than a few thousand recalcitrants. "His Majesty proposed to take an ultimate resolution as regarded the Edict of Nantes," writes the Duke of Burgundy in a memorandum found amongst his papers. "Monseigneur represented that, according to an anonymous letter he had received the day before, the Huguenots had some expectation of what was coming upon them, that there was perhaps some reason to fear that they would take up arms, relying upon the protection of the princes of their religion, and that, supposing they dared not do so, a great number would leave the kingdom, which would be injurious to commerce and agriculture, and, for that same reason, would weaken the state. The king replied that he had foreseen all for some time past, and had provided for all; that nothing in the world would be more painful to him than to shed a single drop of the blood of his subjects, but that he had armies and good generals whom he would employ in case of need against rebels who courted their own destruction. As for calculations of interest, he thought them worthy of but little consideration in comparison with the advantages of a measure which would restore to religion its splendor, to the state its tranquillity, and to authority all its rights. A resolution was carried unanimously for the suppression of the Edict of Nantes." The declaration, drawn up by Chancellor Le Tellier and Chateauneuf, was signed by the king on the 15th of October, 1685; it was despatched on the 17th to all the superintendents. The edict of pacification, that great work of the liberal and prudent genius of Henry IV., respected and confirmed in its most important particulars by Cardinal Richelieu, recognized over and over again by Louis XIV. himself, disappeared at a single stroke, carrying with it all hope of liberty, repose, and justice, for fifteen hundred thousand subjects of the king. "Our pains," said the preamble of the edict, "have had the end we had proposed, seeing that the better and the greater part of our subjects of the religion styled Reformed have embraced the Catholic. The execution of the Edict of Nantes consequently remaining useless, we have considered that we could not do better, for the purpose of effacing entirely the memory of the evils which this false religion has caused in our kingdom, than revoke entirely the aforesaid Edict of Nantes, and all that has been done in favor of the said religion."

[Ill.u.s.tration: Revocation of the Edict of Nantes----556]

The edict of October 15, 1685, supposed the religion styled Reformed to be already destroyed and abolished. It ordered the demolition of all the chapels that remained standing, and interdicted any a.s.sembly or worship; recalcitrant (_opiniatres_) ministers were ordered to leave the kingdom within fifteen days; the schools were closed; all new-born babies were to be baptized by the parish priests; religionists were forbidden to leave the kingdom on pain of the galleys for the men and confiscation of person and property for the women. "The will of the king," said superintendent Marillac at Rouen, "is, that there be no more than one religion in this kingdom; it is for the glory of G.o.d and the well-being of the state."

Two hours were allowed the Reformers of Rouen for making their abjuration.

One clause, at the end of the edict of October 15, seemed to extenuate its effect. "Those of our subjects of the religion styled Reformed who shall persist in their errors, pending the time when it may please G.o.d to enlighten them like the rest, shall be allowed to remain in the kingdom, country, and lands, which obey the king, there to continue their trade and enjoy their property without being liable to be vexed or hindered on pretext of prayer or worship of the said religion of whatsoever nature they may be." "Never was there illusion more cruel than that which this clause caused people," says Benoit, in his _Histoire de l'Edit de Nantes_." It was believed that the king meant only to forbid special exercises, but that he intended to leave conscience free, since he granted this grace to all those who were still Reformers, pending the time when it should please G.o.d to enlighten them. Many gave up the measures they had taken for leaving the country with their families, many voluntarily returned from the retreats where they had hitherto been fortunate enough to lie hid. The most mistrustful dared not suppose that so solemn a promise was only made to be broken on the morrow. They were all, nevertheless, mistaken; and those who were imprudent enough to return to their homes were only just in time to receive the dragoons there." A letter from Louvois to the Duke of Noailles put a stop to all illusion. "I have no doubt," he wrote, "that some rather heavy billets upon the few amongst the n.o.bility and third estate still remaining of the religionists will undeceive them as to the mistake they are under about the edict M. de Chateauneuf drew up for us. His Majesty desires that you should explain yourself very sternly, and that extreme severity should be employed against those who are not willing to become of his religion; those who have the silly vanity to glory in holding out to the last must be driven to extremity." The pride of Louis XIV. was engaged in the struggle; those of his subjects who refused to sacrifice their religion to him were disobedient, rebellious, and besotted with silly vanity.

"It will be quite ridiculous before long to be of that religion," wrote Madame de Maintenon.

Even in his court and amongst his most useful servants the king encountered unexpected opposition. Marshal Schomberg with great difficulty obtained authority to leave the kingdom; Duquesne was refused.

The ill.u.s.trious old man, whom the Algerian corsairs called "the old French capitan, whose bride is the sea, and whom the angel of death has forgotten," received permission to reside in France without being troubled about his religion. "For sixty years I have rendered to Caesar that which was Caesar's," said the sailor proudly; "it is time to render unto G.o.d that which is G.o.d's." And, when the king regretted that his religion prevented him from properly recognizing his glorious career, "Sir," said Duquesne, "I am a Protestant, but I always thought that my services were Catholic." Duquesne's children went abroad. When he died, 1688, his body was refused to them. His sons raised a monument to him at Aubonne, in the canton of Berne, with this inscription: "This tomb awaits the remains of Duquesne. Pa.s.ser, should you ask why the Hollanders have raised a superb monument to Ruyter vanquished, and why the French have refused a tomb to Ruyter's vanquisher, the fear and respect inspired by a monarch whose power extends afar do not allow me to answer."

Of the rest, only the Marquis of Ruvigny and the Princess of Tarento, daughter-in-law of the Duke of La Tremoille and issue of the house of Hesse, obtained authority to leave France. All ports were closed, all frontiers watched. The great lords gave way, one after another.

Accustomed to enjoy royal favors, attaching to them excessive value, living at court, close to Paris, which was spared a great deal during the persecution, they, without much effort, renounced a faith which closed to them henceforth the door to all offices and all honors. The gentlemen of the provinces were more resolute; many realized as much as they could of their property, and went abroad, braving all dangers, even that of the galleys in case of arrest. The Duke of La Force had abjured, then repented of his abjuration, only to relapse again. One of his cousins, seventy-five years of age, was taken to the galleys. He had for his companion Louis de Marolles, late king's councillor. "I live just now all alone," wrote the latter to his wife. "My meals are brought from outside; if you saw me in my beautiful convict-dress, you would be charmed. The iron I wear on my leg, though it weighs only three pounds, inconvenienced me at first far more than that which you saw me in at La Tournelle." Files of Protestant galley-convicts were halted in the towns, in the hope of inspiring the obstinate with a salutary terror.

The error which had been fallen into, however, was perceived at court.

The stand made by Protestants astounded the superintendents as well as Louvois himself. Everywhere men said, as they said at Dieppe, "We will not change our religion for anybody; the king has power over our persons and our property, but he has no power over our consciences." There was fleeing in all directions. The governors grew weary of watching the coasts and the frontiers. "The way to make only a few go," said Louvois, "is to leave them liberty to do so without letting them know it." Any way was good enough to escape from such oppression. "Two days ago,"

wrote M. de Tesse, who commanded at Gren.o.ble, "a woman, to get safe away, hit upon an invention which deserves to be known. She made a bargain with a Savoyard, an ironmonger, and had herself packed up in a load of iron rods, the ends of which showed. It was carried to the custom-house, and the tradesman paid on the weight of the iron, which was weighed together with the woman, who was not unpacked until she was six leagues from the frontier." "For a long time," says M. Floquet, "there was talk in Normandy of the Count of Marance, who, in the middle of a severe winter, flying with thirty-nine others on board a fishing-smack, encountered a tempest, and remained a long time at sea without provisions, dying of hunger, he, the countess, and all the pa.s.sengers, amongst whom were pregnant women, mothers with infants at the breast, without resources of any sort, reduced for lack of everything to a little melted snow, with which they moistened the parched lips of the dying babes." It were impossible to estimate precisely the number of emigrations; it was probably between three and four hundred thousand.

"To speak only of our own province," writes M. Floquet in his _Histoire du Parlement de Normandie,_ "about one hundred and eighty-four thousand religionists went away; more than twenty-six thousand habitations were deserted; in Rouen there were counted no more than sixty thousand men instead of the eighty thousand that were to be seen there a few years before. Almost all trade was stopped there as well as in the rest of Normandy. The little amount of manufacture that was possible rotted away on the spot for want of transport to foreign countries, whence vessels were no longer found to come. Rouen, Darnetal, Elbeuf, Louviers, Caudebec, Le Havre, Pont-Audemer, Caen, St. Lo, Alencon, and Bayeux were falling into decay, the different branches of trade and industry which had but lately been seen flourishing there having perished through the emigration of the masters whom their skilled workmen followed in shoals."

The Norman emigration had been very numerous, thanks to the extent of its coasts and to the habitual communication between Normandy, England, and Holland; Vauban, however, remained very far from the truth when he deplored, in 1688, "the desertion of one hundred thousand men, the withdrawal from the kingdom of sixty millions of livres, the enemy's fleets swelled by nine thousand sailors, the best in the kingdom, and the enemy's armies by six hundred officers and twelve thousand soldiers, who had seen service." It is a natural but a striking fact that the Reformers who left France and were received with open arms in Brandenburg, Holland, England, and Switzerland carried in their hearts a profound hatred for the king who drove them away from their country, and everywhere took service against him, whilst the Protestants who remained in France, bound to the soil by a thousand indissoluble ties, continued at the same time to be submissive and faithful. "It is right," said Chanlay, in a Memoire addressed to the king, "whilst we condemn the conduct of the new converts, fugitives, who have borne arms against France since the commencement of this war up to the present, it is right, say I, to give those who have staid in France the praise and credit they deserve. Indeed, if we except a few disturbances of little consequence which have taken place in Languedoc, we have, besides the fact of their remaining faithful to the king in the provinces, and especially in Dauphiny, even whilst the confederated armies of the emperor, of Spain, and of the Duke of Savoy were in the heart of that province in greater strength than the forces of the king, to note that those who were fit to bear arms have enlisted amongst the troops of his Majesty and done good service." In 1745, after sixty years' persecution, consequent upon the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, Matthew Desubas, a young pastor accused before the superintendent of Languedoc, Lenain, said with high-spirited modesty, "The ministers preach nothing but patience and fidelity to the king." I am aware of it, sir," answered the superintendent. The pastors were hanged or burned, the faithful flock dragged to the galleys and the Tower of Constance. Prayers for the king, nevertheless, were sent up from the proscribed a.s.semblies in the desert, whilst the pulpit of Saurin at the Hague resounded with his anathemas against Louis XIV., and the regiments of emigrant Huguenots were marching against the king's troops under the flags of England or Holland.

The peace of Ryswick had not brought the Protestants the hoped-for alleviation of their woes. Louis XIV. haughtily rejected the pet.i.tion of the English and Dutch plenipotentiaries on behalf of "those in affliction who ought to have their share in the happiness of Europe." The persecution everywhere continued,--with determination and legality in the north, with violence and pa.s.sion in the south, abandoned to the tyranny of M. de Lamoignon de Baville, a crafty and cold-bloodedly cruel politician, without the excuse of any zealous religious conviction. The execution of several ministers who had remained in hiding in the Cevennes, or had returned from exile to instruct and comfort their flocks, raised to the highest pitch the enthusiasm of the Reformers of Languedoc. Deprived of their highly-prized a.s.semblies and of their pastors' guidance, men and women, graybeards and children, all at once fancied themselves animated by the spirit of prophecy. Young girls had celestial visions; the little peasant la.s.ses poured out their utterances in French, sometimes in the language and with the sublime eloquence of the Bible, sole source of their religious knowledge. The rumor of these marvels ran from village to village; meetings were held to hear the inspired maidens, in contempt of edicts, the galleys, and the stake. A gentleman gla.s.s-worker, named Abraham de la Serre, was, as it were, the Samuel of this new school of prophets. In vain did M. de Baville have three hundred children imprisoned at Uzes, and then send them to the galleys; the religious contagion was too strong for the punishments.

"Women found themselves in a single day husbandless, childless, houseless, and penniless," says Court; they remained immovable in their pious ecstasy; the a.s.semblies multiplied; the troops which had so long occupied Languedoc had been summoned away by the war of succession in Spain; the militia could no longer restrain the Reformers growing every day more enthusiastic through the prophetic hopes which were born of their long sufferings. The arch-priest of the Cevennes, Abbe du Chayla, a tyrannical and cruel man, had undertaken a mission at the head of the Capuchins. His house was crammed with condemned Protestants; the breath of revolt pa.s.sed over the mountains on the night of July 27, 1702, the castle of the arch-priest was surrounded by Huguenots in arms, who demanded the surrender of the prisoners. Du Chayla refused. The gates were forced, the condemned released, the priests who happened to be in the house killed or dispersed. The archpriest had let himself down by a window; he broke his thigh; he was found hiding in a bush; the castle was in flames. "No mercy, no mercy!" shouted the madmen; "the Spirit willeth that he die." Every one of the Huguenots stabbed the poor wretch with their poniards: "That's for my father, broken on the wheel; that's for my brother, sent to the galleys; that's for my mother, who died of grief; that's for my relations in exile!" He received fifty-two wounds. Next day the Cevennes were everywhere in revolt. A prophet named Seguier was at the head of the insurrection. He was soon made prisoner. "How dost thou expect me to treat thee?" asked his judge. "As I would have treated thee, had I caught thee," answered the prophet. He was burned alive in the public square of Pont-de-Montvert, a mountain burgh. "Where do you live?" he had been asked at his examination. "In the desert," he replied, "and soon in heaven." He exhorted the people from the midst of the flames. The insurrection went on spreading. "Say not, What can we do? we are so few; we have no arms!" said another prophet, named Laporte.

"The Lord of hosts is our strength! We will intone the battle-psalms, and, from the Lozere to the sea, Israel shall arise! And, as for arms, have we not our axes? They will beget muskets!" The plain rose like the mountain. Baron St. Comes, an early convert, and colonel of the militia, was a.s.sa.s.sinated near Vauvert; murders multiplied; the priests were especially the object of the revolters' vengeance. They a.s.sembled under the name of _Children of G.o.d,_ and marched under the command of two chiefs, one, named Roland, who formerly served under Catinat, and the other, a young man, whiles a baker and whiles a shepherd, who was born in the neighborhood of Anduze, and whose name has remained famous.

John Cavalier was barely eighteen when M. de Baville launched his brother-in-law, the Count of Broglie, with a few troops upon the revolted Cevenols. The Catholic peasants called them Camisards, the origin of which name has never been clearly ascertained. M. de Broglie was beaten; the insurrection, which was entirely confined to the populace, disappeared all at once in the woods and rocks of the country, to burst once more unexpectedly upon the troops of the king. The great name of Lamoignon shielded Baville; Chamillard had for a long while concealed from Louis XIV. the rising in the Cevennes. He never did know all its gravity. "It is useless," said Madame de Maintenon, "for the king to trouble himself with all the circ.u.mstances of this war; it would not cure the mischief, and would do him much." "Take care," wrote Chamillard to Baville, on superseding the Count of Broglie by Marshal Montrevel, "not to give this business the appearance of a serious war."

The rumor of the insurrection in Languedoc, however, began to spread in Europe. Conflagrations, murders, executions in cold blood or in the heat of pa.s.sion, crimes on the part of the insurgents, as well as cruelties on the part of judges and generals, succeeded one another uninterruptedly, without the military authorities being able to crush a revolt that it was impossible to put down by terror or punishments. "I take it for a fact," said a letter to Chamillard from M. de Julien, an able captain of irregulars, lately sent into Languedoc to aid the Count of Broglie, "that there are not in this district forty who are real converts, and are not entirely on the side of the Camisards. I include in that number females as well as males, and the mothers and daughters would give the more striking proofs of their fury if they had the strength of the men. . . . I will say but one word more, which is, that the children who were in their cradles at the time of the general conversions, as well as those who were four or five years old, are now more Huguenot than the fathers; n.o.body, however, has set eyes upon any minister; how, then, comes it that they are so Huguenot? Because the fathers and mothers brought them up in those sentiments all the time they were going to ma.s.s. You may rely upon it that this will continue for many generations." M. de Julien came to the conclusion that the proper way was to put to the sword all the Protestants of the country districts and burn all the villages. M. de Baville protested. "It is not a question of exterminating these people," he said, "but of reducing them, of forcing them to fidelity; the king must have industrious people and flourishing districts preserved to him." The opinion of the generals prevailed; the Cevenols were proclaimed outlaws, and the pope decreed a crusade against them. The military and religious enthusiasm of the Camisards went on increasing. Cavalier, young and enterprising, divided his time between the boldest attempts at surprise and mystical ecstasies, during which he singled out traitors who would have a.s.sa.s.sinated him or sinners who were not worthy to take part in the Lord's Supper. The king's troops ravaged the country; the Camisards, by way of reprisal, burned the Catholic villages; everywhere the war was becoming horrible. The peaceable inhabitants, Catholic or Protestant, were incessantly changing from wrath to terror. Cavalier, naturally sensible and humane, sometimes sank into despondency. He would fling himself on his knees, crying, Lord, turn aside the king from following the counsels of the wicked!" and then he would set off again upon a new expedition. The struggle had been going on for two years, and Languedoc was a scene of fire and bloodshed. Marshal Montrevel had gained great advantages when the king ordered Villars to put an end to the revolt.

"I made up my mind," writes Villars, in his Memoires, "to try everything, to employ all sorts of ways except that of ruining one of the finest provinces in the kingdom, and that, if I could bring back the offenders without punishing them, I should preserve the best soldiers there are in the kingdom. They are, said I to myself, Frenchmen, very brave and very strong, three qualities to be considered." "I shall always," he adds, "have two ears for two sides."

"We have to do here with a very extraordinary people," wrote the marshal to Chamillard, soon after his arrival; "it is a people unlike anything I ever knew--all alive, turbulent, hasty, susceptible of light as well as deep impressions, tenacious in its opinions. Add thereto zeal for religion, which is as ardent amongst heretics as Catholics, and you will no longer be surprised that we should be often very much embarra.s.sed.

There are three sorts of Camisards: the first, with whom we might arrange matters by reason of their being weary of the miseries of war. The second, stark mad on the subject of religion, absolutely intractable on that point; the first little boy or little girl that falls a-trembling and declares that the Holy Spirit is speaking to it, all the people believe it, and, if G.o.d with all his angels were to come and speak to them, they would not believe them more; people, moreover, on whom the penalty of death makes not the least impression; in battle they thank those who inflict it upon them; they walk to execution singing the praises of G.o.d and exhorting those present, insomuch that it has often been necessary to surround the criminals with drums to prevent the pernicious effect of their speeches. Finally, the third: people without religion, accustomed to pillage, to murder, to quarter themselves upon the peasants; a rascalry furious, fanatical, and swarming with prophetesses."

Villars had arrived in Languedoc the day after the checks encountered by the Camisards. The despondency and suffering were extreme; and the marshal had Cavalier sounded.

"What do you want to lay down your arms?" said the envoy. "Three things," replied the Cevenol chief: "liberty of conscience, the release of our brethren detained in the prisons and the galleys, and if these demands are refused, permission to quit France with ten thousand persons." The negotiators were intrusted with the most flattering offers for Cavalier. Sensible, and yet vain, moved by his country's woes, and flattered by the idea of commanding a king's regiment, the young Camisard allowed himself to be won. He repaired formally to Nimes for an interview with the marshal. "He is a peasant of the lowest grade," wrote Villars to Chamillard, "who is not twenty-two, and does not look eighteen; short, and with no imposing air, qualities essential for the lower orders, but surprising good sense and firmness. I asked him yesterday how he managed to keep his fellows under. 'Is it possible,'

said I, 'that, at your age, and not being long used to command, you found no difficulty in often ordering to death your own men?' 'No, sir,' said he, 'when it seemed to me just.' 'But whom did you employ to inflict it?' 'The first whom I ordered, and n.o.body ever hesitated to follow my orders.' I fancy, sir, that you will consider this rather surprising.

Furthermore, he shows great method in the matter of his supplies, and he disposes his troops for an engagement as well as very experienced officers could do. It is a piece of luck if I get such a man away from them."

Cavalier's fellows began to escape from his sway. They had hoped, for a while, that they would get back that liberty for which they had shed their blood. "They are permitted to have public prayer and chant their psalms. No sooner was that known all round," writes Villars, "than behold my madmen rushing up from burghs and castles in the neighborhood, not to surrender, but to chant with the rest. The gates were closed; they leap the walls and force the guards. It is published abroad that I have indefinitely granted free exercise of the religion." The bishops let the marshal be.

"Stuff we our ears," said the Bishop of Narbonne, "and make we an end."

The Camisards refused to listen to Cavalier.

"Thou'rt mad," said Roland; "thou bast betrayed thy brethren; thou shouldst die of shame. Go tell the marshal that I am resolved to remain sword in hand until the entire and complete restoration of the Edict of Nantes!" The Cevenols thought themselves certain of aid from England; only a handful followed Cavalier, who remained faithful to his engagements. He was ordered with his troop to Elsa.s.s; he slipped away from his watchers and threw himself into Switzerland. At the head of a regiment of refugees he served successively the Duke of Savoy, the States-General, and England; he died at Chelsea in 1740, the only one amongst the Camisards to leave a name in the world.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Death of Roland the Camisard----569]

The insurrection still went on in Languedoc under the orders of Roland, who was more fanatical and more disinterested than Cavalier; he was betrayed and surrounded in the castle of Castelnau on the 16th of August, 1704. Roland just had time to leap out of bed and mount his horse; he was taking to flight with his men by a back door when a detachment of dragoons came up with him; the Camisard chief put his back against an old olive and sold his life dearly. When he fell, his lieutenants let themselves be taken "like lambs" beside his corpse. "They were destined to serve as examples," writes Villars, "but the manner in which they met death was more calculated to confirm their religious spirit in these wrong heads than to destroy it. Lieutenant Maille was a fine young man of wits above the common. He heard his sentence with a smile, pa.s.sed through the town of Nimes with the same air, begging the priest not to plague him; the blows dealt him did not alter this air in the least, and did not elicit a single exclamation. His arms broken, he still had strength to make signs to the priest to be off, and, as long as he could speak, he encouraged the others. That made me think that the quickest death is always best with these fellows, and that their sentence should above all things bear reference to their obstinacy in revolt rather than in religion." Villars did not carry executions to excess, even in the case of the most stubborn; little by little the chiefs were killed off in petty engagements or died in obscurity of their wounds; provisions were becoming scarce; the country was wasted; submission became more frequent every day. The princ.i.p.als all demanded leave to quit France. "There are left none but a few brigands in the Upper Cevennes," says Villars. Some partial risings, alone recalled, up to 1709, the fact that the old leaven still existed; the war of the Camisards was over. It was the sole attempt in history on the part of French Protestantism since Richelieu, a strange and dangerous effort made by an ignorant and savage people; roused to enthusiasm by persecution, believing itself called upon by the spirit of G.o.d to win, sword in hand, the freedom of its creed under the leadership of two shepherd soldiers and prophets. Only the Scottish Cameronians have presented the same mixture of warlike ardor and pious enthusiasm, more gloomy and fierce with the men of the North, more poetical and prophetical with the Cevenols, flowing in Scotland as in Languedoc from religious oppression and from constant reading of the Holy Scriptures. The silence of death succeeded everywhere in France to the plaints of the Reformers and to the crash of arms; Louis XIV. might well suppose that Protestantism in his dominions was dead.

It was a little before the time when the last of the Camisards, Abraham Mazel and Claris, perished near Uzes (in 1710), that the king struck the last blow at Jansenism by destroying its earliest nest and its last refuge, the house of the nuns of Port-Royal des Champs. With truces and intervals of apparent repose, the struggle had lasted more than sixty years between the Jesuits and Jansenism. M. de St. Cyran, who left the Bastille a few months after the death of Richelieu, had dedicated the last days of his life to writing against Protestantism, being so much the more scared by the heresy in that, perhaps, he felt himself attracted thereto by a secret affinity. He was already dying when there appeared the book Frequente Communion, by M. Arnauld, youngest son and twentieth child of that ill.u.s.trious family of Arnaulds in whom Jansenism seemed to be personified. The author was immediately accused at Rome, and buried himself for twenty years in retirement. M. de St. Cyran was still working, dictating Christian thoughts and points touching death.

_Stantem mori oportet_ (One should die in harness), he would say. On the 3d of October, 1643, he succ.u.mbed suddenly, in the arms of his friends.

"I cast my eyes upon the body, which was still in the same posture in which death had left it," writes Lancelot, "and I thought it so full of majesty and of mien so dignified that I could not tire of admiring it, and I fancied that he would still have been capable, in the state in which he was, of striking with awe the most pa.s.sionate of his foes, had they seen him." It was the most cruel blow that could have fallen upon the pious nuns of Port-Royal. "_Dominus in coelo!_ (Lord in heaven!)"

was all that was said by Mother Angelica Arnauld, who, like M. de St.

Cyran himself, centred all her thoughts and all her affections upon eternity.

With his dying breath M. de St. Cyran had said to M. Gudrin, physician to the college of Jesuits, "Sir, tell your Fathers, when I am dead, not to triumph, and that I leave behind me a dozen stronger than I." With all his penetration the director of consciences was mistaken; none of those he left behind him would have done his work; he had inspired with the same ardor and the same constancy the strong and the weak, the violent and the pacific; he had breathed his mighty faith into the most diverse souls, fired with the same zeal penitents and nuns, men rescued from the scorching furnace of life in the world, and women brought up from infancy in the shade of the cloister. M. Arnauld was a great theologian, an indefatigable controversialist, the oracle and guide of his friends in their struggle against the Jesuits; M. de Sacy and M. Singlin were wise and able directors, as austere as M. de St. Cyran in their requirements, less domineering and less rough than he; but M. de St. Cyran alone was and could be the head of Jansenism; he alone could have inspired that idea of immolation of the whole being to the sovereign will of G.o.d, as to the truth which resides in Him alone. Once a.s.sured of this point, M. de St. Cyran became immovable. Mother Angelica pressed him to appear before the archbishop's council, which was to p.r.o.nounce upon his book _Theologie familiere_. "It is always good to humble one's self," she said. "As for you," he replied, "who are in that disposition, and would not in any respect compromise the honor of the truth, you could do it; but as for me, I should break down before the eyes of G.o.d if I consented thereto; the weak are more to be feared sometimes than the wicked."