The persecution of Huguenots under Louis XV refers to hostile activities against French Protestants between 1715 and 1774 during the reign of Louis XV.
The persecution of Huguenots under Louis XV refers to hostile activities against French Protestants between 1715 and 1774 during the reign of Louis XV.
The members of the Protestant religion in France, the Huguenots, had been granted substantial religious, political and military freedom by Henry IV in his Edict of Nantes. Later, following renewed warfare, they were stripped of their political and military privileges by Louis XIII, but retained their religious freedoms. This situation persisted until the personal rule of Louis XIV. Initially he sought to convert Protestants to Catholicism through peaceful means, including financial incentives, but gradually he adopted harsher measures, culminating in the use of dragonnades, soldiers stationed in the homes of Protestants to force them to convert. In 1685, he revoked the Edict of Nantes altogether, abolishing all rights of Protestants in the kingdom.
Under this duress, many Protestants converted to Catholicism; others fled the country. Those who converted, however, usually did so only outwardly as crypto-Protestants, also called Nicodemites. As soon as the vigilance of the government was relaxed they neglected the service of the Catholic Church, and, when they dared, they met in their houses or in the open for the worship of their own faith. [1] In truth, the number of Protestants who truly became Catholics and passed on their faith to their children was insignificant.
The penalties for preaching or attending a Protestant assembly were severe: life terms in the galleys for men, imprisonment for women, and confiscation of all property were common.
Beginning in 1702, a group of Protestants in the region of the Cévennes mountains, known as Camisards, revolted against the government. Fighting largely ceased after 1704, only to resume in 1710 and continue sporadically for the next five years. Protestantism continued to be suppressed in France until the death of Louis XIV in 1715.
As Louis XV was only five years old when he became king, France came under the rule of a regent, Philippe II, Duke of Orléans (in office: 1715–1723). The Regent had little interest in continuing the persecution of Protestants. While the kingdom's laws did not change, their application diminished. Protestants began once more to celebrate their religion, especially in regions such as Languedoc, the Dauphiné, Guyenne, and Poitou. [2] Nevertheless, there remained those who advocated rigor in the treatment of the Protestants. Prominent among these, the Archbishop of Rouen, Louis III de La Vergne de Tressan, became the grand almoner to the Regent. He argued with both the Regent and the most influential minister, Cardinal Dubois, in favour of severe measures against the Protestants. They rejected his ideas.
After Louis Henri, Duc de Bourbon became premier in 1723, however, the bishop found in him a more receptive audience, and he was given permission to draw up a general law against "l'hérésie". The King promulgated a law on 14 May 1724:
Of all the grand designs of our most honoured lord and great-grandfather, there is none that we have more at heart to carry out than that which he conceived, of entirely extinguishing heresy in his kingdom. Arrived at majority, our first care has been to have before us the edicts whereof execution has been delayed, especially in the provinces afflicted with the contagion. We have observed that the chief abuses which demand a speedy remedy relate to illicit assemblies, the education of children, the obligation of public functionaries to profess the Catholic religion, the penalties against the relapsed, and the celebration of marriage, regarding which here are our intentions: Shall be condemned: preachers to the penalty of death, their accomplices to the galleys for life, and women to be shaved and imprisoned for life. Confiscation of property: parents who shall not have baptism administered to their children within twenty-four hours, and see that they attend regularly the catechism and the schools, to fines and such sums as they may amount to together; even to greater penalties. Midwives, physicians, surgeons, apothecaries, domestics, relatives, who shall not notify the parish priests of births or illnesses, to fines. Persons who shall exhort the sick, to the galleys or imprisonment for life, according to sex; confiscation of property. The sick who shall refuse the sacraments, if they recover, to banishment for life; if they die, to be dragged on a hurdle. Desert-marriages are illegal; the children born of them are incompetent to inherit. Minors whose parents are expatriated may marry without their authority; but parents whose children are on foreign soil shall not consent to their marriage, on pain of the galleys for the men and banishment for the women. Finally, of all fines and confiscations, half shall be employed in providing subsistence for the new converts. [3]
The law equalled, and even surpassed in some measures, the most severe proclamations of Louis XIV. However, times had changed. Louis XIV's decrees against the Protestants had been greeted by the majority of the country with enthusiasm. But the clergy had not sought the 1724 edict; it was "the work of an ambitious man [Tressan] backed up by certain fanatics". The magistrates, too, were not as enthusiastic as the public in their application of the edict. [4]
Serious discrimination took place only where the local authorities were strict and loyal to the edict. It mostly occurred in southern France, especially in the dioceses of Nîmes and Uzès, and in Dauphiné. [5] Protestant preachers and/or leaders active during this period in France included Antoine Court, [6] [7] Paul Rabaut, [8] Alexander Ramsey, and Roger. [9] They often lived as nomads in wilderness areas in order to avoid capture.
Historians estimate that the number of men and women imprisoned or sent to the galleys for religious offences in the 40 years following the edict of 1724 was almost two thousand. [10] According to Antoine Court, eight ministers were executed in this period. [11] This was a much lower rate than had occurred during the later part of Louis XIV's reign. [12]
Toulon was the centre where most of the men committed to the galleys for religious crimes served their sentences. [10]
Letters of one of its inmates and the accounts of witnesses such as Marie Durand tell of the dreary and desolate women's prison, the Tower of Constance at Aigues Mortes. [13] Through the efforts of the Prince of Beauvau, the dozen or so women held there were finally released in 1767. [14]
In the decades following 1724, enthusiasm for the persecution of Protestants continued to wane; after 1764 they "enjoyed a practical toleration for a quarter of a century before the law secured them a legal toleration" [15] by the Edict of Versailles in 1787.
The Edict of Nantes was signed on 13 April 1598 by King Henry IV and granted the minority Calvinist Protestants of France, also known as Huguenots, substantial rights in the nation, which was predominantly Catholic.
The Huguenots were a religious group of French Protestants who held to the Reformed, or Calvinist, tradition of Protestantism. The term, which may be derived from the name of a Swiss political leader, the Genevan burgomaster Besançon Hugues (1491–1532), was in common use by the mid-16th century. Huguenot was frequently used in reference to those of the Reformed Church of France from the time of the Protestant Reformation. By contrast, the Protestant populations of eastern France, in Alsace, Moselle, and Montbéliard, were mainly Lutherans.
The French Wars of Religion is the term which is used in reference to a period of civil war between French Catholics and Protestants, commonly called Huguenots, which lasted from 1562 to 1598. According to estimates, between two and four million people died from violence, famine or diseases which were directly caused by the conflict; additionally, the conflict severely damaged the power of the French monarchy. The fighting ended in 1598 when Henry of Navarre, who had converted to Catholicism in 1593, was proclaimed Henry IV of France and issued the Edict of Nantes, which granted substantial rights and freedoms to the Huguenots. However, Catholics continued to have a hostile opinion of Protestants in general and of Henry, and his assassination in 1610 triggered a fresh round of Huguenot rebellions in the 1620s.
An edict is a decree or announcement of a law, often associated with monarchism, but it can be under any official authority. Synonyms include "dictum" and "pronouncement".
The Edict of Fontainebleau was an edict issued by French King Louis XIV and is also known as the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The Edict of Nantes (1598) had granted Huguenots the right to practice their religion without state persecution. Protestants had lost their independence in places of refuge under Cardinal Richelieu on account of their supposed insubordination, but they continued to live in comparative security and political contentment. From the outset, religious toleration in France had been a royal, rather than popular, policy.
Camisards were Huguenots of the rugged and isolated Cévennes region and the neighbouring Vaunage in southern France. In the early 1700s, they raised a resistance against the persecutions which followed Louis XIV's Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, making Protestantism illegal. The Camisards operated throughout the mainly Protestant Cévennes and Vaunage regions including parts of the Camargue around Aigues Mortes. The revolt broke out in 1702, with the worst of the fighting continuing until 1704, then skirmishes until 1710 and a final peace by 1715. The Edict of Tolerance was not finally signed until 1787.
The Dragonnades were a French government policy instituted by King Louis XIV in 1681 to intimidate Huguenot (Protestant) families into converting to Catholicism. This involved the billeting of ill-disciplined dragoons in Protestant households with implied permission to abuse the inhabitants and destroy or steal their possessions. The soldiers employed in this role were satirized as "missionary dragoons".
Louis Henri, Duke of Bourbon, was a French nobleman and politician who served as Prime Minister of France from 1723 to 1726. As a member of the reigning House of Bourbon, he was a prince du sang.
The Kingdom of France in the early modern period, from the Renaissance to the Revolution (1789–1804), was a monarchy ruled by the House of Bourbon. This corresponds to the so-called Ancien Régime. The territory of France during this period increased until it included essentially the extent of the modern country, and it also included the territories of the first French colonial empire overseas.
The Kingdom of France is the historiographical name or umbrella term given to various political entities of France in the medieval and early modern period. It was one of the most powerful states in Europe since the High Middle Ages. It was also an early colonial power, with possessions around the world.
Antoine Court was a French reformer called the "Restorer of Protestantism in France." He was born in Villeneuve-de-Berg, in Languedoc, on 27 March 1696. His parents were peasants, adherents of the Reformed church, which was then undergoing persecution. When 17 years old, Court began to speak at the secret meetings of the Protestants, held literally "in dens and caves of the earth," and often in darkness, with no pastor present to teach or counsel.
The Ancien Régime, also known as the Old Regime, was the political and social system of the Kingdom of France from the Late Middle Ages until 1789 and the French Revolution, which abolished the feudal system of the French nobility (1790) and hereditary monarchy (1792). The Valois dynasty ruled during the Ancien Régime up until 1589 and was then replaced by the Bourbon dynasty. The term is occasionally used to refer to the similar feudal systems of the time elsewhere in Europe such as that of Switzerland.
The War of the Camisards or the Cévennes War was an uprising of Protestant peasants known as Camisards in the Cévennes and Languedoc during the reign of Louis XIV. The uprising was a response to the Edict of Fountainebleu in 1685.
François Vincent Marc de Beauvau, Prince de Beauvau-Craon, was a Lorrainese nobleman and viceroy of Tuscany.
The Huguenot rebellions, sometimes called the Rohan Wars after the Huguenot leader Henri de Rohan, were a series of rebellions of the 1620s in which French Calvinist Protestants (Huguenots), mainly located in southwestern France, revolted against royal authority. The uprising occurred a decade after the death of Henry IV who, himself originally a Huguenot before converting to Catholicism, had protected Protestants through the Edict of Nantes. His successor Louis XIII, under the regency of his Italian Catholic mother Marie de' Medici, became more intolerant of Protestantism. The Huguenots tried to respond by defending themselves, establishing independent political and military structures, establishing diplomatic contacts with foreign powers, and openly revolting against central power. The Huguenot rebellions came after two decades of internal peace under Henry IV, following the intermittent French Wars of Religion of 1562–1598.
The Edict of Versailles, also known as the Edict of Tolerance, was an official act that gave non-Catholics in France the access to civil rights formerly denied to them, which included the right to contract marriages without having to convert to the Catholic faith, but it denied them political rights and public worship. The edict was signed by King Louis XVI on 7 November 1787, and registered in the Parlement of Paris during the Ancien Régime on 29 January 1788. Its successful enactment was caused by persuasive arguments by prominent French philosophers and literary personalities of the day, including Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot; Étienne François, duc de Choiseul, Americans such as Benjamin Franklin and especially the joint work of Guillaume-Chrétien de Lamoignon de Malesherbes, minister to Louis XVI, and Jean-Paul Rabaut Saint-Étienne, spokesman for the Protestant community in France.
Elias Neau, born Élie Neau, in Moëze, Saintonge, was a French Huguenot. After the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, he fled first to the French colony of Saint-Domingue, then to Boston, where he became a prosperous merchant. In 1692, he was captured by a French privateer near Jamaica, and for being a fugitive Protestant, was first sentenced to a life sentence as a galley slave, imprisoned in a castle dungeon in Marseille for two years, and then transferred to the Château d'If off the coast of Marseille for 50 days. He was released in 1697, following the intercession of King William III, whose ministers argued that Neau was an English subject.
Events from the year 1685 in France
Marie Durand (1711–1776), was a French Protestant. She was famously imprisoned in the Tour de Constance (Aigues-Mortes) from 25 August 1730 for attending a Huguenot assembly with her mother, or perhaps because her brother, Pierre Durand, was a well-known preacher, or perhaps because of her marriage.
The Savoyard–Waldensian wars were a series of conflicts between the community of Waldensians and the Savoyard troops in the Duchy of Savoy from 1655 to 1690. The Piedmontese Easter in 1655 sparked the conflict. It was largely a period of persecution of the Waldensian Church, rather than a military conflict. Joshua Janavel (1617–1690) was one of the Waldensian military leaders against the Savoyard ducal troops.
