THE HUGUENOTS IN FRANCE
As
early as the 12th century, a time of openness, and of wide political
and religious debate in western Europe, the Roman Catholic and
Orthodox churches had been penetrated by small groups of 'heretics',
men who claimed to be innovators, holders of the 'truth'.
Among
these were the Cathars
and the Waldensians,
forerunners of the Huguenots, forming popular religious movements
that questioned the authority of the Church of Rome and pressed to
open the Latin procedures of worship to the whole congregation. These
and other 'heresies' laid the ground for the Reformation. Both groups
were ruthlessly persecuted throughout the 13th and 14th centuries.
The last of the Cathars fled to Sicily in the 15th century and were
finally annihilated.
In
France, the growth of Protestantism continued at first subversively
on a Calvinistic model. The Protestants eventually became political
and aggressive. For the most part their strength lay in the southwest
of France in an area bordered by the Loire, the Saone and the Rhone
to the north-east, and to the south and west the Mediterranean,
Pyrenees and Bay of Biscay. There were outposts in Normandy and
Dauphiné while Geneva was the capital of French Huguenotism,
operating almost as an independent French republic.
By the time
Francis I (1494-1547) and Henry II (1519-1559) came to power, the
Huguenots in France numbered hundreds of thousands, mostly gentry and
even nobility. There were, however, many divides among them, and the
Counter-Reformation, under the authority of the Pope and the Jesuits,
sought to exploit these differences. Calvinism - John Calvin wrote
the first edition of the Institutes of the Christian Religion in 1535
at the age of 27 - was scarcely popular, and the Huguenots probably
over-rated their strength. This made their position perilous: the
powerful Guise family and the ruling Catholic party were committed to
a policy of political and religious unity, the better to oppose
France's enemies abroad and to fight Protestantism across Europe.
Huguenotism was heading for a period of severe trouble.
After the
death of Louis XI in 1483 France went through a period of weak rule
while competing factions appeared to forget all sense of patriotism
and loyalty. The middle classes were at odds, the bureaucratic
machine did not always support the crown, the Huguenots handed Le
Havre over to the English and the Guises were in league with Spain.
The Huguenots, although loyal to Henry of Navarre, set up a state
within a state in a virtual act of provincial independence.
Opposition to the Huguenots slowly came to a head. The Conference
of Bayonne in 1565 contemplated the extirpation of Protestantism
throughout France. In 1568 a league for the elimination of heresy
formed at Toulouse, calling itself a 'crusade'. But Catherine of
Medici's son Charles IX (1550-1574) , fearing that firmer action
against the Huguenots would be interpreted as dancing to the tune of
Spain, made the Treaty of Saint Germain with the Huguenots in 1570.
There was a strong reaction to this on the part of the French people,
culminating in the Saint
Bartholomew's Day massacre in 1572
when Huguenots in Paris were
slaughtered in thousands as they gathered for religious celebrations.
Even
then, the religious policy of the French government was still not
staunchly Catholic, and Henry III (1574-1589) made the Peace of
Monsieur with the Huguenots in 1576. This provoked yet another strong
reaction: a number of Catholic leagues sprang up, of danger both to
the Crown and to the Protestants. The powerful Guises formed the
Catholic League (the League of Paris) and turned to the common people
for support. Henry III capitulated, giving Henry of Navarre the
opening he was looking for: the Huguenots gathered to support him at
the Battle of Coutras, after which (in October 1587) a rebellion
broke out in Paris leading to the deaths of the king and Henry of
Guise. A central council was set up in Paris that managed by terror
through affiliated societies throughout the country, and Henry of
Navarre became the legitimate king of France as Henry IV (1553-1610.
The nobles, the Church, the upper bourgeoisie and the Parlement
of Paris united against the revolutionists in favour of the crown and
the constitution, thus bringing a kind of stability for the monarchy
that lasted until 1789. This forced the Huguenots to change tack and
keep their own tendencies quietly in the background.
Henry
adopted a policy of compromise over the Protestants, but for some of
the more fanatical Huguenots, this was not enough: they were by
nature opposed to the crown as a form of absolutism. The Edict of
Nantes (1598) was intended to bring a kind of peace in turn to the
warring Huguenots and Catholics. It gave Protestants liberty of
conscience, allowed them eight strong towns and so a form of
geographical independence, and granted local privileges regarding
liberty of worship.
For the most part, Huguenotism was driven
south of the Loire with a much more slender hold in the north, but
this was far from a perfect solution. The Huguenot penchant for
republican doctrines and local independence made the French upper
classes uneasy, and Paris was in deadly enmity with them.
It
seems that the Huguenots suffered from a form of denial. They little
realised just how provocative their policies were to the majority of
the populace of France, and how ill-equipped they were to win the
battle of words. The Huguenot Confederation was a defence
organisation and not a diplomatic body: they quarrelled with each
other and with everyone else, and as the years went by the sense of
unease throughout France escalated. Had it not been for the strength
of Henry IV, the Treaty of Nantes would never have come about.
As
the seventeenth century progressed, the Huguenots became bigger
players on the national scene. They found a champion in the great
prince, Henri de la Tour-d'Auvergne, Duc de Bouillon (15941623). He
not only had large holdings of land but a history of rebelling
against authority and pitting his enemies against each other. He
tried to recruit the Huguenots to his cause but they were too canny
to fight. After a period of turmoil, Navarre council was merged with
that of Béarn, and Catholicism restored in the area. The
Huguenots, under this threat, organised themselves into 'circles',
holding general assemblies. Between 1598 and 1620 nine general
assemblies were held, two with royal consent.
The Huguenots of
the north, including Picardie, were nervous of these moves, being
small in number, exposed and vulnerable. Yet the drive to establish
the Protestant position continued, spurred in part by the suffering
of Protestants in other countries. Henry de Rohan and his brother
Soubise undertook a campaign which saw the crown capitulate, and
honours and pensions for the Huguenots. This served to stoke Rohan's
ambition to form an independent republic in the area around La
Rochelle under the overall protection of England.
This took place
at a time when a century of counter-reformation activity began in
France. Throughout, religious banners proclaimed differences that
were almost always purely political. There were great open debates.
Science leaped forward. There was a reshuffling of the boundaries
between church and state in a context of almost feudal practices of a
church attuned to serving the needs of the monarchy. The bishop was a
courtier of kinds and his priests peasants, and the Jesuits held the
trump cards in the pack. They were of a mind to wage war, with the
freedom to speak in public, pursue heretics and infidels, and manage
the lives of people at all levels in society through the schools and
the confessionals. (Thanks to this, France ended the century with the
church strengthened at all levels.)
Richelieu came to power in
1622 when he was invested with his Cardinal's hat. He inherited a
situation where the last Protestant forces in Germany were being
vanquished, the Huguenots were shaping up to provoke trouble in
France, and Spanish troops were on the borders. The Huguenots,
though, were divided about how to deal with hostility from the
Catholics: some saw safety in loyalty to the crown. Others, led by
the Rohans, were in favour of certain forms of resistance to restore
Huguenot courts attached to the Parlements, and seek guarantees of
the rights won in the Edict of Nantes, including the fortification of
their towns.
By now there were a quarter of a million more
Huguenots in France than at the beginning of the century, with 30,000
in Paris, and a changing leadership that had to respond to the
different position of the monarchy, fashion, and the hardening in
attitudes of the Catholic church. The leading lights of the Huguenots
were on the whole educated, bourgeois, perhaps even wealthy merchants
and financiers or lawyers. They could not field a big army in support
of the ambition Rohan brothers, so although there was a revolt at La
Rochelle with a siege that began in 1627, it was not widely
supported.
Richelieu tackled the siege with steadfastness. He
closed off the mouth of the port with a stone wall to starve La
Rochelle into submission and prevent supplies arriving from England.
He finally drove the English away leaving Soubise inside the citadel,
his brother Rohan trying unsuccessfully to raise reinforcements in
the south and west. Richelieu waited patiently until the keys of La
Rochelle were surrendered on All Saints Day in 1628, then spared and
fed the inhabitants and demolished the walls. La Rochelle returned to
prosperity but independence was never restored. In short, the
Huguenots had once more shot themselves in the foot.
From this
time on, religion was no longer an issue between the monarchy and the
nobles. Richelieu took the view that diplomacy would succeed in
eliminating Protestantism where force might fail. The militant
Calvinism of earlier years gave way to a moderate approach that
allowed for loyalty to the monarch. Yet old Huguenot fantasies of
power and control lingered on in the traditional villages of the
south on the estates of the nobility, but in the new society of
liberal 17th century France, with power now devolved to the
bourgeoisie, thoughts of supremacy and a Protestant state faded.
The
Huguenots, however, were still an irritant both to the state and the
church as well as to the other nine-tenths of the population. This
meant that their security rested crucially on the diplomatic efforts
and canniness of those close to the court, such as the de Croisettes
family who court lawyers.
Yet Protestantism remained on the
increase. When Louis XIV came to the throne in 1661 there were 1.75
million Huguenots in France with 630 places of worship (known as
temples), and 750 of their own ministers. But a drifting away was
also afoot, and the Huguenot ideals began to founder, while their
universities dwindled to teaching only theology. The pure and
honourable outward display of the Huguenots masked a sense of
dispiritedness and purposelessness. The traditional Huguenot
religious insistence upon the strength of the individual and his
relationship with God was finally waning. The ultimate blow to this
central tenet came in 1657 when the Reformed Church delegates assured
the king that they looked upon him as God with absolute authority.
This was a fundamental betrayal of kinds from which the Huguenots
never recovered.
There was a great deal of talk over the next
decades about reunion, but the French church was finally spurred to
deal with Huguenot indifference to this idea. The crown was being
showered with petitions against the Huguenots, to which the latter
were unable to respond since their national synods had been stopped
in 1659. However, once the Dutch War was over in 1678, Louis was free
to turn his mind to the Huguenot problem. In the interval, a massive
dossier of complaints and evidence was accumulated to underpin the
case against the Huguenots. Their long period of relative grace was
rapidly coming to an end.
The final chapter in this story, when the Huguenots were banished, restricted, and persecuted is told on another page.
SOURCES
GOUBERT, Pierre, (CARTER, Anne. transl.). 1970. Louis XIV and Twenty Million Frenchmen. Penguin Press.
HASSALL, Arthur. 1902. The French People. William Heinemann.
HEER, Friedrich. 1961. The Medieval World. Mentor.
RAYNER, Robert M. 1964. European History 1648-1789. Longmans.
STOYE, John. 1973. Europe Unfolding 1648-1688. Fontana.
TREASURE, G. R. 1966. Seventeenth Century France. Rivingtons (Publishers) Limited.