HUGUENOTS

HUGUENOTS. "Huguenot" was the pejorative name given to Calvinist French Protestants by their Catholic opponents in the sixteenth century. The etymology of the word is obscure and contested. Henri Estienne (Latin Stephanus) was among several contemporaries to attribute it to the name given around 1560 to Protestants in Tours, after the neighborhood and city gate in which they held their religious services. Estienne may well have been correct, but an alternative derivation from Eidgenossen ('Confederates') that had become Eigenotz, or the supporters of the Swiss Protestant canton of Bern against the supporters of Catholic Savoy in the factional politics of Geneva in the 1530s, is still widely accepted. French Protestants preferred to call themselves l'église réformée, 'the Reformed church', and the French crown normally referred to them officially as "those of the so-called Reformed religion" after 1560.

French Protestantism emerged from the deeper wells of biblical humanism, reforming Gallicanism, inflected Lutheranism, and religious heterodoxy. But, under the influence of persecution, many Protestants were exiled to Strasbourg, Basel, and Geneva, which is where John Calvin established himself permanently from 1541. Increasingly in the 1550s, the influence of Calvin's writings and the model of the Genevan church came to exercise a dominant impact upon French-speaking Protestants, first among the communities of exiles in the Rhineland and elsewhere and then, from 1555 onward, in France itself. The Genevan Company of Pastors (Compagnie des Pasteurs) began to train and dispatch a limited number of ministers back to France in response to a deluge of requests from particular communities. In this period, French Protestantism became, in its theology and organization, irreducibly Calvinist. Although there had been at least one earlier gathering of French churches in 1557, the first generally recognized synod of the French Protestant church took place secretly in Paris in 1559. The delegates endorsed the "Confession of Faith" and "Discipline" which, taken together, provided a constitution and a creed for the Reformed communities. In church organization, this meant that the powers, selection, and responsibility of church officers (the familiar elders, pastors, deacons, and doctors of the Genevan new order) were vested in individual churches in the form of a consistory, composed of these officials and often made up of its notability. A contrary view, that power be vested in the congregation at large, still found its echoes in the documents of 1559, but they were gradually eliminated from Huguenot thought and practice in the course of the 1560s, culminating in the modifications at the synod of La Rochelle in 1571. Thereafter, the Confession and Discipline proved enduring statements of what the Huguenots stood for over the next two centuries. For their opponents, however, the movement was defined by the Huguenot Psalter, the Genevan metrical translation begun by Clément Marot and completed by Théodore de Bèze, Calvin's successor in Geneva, and by the French vernacular Bible, most notably the Neuchâtel Bible, originally translated by Pierre Robert Olivétan (French Olivier, Latin Olivetanus) and the basis for all subsequent French Protestant Bibles (including the Geneva Bible) in the sixteenth century.

French Protestantism found itself at what would be the height of its influence in the early 1560s. The political circumstances of a royal minority and regency, and the emergence of powerful protectors at court, especially Gaspard III de Coligny (1519–1572) and his cousin, a younger prince of the blood, Louis I de Bourbon, prince of Condé (1530–1569), assisted the chaotic and dramatic growth in Protestant numbers in these years. In March 1562, Coligny is supposed to have presented a list of the 2,150 churches then extant in France to the regent Catherine de Médicis. His figure may, however, have been exaggerated, and later historians can only document the existence of around 1,200–1,250 churches in this decade, or less than 4 percent of the Catholic parishes of the kingdom. If we allow for 1,500 communicating members of each church, we arrive at an adult Protestant population of under two million, perhaps not far from 10 percent of the total population of the French kingdom. These churches were, however, unevenly distributed, reflecting on the one hand its literate, urban constituency and, on the other, its seigneurial heartland. Although there were many Reformed churches in Normandy, they remained quite widely scattered through the rest of northern France. Only south of the Loire, and especially in the crescent of communities stretching from La Rochelle through the southern provinces of Guyenne, Languedoc, and Dauphiné to Geneva, would there be a critical mass sufficient to provide an enduring basis for the forthcoming military struggle against the French crown.

That struggle was sustained and grueling. The Huguenots mobilized the resources of the churches in the early civil wars and seized royal revenues and ecclesiastical wealth in order to fund their campaigns. The civil wars lasted off and on from 1562 to 1598, and then again from 1622 to 1629. Without their naval strength off the Atlantic coast, mercenary German reinforcements, and the leadership of their most skilful "protector," Henry of Navarre, later Henry IV, king of France (ruled 1589–1610), they would probably not have succeeded in winning the limited degrees of toleration that the French crown reluctantly conceded them in edicts of pacification that culminated in the pacification of Nantes (April 1598), modified by the peace of Alais (1629). From the early civil wars, however, the antipathy of the Catholic majority in France toward the Huguenots was manifested by aristocratic feud and sectarian hatred. Both culminated in the famous St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre (August 1572) in Paris, an event that was mirrored in a score of provincial cities in the following weeks. The experience permanently eroded Protestant support, especially in northern France. It also cemented the emerging defensive and stoic mentality of French Protestantism, in which earlier persecution (recalled in successive and enlarged editions of Jean Crespin's famous French martyrology, the Histoire des martyrs [1554]) became the pattern of the way in which God repeatedly tested his faithful French elect.

The sixteenth-century Catholic perception of Huguenot political engagement has created an enduring view that they were republicans, determined to resist monarchical authority, who sought to establish a federal state in France after the model of the Swiss cantons or the emerging Dutch Republic. In reality, the basis for Huguenot "resistance theory" was laid among Protestant refugee reformers from a variety of backgrounds and found its echoes later in the sixteenth century among Catholics who were themselves similarly at odds with French monarchical authority. And, although French Protestants had a political assembly that met on an irregular basis to provide credibility to its military and financial organization, it was never the basis for a republican movement. In reality French Huguenots continued to adhere to the principles of monarchy, even though they preferred (like many of their Catholic counterparts) to see it in less than absolutist terms. Their great spokesman and one-time advisor to Henry IV, Philippe Duplessis Mornay, repeatedly defended his coreligionists against those who accused them of wanting to set up a "state within a state," to "diminish royal authority," or "establish a democracy." A comparable distillation, that the Huguenots stood for the principle of religious toleration, has also to be seen as something of a retrospective myth, born of the inevitable apologetic of a minority religious movement and incarnated by the Enlightenment and liberal nineteenth-century historiography.

The Edict of Nantes granted French Protestants limited rights of worship, access to royal offices, legal redress before special royal courts (known as chambres de l'édit or 'Chambers of the Edict'), and rights to establish their own academies. Royal letters (brevets) accompanying the edict granted subsidies for their troops, pastors, and schools and allowed them to garrison certain towns. The brevets were not maintained beyond 1629, and the terms of the edict were interpreted by royal officials in an increasingly restrictive way, especially after 1661, until the edict was revoked by Louis XIV in the Edict of Fontainebleau (October 1685). Of the 873 pastors remaining in France at that time, about 140 abjured; but the remainder chose to defy the edict and take up exile in the Dutch Republic (43 percent), Switzerland (27 percent), England (23 percent) and Germany (7 percent). More surprising to the authorities was the degree of illegal emigration of lay Huguenots—latest estimates suggest a figure of around 200,000. The Huguenot diaspora made the revocation a European phenomenon and cemented the French Protestant sense of a separate identity. The cultural and economic influence of the exiled Huguenots was far from negligible, spreading beyond Europe to colonial North America and the Dutch colonies, even if it has sometimes been exaggerated. Protestantism survived underground in eighteenth-century France and was once more officially tolerated on the eve of the Revolution.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Bulletin de la Société de l'Histoire du Protestantisme Français, and the equivalent British Proceedings of the Huguenot Society of Great Britain and Ireland are an indispensable starting point for all those wishing to trace their Huguenot ancestry.

Benedict, Philip. The Faith and Fortunes of France's Huguenots, 1600–1685. St. Andrews Studies in Reformation History. Aldershot, U.K., and Burlington, Vt., 2001.

Butler, Jon. The Huguenots in America: A Refugee People in New World Society. Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1983.

Garrisson, Janine. Les Protestants au XVIe siècle. Paris, 1988.

Gray, Janet. "The Origin of the Word Huguenot." Sixteenth Century Journal 14, no. 3 (1983): 349–359.

Greengrass, M. The French Reformation. Oxford, 1987.

Gwynn, Robin D. Huguenot Heritage: The History and Contribution of the Huguenots in Britain. London, 1985.

Kingdon, Robert McCune. Geneva and the Coming of the Wars of Religion in France, 1555–1563. Travaux d'humanisme et renaissance, vol. 22. Geneva, 1956.

——. Geneva and the Consolidation of the French Protestant Movement, 1564–1572. Travaux d'humanisme et renaissance, vol. 92. Geneva, 1967.

Léonard, Émile G. A History of Protestantism. Edited by H. H. Rowley. 2 vols. London, 1965–1967.

Magdelaine, Marie, and R. von Thadden, eds. Le refuge huguenot (1685–1985). Paris, 1985.

Prestwich, Menna, ed. International Calvinism, 1541–1715. Oxford, 1985.

Wolff, Philippe, ed. Histoire des protestants en France, de la réforme àlarévolution. Toulouse, 1977.

MARK GREENGRASS

Teacher Ratings: See what

others think

of your teachers

xxxxxxx