Revolutionaries before the Revolution: How did the Huguenots react to increasing persecution?

The sixteenth century saw France embroiled in a series of civil wars between the Catholics and the Huguenots (French Protestants) who resisted the persecution of the Catholic establishment. Henri II of France died in 1559, and soon after a regency was formed by the militantly Catholic Guise family. The same year, the zealous Protestant Jean Calvin published his Institutes of the Christian Religion. As the counter-reformation emerged, the Guise family intensified their persecution of the Huguenots. Calvin often maintained a philosophy of godly ‘passive obedience’, believing that subjects must have their ‘hearts inclined to reverence their rulers’, and ‘prove their obedience toward them’. On the other hand, Huguenots, who were not content to live under the suppression of Catherine de’ Medici, took up arms and the French Wars of Religion began. Calvin died in 1564, several years before the 1572 St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, which saw the brutal murder of 5,000-30,000 innocent Huguenots at the hands of the Guise family.

The Religious Wars

In the face of such oppression, Huguenots began devising theories of resistance rooted in theological and legalistic justification. François Hotman’s Francogallia, published only a year after the massacre, provides a supposedly historical account of the ancient constitution of France. He argued that contemporary tyranny and growing absolutism was a deviation from an electoral commonwealth. As Ralph Giesy points out, Hotman did not present the work as polemical, avoiding commentary on contemporary issues. Instead, he details the ancient constitution and allows the reader to make their own inferences. Hotman looked back to Charlemagne to justify the idea that kings were elected. He claimed that his will stated that whichever son who succeeded him would be the one ‘whom the people may wish to elect’. He then forcefully argues that ‘the right of the people was supreme’, a clear expression of popular sovereignty.

There is no doubt that Hotman cultivated the seeds from which the French Revolution would grow, and his beliefs were one of the many radical ideas expressed by Huguenots in this period. There is no explicit endorsement of rebellion in Francogallia, however the idea that the legitimacy of the monarch lies in the people, and that the people can revoke this legitimacy, implies that the contemporary monarchy may also be deposed. Hotman, alongside many Huguenots, were pushed to these radical ideas to defend their own faith, and unlike many other persecuted minorities, such as the Jewish communities residing in Iberia, they had strong military forces and numbers to rebel against oppression.

Whilst Hotman’s argument is mostly secular and historical, Huguenots also developed justifications for resistance which were explicitly scriptural, with Phillipe du Plessis-Mornay’s Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos. This was a more radical text, justifying rebellion by arguing ‘it is considered worse to plunder the temple than to make an attempt on the life of a prince’, clearly stating that rebellion is a lesser evil than the destruction of religion. To Plessis-Mornay, resistance was the final resort after all other options had been exhausted, after ‘Caesar exceeds his bounds’ and ‘usurps the throne of God’. Vindiciae shows how Huguenots developed radical, proto-revolutionary ideas so that they may be able to practice their own faith. The Vindiciae even rejected the divinity of kings, believing they were ‘born entirely by the same lot as other men, and […] elevated from the ground to their position by the votes and […] on the shoulders of the people’ – a clear indication of the consent of the governed. 

Renewed Oppression

In 1598, the Edict of Nantes granted Huguenots freedom of worship. Through a deliberate government policy of ‘oubliance’ (oblivion), the devastation of the religious wars was slowly erased. In official memory, St Bartholomew’s Day never happened. Yet in 1685, Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, decreeing that Protestant temples must be destroyed, and all ministers were given two weeks to either convert or leave the country. Some rose up in the Camisard War in 1702, but the failure of this rebellion convinced most Huguenots that they must express unconditional loyalty to the crown to survive.

In turn, this persecution led to the Calas affair in 1762. Jean Calas, a Huguenot merchant, was accused of murdering his son, who had in fact committed suicide. Calas was then condemned and broken on the wheel. This prompted Voltaire to publish his Treatise on Tolerance, reinvigorating the Huguenot crusade for tolerance. He blamed the violence of the religious wars on the intolerance of the Catholic League, claiming that ‘by the light of the faggots and under the blows of the executioners, their [Calvinists] numbers had multiplied. Patience gave way to anger. They copied the cruel practices of their enemies’. Whilst Voltaire does recognise the bigotry held by some Huguenots, he argues it was caused by the oppression faced by the Catholics. Voltaire bridged the gap between the Huguenots and the philosophes, and through his intense defence of toleration, the Huguenots joined the ranks of would-be revolutionaries.

Conclusion

From the sixteenth century onwards, Huguenots in France suffered persecution and oppression from a Catholic majority. This pushed them to take matters into their own hands, developing theories of resistance. They did eventually achieve tolerance through the Edict of Nantes, yet had it stripped away by Louis XIV. Voltaire would bring them to the side of the philosophes, and Article X of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man finally granted them full religious liberties. The Huguenots relished the Revolution, and the first legal Protestant service in Paris since 1685 would be held in the church of the Saint-Louis-du-Louvre, with the Declaration of the Rights of Man engraved into a marble plaque in the service. Huguenots, despite the best efforts of their opponents, had survived. Though Plessis-Mornay’s vision of popular sovereignty was not achieved in his lifetime, the Revolution brought what he and many Huguenots had wanted – the freedom to worship as they please.

Bibliography

Primary Sources:

Brutus, the Celt, Stephanus Junius, Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos: or, concerning the legitimate power of a prince over the people, and of the people over a prince, (1579) trans. by George Garnett, (Cambridge University Press, 1994)

Calvin, John, ‘Civil Government’ (1559) in John T. McNeill, ed., and Ford Loewis Battles, trans., Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion (Vol. 2) (S.C.M. Press, 1961)

Hotman, François, Francogallia, (1573) ed. by Ralph E. Giesey and J. H. M. Salmon, (Cambridge University Press, 1972)

Voltaire, Treatise on Tolerance, (1760) ed. by Simon Harvey and Brian Masters, (Cambridge University Press, 2000)

Secondary Sources:

Adams, Geoffrey, ‘Myths and Misconceptions: The Philosophe View of the Huguenots in the Age of Louis XV’, Historical Reflections, 1:1 (1974), pp. 59-80

Frisch, Andrea, Forgetting Differences: Tragedy, Historiography, and the French Wars of Religion, (Edinburgh University Press, 2015)

Giesey, Ralph E., ‘When and Why Hotman Wrote the Francogallia’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 29:3 (1967), pp. 581-611

Poland, Burdette C., French Protestantism and the French Revolution: A Study in Church and State, Thought and Religion, 1685-1815, (Princeton University Press, 1957)

Skinner, Quentin, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought Volume 2: The Age of Reformation, (Cambridge University Press, 1996)