Huguenots

Huguenot was the popular term for French Protestants—the men and women who formed the French Reformed Church—from the mid-sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. The word's origins are unclear and contested. Opponents initially used it as a slur. Only gradually did Huguenot become the accepted designation for a French Calvinist. The Reformation had an early, forceful impact on France, and by the 1550s the Calvinist or Reformed tradition dominated. Reformed Protestantism, inspired by the Frenchman John Calvin and his ecclesiastical reorganization of the francophone city of Geneva, spread quickly throughout the realm. The growth of the Huguenot community provoked strong Catholic and monarchial reaction. Religious warfare erupted in 1562 and the turmoil devastated France for nearly forty years.

In addition to the clash of Catholic and Protestant armies, the assassination of individual political leaders and less calculated outbreaks of collective violence—deadly riots and vicious massacres—underscored the intense and bitter enmity surrounding these rivalries. The most famous incident was the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre of August 24, 1572. Huguenot nobles had gathered in Paris for the marriage of their leader Henry of Navarre to the king's sister. The king and queen mother seized the occasion to rid themselves of political and religious opponents. Zealous Parisian Catholics soon transformed the purge into carnage as they butchered thousands of Huguenots. The constant warfare and brutality did not cease until 1598 with the king's proclamation of the Edict of Nantes. The royal legislation established structures for promoting peaceful coexistence between Catholics and Protestants.

The Huguenots were never more than a minority. At their height during the 1560s they may have amounted to 10 percent of the population. This initial growth did not survive the Saint Bartholomew's Massacre; afterwards Huguenot ranks thinned considerably. By the close of the sixteenth century they were no more than 7 to 8 percent of the French populace. Their strength further eroded in the seventeenth century. When Louis XIV finally revoked the Edict of Nantes in October 1685, the Huguenot community was 800,000 to 1 million persons.

The options for French Protestants after 1685 were limited and demanding. Some individuals were extraordinary in their resistance. For most, however, open defiance and the prospect of prison, the galleys, or execution were unattractive. The vast majority converted to Catholicism, if insincerely. About one-fifth of Huguenots—150,000 to 200,000—chose exile in the Swiss cities, various German states, the Netherlands, British Isles, and eventually North America, South Africa, Scandinavia, and Russia.

Many Huguenots who remained in France began to assemble secretly in the désert (wilderness), a moving biblical image that emphasized their tenacity. Women assumed an especially strong role. They led clandestine worship complete with prayers, scriptural readings, and the singing of psalms. Some women endured agonizing confinement. Those arrested at illicit religious assemblies were incarcerated in Catholic hospitals and nunneries. Women judged to have committed more serious offenses went to prison, where they often remained forgotten for decades. Finally, a few young women, and in time men, turned to prophesy, becoming anguished voices crying out to protest their oppression.

The prophesying movement spread and eventually turned violent as the more zealous adherents sought to wreak God's retribution on their Catholic oppressors. The murderous, protracted revolt of the Camisards—so designated for the simple white shirts that the insurgents wore—began in 1702. Protestants carried out acts of vengeance, such as murdering priests and burning churches. They also waged organized guerrilla warfare. Royal troops responded with further repression and reprisals. The fighting dragged on for eight years and led to the death of many Protestants and Catholics.

Although the active persecution of Huguenots gradually abated, the restoration of their civil status occurred only with the Edict of the Toleration in 1787 and the French Revolution two years later. In the end the ordeal of the désert became the heroic age for French Protestants. The memory of the eighteenth-century persecution and attending diaspora has eclipsed earlier struggles in shaping collective identity and goes to the very meaning of Huguenot.

SEE ALSO Catholic Church; Massacres; Persecution

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Diefendorf, B. (1991). Beneath the Cross: Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth-Century Paris. New York: Oxford University Press.

Mentzer, R. A., and A. Spicer, eds. (2002). Society and Culture in the Huguenot World, 1559–1685. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Van Ruymbeke, B., and R. Sparks, eds. (2003). Memory and Identity: Minority Survival among the Huguenots in France and the Atlantic Diaspora. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.

Raymond A. Mentzer