Ten A Huguenot Half-century

By comparison with the sound and fury of the Jansenist and gallican disputes, the experiences of France’s Protestants during the decades after they finally lost their political and military power in the late 1620s seem both harder to pin down and less noteworthy. The extended mid-century from 1630 to about 1680 could compete neither with the fortitude displayed by the generation which defended the cause at La Rochelle in the 1620s, nor with the tragic but often heroic resistance, in very changed circumstances, to the revocation of the Edict of Nantes of the 1680s and later. Sandwiched between these two historic peaks, the intervening half-century seems rather ill-defined and, as a result, subject to divergent assessments by historians. In 1961, Emile-G. Leonard famously summarised the existing historiography by stating that it was an age when the Huguenots became lethargic, theologically, socially, politically and institutionally, losing the fire and commitment that had previ- ously characterised them. When the time of tribulation came under Louis XIV the great majority were unprepared for the challenge, but the revocation, Leonard argued, was salutary because it finally raised them from that long slumber.¹Close Such a comprehensive verdict, treating Protestantism as the sick man of France, now seems excessively judgemental and self-flagellating, meas- uring developments uniquely in terms of the tragic denouement of 1685.

Almost inevitably, subsequent research has unearthed evidence that contradicted Leonard on many points, leading to a more nuanced général view of these years. In 1968, Daniel Ligou could only assert that the condition of French Protestantism around 1661 was ‘not too sombre’²Close Twenty years later, Menna Prestwich peered through the other end of the lens, boldly asking whether the years from 1629 to 1661 should not be considered ‘a golden age’ for the Huguenots who, shorn of their military and political power, contributed significantly to contemporary economic, financial and even cultural and artistic developments.³Close Despite such advances, the history of French Protestantism throughout the half-century between 1630 and 1680 remains oddly disconnected from the mainstream of the country’s politico-religious history. The more combatively ‘confessional’ its historiography, the less room it seemed to leave for alternative interpretations — let alone for an approach that would consider the period between 1630 and 1680 as one of variation, false starts and uncertainty.⁴Close The major developments of these decades do not lend themselves to a straightforward narrative. As a result, the following pages move forwards and backwards through these developments without assuming that there was anything inevitable about the final outcome. The chapter discusses important developments not touched on earlier, which will illustrate the continuing vitality of French Protestantism while underlining how limited généralisations purporting to be valid for French Protestantism as a whole can be.

The political and military superstructures of France’s Protestants’ (RPR) may have been dismantled by 1630 — with a few ‘tolerable’ exceptions, such as the increasingly episodic national synods and the Protestant général deputies to the court.⁵Close Although the Huguenot ‘party’ was replaced by the churches in certain respects, it was still too early for contemporaries to ignore the Protestants, either militarily or politically. The 1620s had indeed shown that Protestant rebellion, when conducted in isolation from other forms of discontent, especially that of the aristocracy, could be dealt with effectively, especially when that revolt cut across the Richelieu ministry’s foreign policy priorities. By comparison, the following three decades witnessed far greater discontent, which at different times embraced almost every social group in France, from the aristocracy to the peasantry, and especially the towns. And the most rebellious areas overlapped considerably with the geography of Protestantism. From the Languedoc revolt of 1632 to the Fronde (and its subsequent local embers) of the 1650s, there were numerous opportunities for the Protestants to piggyback on such discontent with the crown and its policies; in each case, the temptation for Huguenot towns, whether former security towns or not, to take up arms to regain their earlier autonomy must have been difficult to resist.⁶Close Despite this self-restraint, there was much more suspicious activity — political and military — by the Huguenots of Languedoc and the Cévennes in the 1630s and early 1640s than is usually recognised. It seems that Richelieu remained as reluctant as ever to become embroiled in further conflict with the southern Huguenots, whose ‘troublemakers’ he appears to have left in relative peace.⁷Close

The Protestants’ political behaviour was, as always, closely tied to the evolution of their nobility. With their military power and the political assemblies a thing of the past, Protestant nobles lost the core of their historical raison d’etre within the Huguenot camp — which was now largely reduced to a religious entity. For nobles anxious to sustain or improve their ‘reputation’, there were very few alternatives to direct royal service. The crown’s growing unwillingness to advance the careers of Protestant nobles disinclined to adopt the same religion as the king increased the pressure on them to convert, as the case of Turenne unambiguously showed.⁸Close By the time of the Camisards (1702), revolt by Protestant nobles had become virtually impossible, despite Catholic assertions of such involvement at the time. After 1629, Rohan could only find service in the royal armies operating outside France, and no one emerged to take his place. Conversion to Catholicism by major figures like the duc de Bouillon (1634) obviously rendered them incapable of replacing Rohan, though it did not make Bouillon himself any less ready to plot against the régime. France’s entry into the Thirty Years War in 1635 made it more necessary than hitherto to grant military commands to individual aristocrats, Huguenot as well as Catholic, who had previously been kept on the sidelines.⁹Close The Fronde, especially during its aristocratic phase (1650–53), seemed to offer some scope to Protestant nobles anxious to reverse past defeats, not least because the normal pillars of monarchical rule — the parlements and the nobility — were themselves in rebellion; such circumstances were unusual enough for a rethink of Protestant attitudes not to be beyond bounds. For its part, the Bordeaux Fronde proved the most radical, associating with Mazarin’s principal rival, the Grand Condé, in 1652, but also with the political radicalism personified by two English Puritan agents despatched there.¹⁰Close

Despite such rumblings, which seemed to offer a ramp for Protestant political ambitions, especially in the previously autonomous southern towns, the great majority of the Protestants stayed firmly loyal. But the crown could not — and did not — take that as a given, especially whenever there was a hint of external support for its Protestants. Considering the religious content and significance of the conflicts within the British Isles and the Holy Roman Empire during these decades, France was, for once, fortunate not to find itself engulfed in new wars of religion around 1650. In the changed political circumstances since 1630, the message of full obedience to absolute monarchy encountered diminishing resistance in the Protestant ranks. It was endlessly reiterated in sermons, addresses and treatises, with a major Saumur theologian, Amyraut, choosing to publish his uncompromising Discours de la souverainete des roys in mid-Fronde (1650). In it, he firmly separated the political from the religious sphere, the better to show that the principles of the second were not transferable and could not be used to argue for alternative political relations.¹¹Close Such loyalism can only have been reinforced by the events of the English Civil War, culminating in Charles I’s execution, from which France’s Protestants were desperate to dissociate themselves, then and later.¹²Close

The Declaration of Saint-Germain of May 1652, in which Mazarin praised and thanked the Protestants for their steadfast loyalty to the crown during the recent disturbances, would have been a rare gesture in any period.¹³Close While acknowledging and encouraging their culture of obedience, the declaration was as much concerned with the immediate future as with the recent past. It was designed to persuade the Protestants to resist the temptation of revolt at this critical moment in the Fronde. In return for their fidelity, the declaration — like its less-known predecessor of 1649 — appeared to remove at a stroke the restrictive measures taken against the Huguenots since 1629.¹⁴Close However, in the turmoil of the Fronde, the declaration was never submitted to the parlements for registration, leaving its real political and legal status uncertain in subsequent years.¹⁵Close

Whatever Mazarin’s real intentions were at this date, he would soon have an additional reason to relax the pressure on the Protestants — his alliance of 1655 with Cromwellian England, which in the early 1650s had been suspected of trying to establish itself as the ‘protector’ of French Protestantism (as James I had in the 1610s).¹⁶Close The Cromwellian alliance, in addition to removing the threat of English intervention in the Midi, also helped to ensure that the Protestants would not be overtly molested during the final years of Mazarin’s ministry. But this prospect did not escape notice: concerned at what it saw as a revival of Protestantism during these years, a well-briefed assembly of clergy protested vehemently in 1656 against the 1652 declaration. Significantly, it had the support of the parlements. The upshot of their combined pressure was a new royal declaration in 1656, effectively superseding that of 1652.¹⁷Close But like the anti-Jansenist formulary of 1657, this backtrack looks like an instance of Mazarin’s readiness to give ground in theory, while preventing follow-up action from taking place. The cardinal’s tactics, as we shall see, did not stop the work of restricting the Protestants’ privileges; it merely ensured that it continued more discreetly and locally.¹⁸Close When the time came for him to govern in 1661, Louis XIV would enjoy considerable latitude in deciding what to do in relation to the Protestants, which was possibly what Mazarin was seeking to enable during his final years.¹⁹Close

The legacy of the Richelieu-Mazarin years, as far as the Protestants are concerned, was ambiguous: they were protected essentially for reasons of state, by a monarchy whose policies were subject to alteration. The Cardinals did not openly conduct anti-Huguenot policies, but they did tolerate — and to some extent institutionalise — low-profile initiatives taken further down the chain of political command which, cumulatively and over several decades, set an important pattern that would continue under Louis XIV. It was precisely these measures that the Protestants were so keen to see annulled during and after the Fronde. Most of the key agents in the process are already familiar from other contexts, but their responses to the Huguenot problem after 1629 saw them co-operate in new ways. The challenge of dealing with practical problems in the wake of the 1620s wars gradually multiplied the opportunities to apply the law — and the terms of the Edict of Nantes itself — in an increasingly restrictive or ‘rigorous’ fashion. By the early 1660s, this improvised approach, sometimes called ‘administrative persecution’, had fashioned a template that could operate effectively ‘on the ground’, far from the court and capital, and at moments when official royal policy towards the Huguenots was not itself overtly hostile.

During, and especially after, the military campaigns of the 1620s against the Huguenots, the French monarchy employed commissioners, as it had in similar post-conflict situations since the 1560s, to supervise the return to peace in the provinces and cities most involved in these conflicts. The task of razing fortresses or citadels, confiscating the artillery of former Protestant security towns, and so on, which began in the 1620s would be pursued more widely during the 1630s. Other, related objectives gradually surfaced, especially that of altering the balance of political power within the Protestant- dominated towns, to prevent them from engaging in military resistance in the future. By the early 1630s the crown’s use of special commissioners had changed markedly since the previous century — and even since the Edict of Nantes itself. The unplanned, incremental development of the provincial intendancies was already well under way, and the remit of their commissions was gradually becoming more all-purpose — justice, finance and ‘police’. Not by accident, the provinces with significant Protestant populations were among the very first to attract these temporary, but resident, new-style commissaires departis.²⁰Close More and more, it was to them rather than to ad hoc commissioners that the tasks involved in restoring order and royal control in Protestant areas were delegated. Virtually none of these intendants were themselves Protestants, even where two of them were appointed to work together in ‘difficult’ provinces such as Languedoc.

Moreover, by mid-century the great majority of the intendants were originally magistrates from the parlements, especially that of Paris, which meant that they were steeped in the evolving political credo of authoritarian monarchy that could accept no legitimate basis for dissent, political or reli- gious.²¹Close One of their number, Jean Balthazar, intendant in Languedoc in the mid-1640s, compared Catholicism and its Protestant rival with a vehemence that invited no contradiction:

the exercise of their [Protestant] religion is not on the same footing as ours. Catholicism is the older, the legitimate and unique religion, that of both the king and the state. The king’s subjects are entitled to conduct Catholic public services everywhere, for which they need no permission, because they fully possess such a faculty and are within the common law of the kingdom. The so-called reformed religion is a religion of edict — new, separate, and contrary to that of the king; a religion of concession and toleration that may only be freely and publicly exercised in certain designated places.²²Close

As his references to Catholicism as the religion of king and state suggest, Balthazar was not a dévot, but rather a champion of authoritarian royal power; such a distinction may well have escaped those contemporaries who did not see the problem of religious coexistence as he did.²³Close

It is not surprising that the intendants found it natural to work in tandem with like-minded Catholic magistrates in the provinces.²⁴Close Above all, they could count on the dévot circles across France — and vice versa. The new and rapidly expanding Company of the Holy Sacrament encouraged a more organised and single-minded approach to undermining the Edict of Nantes’s régime from within.²⁵Close It was not until the 1650s that local chapters of the Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith became operational in south-eastern cities like Grenoble, Lyon, Aix and Montpellier, where they sometimes acted as the public face of the Company in pressurising the authorities to act against Protestants. Both organisations included magistrates from the parlements or other local courts and, by mid-century, they were joined by several provincial intendants. The more connected the intendants were to such milieux, the less likely they were to be simply the docile recipients or executors of royal orders; they frequently anticipated or interpreted those orders in ways that put pressure on the royal council, which could not always strike down their initiatives.

A prime example of the successful dovetailing of such institutions and organised groups was France’s most ultra-Catholic city, Toulouse, which had been viscerally hostile to religious coexistence since the early 1560s.²⁶Close That hostility extended from an early date to the chambre mi-partie based at Castres. The chambre’s role in making the Nantes régime work by adjudicating lawsuits between Catholics and Protestants was, not surprisingly, regularly obstructed by the Toulouse parlement, which had other, non-religious grounds for opposing the chambres as interlopers threatening to undermine its own jurisdiction as a ‘sovereign’ court. This concern proved to be one factor in the unusual tactical alliance already noted between the parlements and the assemblies of clergy by the 1650s. In this issue — and others — corporate self-interest could sustain a limited but powerful partnership. The assemblies of clergy objected vehemently to Catholic-Protestant conflicts over church benefices, tithes and church patronage being referred to the chambres, and wanted them to be reserved to the parlements. The bishops who dominated the assemblies brought to these events their own prior experiences — which could vary widely, depending on the scale of the Huguenot presence within their dioceses. Almost certainly galvanising the bishops in ways that might not otherwise have occurred to them, the assemblies rarely missed an opportunity to bring Huguenot abuses of power or of the law to the king’s attention, and to deplore the continuing régime of religious coexistence, of which the role of the chambres de ledit was a particularly irksome reminder.²⁷Close As the restrictive — or ‘rigorous’ — interpretation of the edict gathered pace, especially during the 1650s and 1660s, the chambres de ledit found themselves increasingly on the defensive throughout France.²⁸Close

To this roster we should add the most active elements of the Catholic church, and especially the new religious orders, particularly the Capuchins and the Jesuits. Using a combination of preaching, missions, schools and colleges, they brought the confessional fight to many parts of southern and western France where it had not previously been witnessed. But the real impact of the Catholic Reformation on the Protestant communities is hard to measure, and it probably differed significantly in areas where Protestants were in a majority or a minority. The city of Lyon may serve as an example here. A hub of Catholic-Reformation Catholicism, it established in 1659 a local Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith with the conversion of the Protestants as its objective. In the following twenty-five years, it converted about 570 out of a Protestant population of 1,700. But this impressive-looking result takes on a quite different significance when it is realised that most of the converts were immigrants, widows, children and other marginal figures; in fact, the core of the relatively small Protestant elite of Lyon was barely touched by the Company’s best efforts.²⁹Close Similar patterns probably applied elsewhere. In the short run, the Catholic convertisseurs were far less successful than either their predictions or their propaganda would lead one to believe, especially in regions where the Protestants were in a majority. However, they did display the kind of tenacity that the ordinary parish clergy were simply unwilling or unable to muster.³⁰Close And with conversions to Protestantism still outstripping those to Catholicism in parts of lower Languedoc until about 1670, the Catholic missionaries and their supporters eventually came to accept that more forceful royal intervention was needed to break the resistance of their religious rivals.³¹Close

These various actors probably had different motives and preferences when confronting the Protestant problem, but even allowing that they did not always work hand-in-glove, they nevertheless constituted a formidable combination at a time when the monarchy was still publicly committed to upholding the terms of the Edict of Nantes. It was they who gradually assembled the arsenal of legal precedents that would become so prominent under Louis XIV in dealing with the Protestants; in particular, they conceived and developed the ‘rigorous’ interpretation of the edict, especially articles 8 and 9, which dealt with the places where Protestants had the right to worship.³²Close If the assemblies of clergy were an increasingly vocal mouthpièce of such a campaign, it was mainly because they were provided with detailed information and advice on how to proceed by these dévots — who might also be magistrates or episcopal officials — active in provincial towns situated in the main regions of Protestant settlement. Such combined action enabled the 1655–57 assembly successfully to pressurise Mazarin into effectively rescinding the 1652 Declaration of Saint- Germain.³³Close The 1660s provide striking evidence of how much had been done since the 1630s, with the successive publication of several huge volumes that became virtual ‘handbooks’ of legal precedents and decrees compiled mainly by lawyers who presented the accumulated jurisprudence for practical use and consultation.³⁴Close The first of these guides was the work of an experienced Jesuit missionary, Bernard Meynier, but the title of his work — De lexecution de ledit de Nantes et le moyen de terminer dans chaque province le grand different et ses principales suites (1662) — shows that it closely resembles those of the lawyers who would follow his example. Meynier subsequently produced other volumes specifically on provinces with large Protestant populations, such as the Dauphiné and Aunis-Saintonge. Noting, for example, that the number of Protestant churches in the Dauphiné had grown since 1598 from seventy to around 200, he concentrated on the ‘illegality’ of that expansion and on developing the arguments capable of reversing it.³⁵Close In 1666, Pierre Bernard, a judge in the presidial court of Beziers, followed with his massive Explication de ledit de Nantes. It was he who came up with the idea that even if a local town council were half Protestant and half Catholic (mi-parti) this should not affect the underlying legal ‘status’ of the town or village itself, because, he argued, ‘no community could be divided or shared, as it was entirely Catholic’ Such a legalistic notion of community was, clearly, immune to the ‘accidents’ of local demography. Bernard admitted that the law in force when he was writing did not quite support this view, and advocated the need to press for the necessary changes.³⁶Close The best known of all these compilations was Jean Filleau’s encyclopaedic Decisions catholiques of 1668. ‘A veritable machine to conduct legal warfare’, it was organised around 141 court rulings, on which it offered a comprehensive array of legal judgments specifically against the Protestants. To them he appended numerous other ‘proofs’ (correspondence, court pleadings, records of conversions and so on) which, taken together, constituted a substantial dossier on each ‘decision’ to help in pursuing further lawsuits arising from them. Filleau’s work may not have appeared in print until 1668, but it had already circulated — and been widely used — in manuscript well before that; its origins went as far back as the grands jours of Poitiers of 1634, where the young barrister Filleau — and others, too — began to learn how to use the legal machinery as an instrument of Catholic reform in a heavily Protestant province.³⁷Close

Publications like these set a standard for years to come, and others followed in due course; updated editions appeared containing the abundant harvest of new legal decisions of the 1660s and 1670s, for which there was an evergrowing demand from the dévot milieux throughout France. The authors were themselves frequently solicited for further opinions and assistance by local dévots (e.g. members of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith) over local cases; in their court submissions or documents the latter would regularly cite chapter and verse from Filleau or Bernard.³⁸Close

It was in such an incremental and partially co-ordinated fashion that the working-out of the ‘rigorous’ interpretation of the Edict of Nantes and the régime of confessional coexistence associated with it took shape. It would continue to unfold in the decades leading up to the revocation of 1685.

All of this seems utterly remote from the decades of relative peace across Europe following the wars of religion, when calls were made for religious union that would, it was hoped, deliver Europe from its self-destructive confessional conflicts. James I of England, as we saw, took up an agenda that appealed to many gallicans and other disillusioned figures, Catholic and Protestant alike, in different parts of Europe.³⁹Close But the numerous proposals and projects of an irenic kind that were launched gained relatively little support, partly because their originators were either marginal figures within their own confessions or belonged to small intellectual circles. It was not always clear whether their objective was a new union, rather than a reunion of the churches. The return of war, in both France and Europe, from 1620 onwards, made it even less likely that such appeals would produce concrete results. Meanwhile, confessional divisions only hardened, and with the passing years they were gradually, albeit very unevenly, internalised by their respective populations; the barriers to union (or reunion) were gradually becoming stronger and more widely spread.

In this respect, France was at a crossroads by the late 1620s. The decision to retain the Edict of Nantes, shorn of its politico-military elements, was, as we have seen, accompanied by the strongest insistence to date that France’s Protestants should return to the true church. This insistence was more than empty rhetoric. Having survived the clash with the dévots over this question, Richelieu attempted to demonstrate that their differences were over means rather than ends. He could argue, with some consistency, that free, voluntary conversion was the only acceptable way to bring the Protestants back into the fold. As bishop of Lu^on, he had agreed to a truce with the substantial local Protestant population on arrival there in 1609, and that ‘peace’ survived until the revolt of the early 1620s.⁴⁰Close By the latter date, preaching missions to convert the Protestant population to Catholicism had begun, particularly in the cardinal’s own province of Poitou. These missions also aimed as much, if not more, at reinforcing the faith of the Catholic populations who might still be tempted to embrace the religion of Protestant neighbours who were often their relatives, spouses, guardians, patrons or employers. Richelieu’s protege and future adviser, Père Joseph, was the principal advocate of missions, but he took a rather different view on the methods permissible for conversion. He supported the familiar Augustinian motto of ‘compel them to enter’ the church, on the grounds that the Huguenots were so obdurate and benighted that some coercion was allowed, and would be justified by the results among the next generation of children of converts. This bred a willingness to seek royal support for conversion methods and strategy, and from the late 1610s onwards Marie de Medici and Louis XIII supported the missionaries.⁴¹Close During the 1630s, Richelieu himself would do likewise, financing missions that bore his name in areas of southern France.⁴²Close

These efforts were virtually inseparable from the ‘controversies’ conducted by Catholics and Protestants during these years. The return of peace after 1598 heralded the organisation of hundreds of often elaborately stage-managed confrontations — ‘duelling for theologians’ — between Catholic and Protestant ‘specialists’ in the genre.⁴³Close Its very format, which required a winner and a loser, encouraged the taking up of antagonistic positions by both parties. But despite the publicity they attracted, these ‘conferences’ proved even less fruitful than the preaching missions, and were largely abandoned by the 1630s in areas like Poitou, where they seemed to do little more than reinforce existing confessional boundaries.⁴⁴Close

Their decline did not signify the demise of religious controversies as such. They had become virtually institutionalised, with Catholic universities and Protestant académies establishing special courses on the subject to defend their respective orthodoxies. Between 1598 and 1685, when over 7,000 works of controversy were published in France, nine out of ten were in French, which enabled them to reach a wider audience than had they remained Latin ‘scholastic’ treatises. As the century wore on, the number of laymen contributing to the controversies grew in number, though without ever being more than a small minority.⁴⁵Close Such ‘normal’ activity may not have attracted much notice beyond the admittedly widening intellectual circles, since both churches, and especially the Catholic, were simultaneously pumping out huge numbers of spiritual works for popular use. However, the more the clergy and elements of the laity, Catholic as well as Protestant, were exposed to controversial works, the more they were ‘socialised’ into the hardening orthodoxies of their respective churches.⁴⁶Close Numerically tiny, the Protestant clergy were probably better educated in such questions than the vast majority of their Catholic adversaries.⁴⁷Close This mattered more than previously because, with the gradual drift of the Protestant nobility towards Catholicism, the pastors increasingly took over the leadership positions within the Protestant churches. The pastors of individual churches, especially in the main Protestant towns, and the professors of the académies could thus wield significant influence for or against interconfessional debate. But it would be a mistake to think that Protestant congregations were committed to following their lead, as some found to their cost. For as long as the consistories and provincial synods functioned relatively normally, ministers who seemed to be selling out to Catholic blandishments were subject to short shrift.⁴⁸Close

It was within this wider context that Richelieu attempted to restore religious unity by an agreed formula acceptable to the Protestant churches. But such a project was beset with numerous difficulties: it was almost certain to produce serious opposition from both confessions, and could be derailed if just one side rejected its terms. In a gallican environment, there was more room to explore such an objective, but firm papal opposition could nevertheless wreck anything that Rome did not approve of. The content of any formula of union would itself be exceptionally difficult to agree upon, given how far apart Catholicism and Calvinism were, both theologically and ecclesiologically. And whatever the formula agreed upon contained, it would also be very difficult to impose from above, even by a figure like Richelieu.

The cardinal’s own credentials were not just political, as he had himself engaged in controversy with the Protestants during the late 1610s and spent several years working on a major work that would appear posthumously — the Methode la plus facile et la plus assuree pour convertir ceux qui se sont separes de leglise (published in 1651). The title conveys Richelieu’s optimism that when it came to solving problems reason and good arguments should prevail; like many contemporaries, he believed that ‘short and easy methods’ would suffice for the task. Having established that there was one true church and that it was not that of the Protestants, he turned to separating the revealed articles of faith from other ‘secondary’ doctrines derived from them. Richelieu’s work owed more to its author’s rank than to its intellectual originality, but that only makes it more representative of the thinking of his generation.⁴⁹Close Having learned earlier the skills of the controversialist from members of his own entourage, he employed a number of writers actively involved in controversies with the Protestants. The most aggressive and resourceful of them was the former Jesuit, François Veron, whose techniques were given the derisory label of ‘Veroniques’ at the time. He was joined in the cardinal’s service by the Protestant converts Louis du Laurens, who later joined the Oratory, and Brachet de la Milletière, who participated in the La Rochelle assembly of 1620 and who would only formally convert to Catholicism in 1645 after being excommunicated by his own church.⁵⁰Close

Shortly after securing his political position during the crisis of late 1630, Richelieu began seeking ways to persuade the Protestant churches to embrace union with Catholicism. In 1631 he was reportedly aiming at secretly obtaining prior agreement to such a reunion from a substantial number of deputies to the Charenton national synod, in the hope that by declaring their own adherence to Catholicism at the right moment, they would provide enough momentum to sway the other deputies into following them; but news of this plan leaked too soon, effectively torpedoing it. A year later, when he was in post-revolt Languedoc, the plan had changed to one of convening, under royal authority, a ‘national’ conference of representatives of the two churches to prepare a full- scale reunion, when Catholicism would be proclaimed as the only religion allowed in France. As reported by the papal nuncio, it was anticipated that a dose of force might be required to persuade the rump of Protestant recalcitrants to agree, but Louis XIII seemed ready to apply that force. This would have been tantamount to a re-run of the colloquy of Poissy, except that in 1631 the intention was to obtain papal approval of the proposal and its outcome. Rome’s response was not encouraging: it firmly objected to any assemblies other than général councils convened by the Pope discussing major religious questions.⁵¹Close Richelieu only revived the question of religious union in late 1640 and 1641, as one of several objectives that had been shelved during the war against the Habsburgs. The facile optimism of the early 1630s had largely evaporated by 1640, but he still evidently believed that once the Protestant pastors had agreed on reunion they would have little difficulty converting their congregations. Although he remained prepared to bribe or pension Protestant pastors to obtain their agreement to his plans, he had come to realise that substantive concessions were needed. He accepted that union would require the shedding of certain non-essential elements of Catholicism that were objectionable to Protestants; this shift in his thinking appears in the final sections of his Methode la plus facile, which differ significantly from its earlier chapters.⁵²Close

The search for a common slate of core doctrines on which both churches could agree at the expense of adventitious or secondary characteristics would become a regular feature of such efforts for decades to come. However, whenever it came to listing the articles of faith held by all confessions, the scope for serious disagreement was very substantial, since France’s Protestants had rejected far more elements of Catholicism than either Lutherans or Anglicans. As gallicans and full-blown supporters of divine right monarchy, they were most unlikely to accept any form of papal temporal power, not least because they had declared the Pope to be Antichrist within living memory. Richelieu’s plans did attract interest from some Protestants, including Hugo Grotius who was then Swedish ambassador to France; the cardinal also encouraged Veron and others to float the kinds of concession that the Catholic side would make on the road to union with the Protestants.⁵³Close The question of how far he was prepared to go to achieve such a religious union arose during his last years, leading to rumours that his plans needed — and indeed dovetailed with his own ambition to obtain — either a papal legation in France or a quasi-autonomous position of patriarch of France.⁵⁴Close

With Richelieu’s death these efforts faded from view, victims in part of the growing lassitude towards sterile inter-confessional ‘controversies’. Reunion and conversion — and their preconditions — would only return to the agenda during the quite different climate of the 1660s and 1670s. In the interim, Protestant theologians were convulsed by their own ongoing internal controversies on questions of grace, justification and predestination, which were not unlike those posed by the Jansenists within Catholicism.⁵⁵Close While the northern académies were receptive to more liberal intepretations of Calvinist thought on these problems, their southern counterparts remained faithful to the Genevan orthodoxy. One consequence of the confrontations with Catholic controversialists was an emphasis on establishing the characteristics of the true church, a development that, taken alongside the synodal structure of the Calvinist churches, was not likely to facilitate reunion.⁵⁶Close A brilliant generation of theologians, such as Mo'ise Amyraut, Pierre du Moulin, Charles Drelincourt, Jean Claude and Jean Daille, were more than a match for their Catholic rivals; they were also active as preachers and teachers within the major académies, which remained places of considerable intellectual vitality. The ‘little flock’, as Mazarin called the Protestants, may have numbered less than one in twenty inhabitants by mid-century, but it was far from moribund. It is thus not surprising that their Catholic rivals began to notice that their numbers were rising again during the 1650s.

Given that the Protestant population was spread very unevenly throughout France, we should not assume that the effects of the activities described so far, and the Protestant reactions to them, were uniform. It is indispensable at this juncture to examine some of the different consequences of such dispersion. Languedoc contained up to three-quarters of France’s Protestants, with the areas of greatest density located in lower Languedoc — from Montpellier northwards into the Cévennes and the Vivarais. This, added to the province’s size and distance from Paris, might suggest that Languedoc was better left well alone. But the sudden termination of the century-long Montmorency governorship as a result of the revolt of 1632 — in which, as we saw, several bishops were implicated — created an unexpected opportunity to strengthen direct royal control there, despite the problems raised by its size and distance from Paris. The Edict of Beziers issued immediately after the suppression of the 1632 revolt sought to curtail the provincial estates and tighten royal control of taxation in particular. The work of eliminating fortified towns had already begun, but it soon became clear that a major obstacle to the political change desired by the Richelieu ministry was the widespread Protestant domination of urban councils (the consulats), which reflected their massive demographic superiority in many of the province’s towns.⁵⁷Close An edict of September 1631 had already insisted that henceforth all consulats (and also hospitals and colleges) in previously Protestant-dominated towns must become bipartisan (mi-parti); and, more crucially still, that the first consul, who was entitled to represent the town at the provincial estates and local tax assembly (the assiette), must henceforth be a Catholic. In both instances, the local demography was deemed to be irrelevant, although it proved virtually impossible in many towns to find a Catholic to elect as first consul.

This reshaping of municipal political power in favour of Catholics, even where they were in a tiny minority, was implemented more energetically after the 1632 revolt. Because of its nature — it did not apply in Catholic towns with Huguenot minorities — it is not hard to imagine that local Protestants resisted it with every trick or scheme they could contrive, as the correspondence of protesting intendants and other Catholic figures in subsequent decades abundantly attests.⁵⁸Close This campaign, and several related measures triggered by it, was the first major step in disenfranchising France’s Protestants in their own heartlands. Its existence alone suggests something of the reserves of selfrestraint that Protestant non-participation in the Fronde must have required, especially in the Midi.⁵⁹Close The policy of municipal bipartisanship was one of the most detested measures of Louis XIII’S reign, one that the Protestants believed Mazarin had annulled by his Saint-Germain declaration of 1652.⁶⁰Close As Caldicott noted, the campaign for Huguenot political marginalisation was conducted with supportive winks and nods from Louis XIII’s ministers, at a time when the Richelieu and Mazarin governments were ostensibly pursuing fiscal reform and preserving Huguenot rights under the Edict of Nantes. However, the limited success of the Catholic offensive may be gauged from the fact that in places like Nîmes more Catholics converted to Protestantism than Protestants to Catholicism until well into the 1660s, and that the growth of Catholic urban populations in towns from La Rochelle to Montpellier owed infinitely more to rural immigrants than to converts within their walls.⁶¹Close

During this same period, it seems that in the neighbouring province of Dauphiné, which also had a significant Protestant population, interconfessional relations were rather less fractious than in Languedoc. The provincial estates were moribund well before 1640, denying the Catholic bishops the platform that their Languedocian counterparts possessed, while the absence of aggressive royal intendants probably hampered the province’s dévots for a time. It would not be until the 1660s or 1670s that the Catholic offensive really took off there, when conversion campaigns were one of its principal features. Neither Languedoc nor the Dauphiné can be held as representative of Huguenot experience during the middle decades of the century, but the fact that their experiences differed so considerably should suggest how much variation there was throughout the country as a whole. Languedoc was clearly critical, not only because of the size of its Protestant population, but also because it became something of a laboratory used by intendants, parlementaires and dévots anxious to undermine the régime of confessional coexistence there.

Poitou had a substantial Protestant population but, despite the presence of La Rochelle, it did not become a major area of confessional confrontation during the seventeenth century, while the local authorities showed little energy in enforcing repressive legislation before the dragonnades of 1681. Such relative moderation among both the population and the provincial authorities may well explain the porosity of the ‘sacred boundaries’ identified for the region by Keith Luria: Poitou did witness an incremental sharpening of separate confessional identities, but in a manner consistent with continuing social, economic and other relations. Such differing variations in confessional porosity were obviously not confined to Poitou.⁶²Close

Within the minority Protestant provinces of northern and central France, Normandy offers an interesting example of a different trajectory. With approximately forty places of worship and thirty-five pastors, the ‘religion’ was more or less equally distributed between the main towns of the province (especially Dieppe, Le Havre, Alen^on, Caen and even the very Catholic city of Rouen), with significant ‘pockets’ of rural entrenchment, especially in the ‘Pays de Caux’. Yet the overall Protestant population around 1660 was no more than about 35,000, less than 2 per cent of the province’s overall population. As in other parts of France, it tended to contract for lack of sources of demographic replenishment from rural areas. From the outset, the Edict of Nantes was applied highly restrictively by a notoriously hostile Rouen parlement, but Normandy’s absence from the 1620s wars at least spared it additional vexation from 1630 onwards. Nor, in contrast to Poitou, did the province suffer unduly from the 1661 commissions of investigation we shall encounter later in this chapter. In fact, the commissioners were slow to act there and, when they did, they frequently disagreed over the legality of the province’s Protestant temples. As a result, it was mainly as late as 1679 and afterwards, when the royal council decided to mop up the undecided cases from the previous decade, that Normandy’s temples first faced the prospect of full-scale demolition.⁶³Close

It should be evident by now that the condition and prospects of France’s Protestants during the early years of Louis XlV’s personal rule were delicately balanced, and that ‘official’ royal policy towards them was only part of a much wider picture. Their political loyalism since 1630 was certainly a major factor in their favour, but its development did not prevent Catholic critics from denouncing them as fundamentally disobedient and rebellious. Despite the squeeze placed on them in increasingly numerous ways, their churches continued to function more than adequately and were well supported by their congregations, while the pastors, well educated in their académies (and sometimes elsewhere in Europe), were superior to the vast majority of their Catholic counterparts. The defection of individual Protestant theologians or intellectuals had little effect on their former co-religionists. In 1661, Louis XIV, having kept Mazarin’s leading ministers in his service, was under no immediate or irresistible pressure to act against the Huguenots. The Memoires which bear his name and which were composed in the late 1660s may not, despite their year-by-year format, represent his sentiments concerning the Protestants in 1661 — the year to which they were assigned — but they probably reflect royal thinking générally during the 1660s. They convey an unwillingness to use violence to convert the Protestants, but they also plainly assert that the Edict of Nantes should be applied to the letter, with all the loopholes or subsequent additions and ‘misinterpretations’ rigorously removed. They reiterate, as if it was self-evident, the view of recent Catholic apologists that Catholicism had by now been so successfully reformed that the original cause — and continuing excuse — for the Protestant Reformation was no longer valid, and that a refusal to return to the true church was henceforth unjustifiable.⁶⁴Close

However, as we have already seen with both Richelieu and Mazarin, général statements, whether in private musings or in royal declarations, often fail to indicate the way that actual policy and political action moved where Protestantism was concerned. That would continue to be so in the first decades of Louis XIV’s rule. For example, Mazarin’s suppression of the Company of the Holy Sacrament in late 1660 — reiterated by the king in 1666 — might seem to herald the end of dévot activism against Protestantism. In fact, the Company’s dissolution merely drove its activities back into the shadows, while the crown’s adoption of many of its objectives in subsequent years scarcely amounted to a rejection of its ultimate ambition — the religious reunification of France.⁶⁵Close During Mazarin’s last days, plans were also completed for the despatch to the provinces of the commissioners who had been charged as long ago as the 1656 royal declaration with investigating Protestant infringements of the Edict of Nantes; within a few months of his death they were ready to commence an extensive enquiry, especially in the southern and western provinces. The assembly of clergy of 1660–61, trying to sustain the momentum of its predecessor of 1655–57, supported this agenda faute de mieux, since it would have much preferred to see the parlements exercise jurisdiction over inter-confessional conflicts rather than either commissioners or the chambres de ledit.⁶⁶Close

However, the commissioners’ work, which spread over several years from 1661 to 1664 and, in some cases, until 1668, confounded such pessimistic expectations; it was detailed and thorough and, from a Protestant point of view, extremely unfavourable. Despite consisting of one Catholic and one Protestant, the commissions concluded overwhelmingly in favour of the restrictive interpretation of Nantes, with only a limited number of split judgements (partages) arising from disagreements among them; the days when the commissioners’ primary task was to ensure peaceful coexistence in the localities were long since gone, and even the Protestant commissioners were now locked into the logic of the new legal scholasticism spawned by the slogan of ‘the edict and nothing but the edict’. It was the Catholic commissioners who dominated the investigations — as they would the recherches de noblesse of the mid-1660s. Virtually all of them were serving intendants in the provinces concerned, combining political and religious attitudes that, as we have already noted, made them no friends of the Protestants. If the Protestant population had more confidence in them than in magistrates from the parlements, that confidence was misplaced in this instance.⁶⁷Close By contrast, the Protestant commissioners seem to have been more obscure figures, in no position to compete with the intendants; this disparity in status (and sometimes in grasp of legal procedures) may well have persuaded them to accept the premises of the ‘rigorous’ interpretation of the Edict of Nantes.⁶⁸Close The result, as one historian put it for Languedoc, and which probably applies to other regions, was ‘a systematic assault on the rights of the Protestants’, especially — but not solely — on the right to participate in local government.⁶⁹Close

It was during the 1660s investigations, too, that the local ginger groups really came into their own, as they enjoyed far more scope for their activism than previously. The investigations ordered in 1661 were to be conducted by the commissioners in response to petitions against Protestant infractions from the syndics of the clergy of the individual dioceses. The syndics were free to take on lawyers and advocates of their choice to assist them in preparing appeals against the Protestants as well as during their appearances before the commissioners themselves. Not only did the authors of the legal handbooks that we have already identified find their works in great demand, but they were themselves often co-opted to assist the syndics in different parts of France. Thus the Jesuit Meynier and the Poitiers lawyer Filleau were extremely active during these years, but there were many other, less well-known but indispensable figures who now enjoyed unprecedented scope to pursue their anti-Protestant proclivities. One such advocate was Pierre Bomier of La Rochelle, who has been described as ‘the soul of the group of “propagators” who led the anti-Protestant campaigns in La Rochelle from 1648 to 1679’; he even managed to get himself appointed secretary to the commissioners investigating local infractions by the Protestants. There is every likelihood that such individuals and groups had once belonged — or continued secretly to belong — to the Company of the Holy Sacrament or its surrogates.⁷⁰Close When Bochart de Champigny, the commissioner for Dauphiné and Provence in 1661, arrived there, he was accompanied from place to place by local dévots who bombarded him with advice and memoranda — so much so that his itinerary can be reconstituted from the surviving records of the Grenoble and Aix chapters of the Propagation; his investigations were, not surprisingly, overwhelmingly favourable to the Catholics.⁷¹Close

Begun in 1661, the investigations of the royal commissions were, with some exceptions, complete by 1665, by which time they had condemned as illegal perhaps one in three or four Protestant places of worship, whose temples were earmarked for rapid demolition; half of all places of worship in Dauphiné, a province with a substantial Protestant population, were closed down, as many of them simply did not have the documentary evidence to prove that their title went back to 1597 or earlier. Where the commissioners disagreed in their judgements, the matter was referred to the royal council for its decision. The latter dealt methodically with the partages of the commissions of one généralite after another, mostly in 1664–65; it upheld the Catholic position in most of the disagreements, especially where demolishing Protestant temples was concerned. This explains why the council sometimes issued dozens of decrees in a single session on such questions.⁷²Close It did not stop there: as if such a case-by-case approach might prove insufficient, the council then followed up the individual decrees with a général ruling (reglement) containing dozens of articles relative to individual provinces, such as Languedoc or Dauphiné, thus consolidating and codifying the existing jurisprudence as far as those areas were concerned. Finally, the decision was taken at this time to make the recent commissions permanent, with the provincial intendants serving on them ex officio. This was tantamount to serving notice on the minority church that it was henceforth under full-time surveillance.⁷³Close By the time the commissioners had reported and the council had finished its work in mid-1665, a perceptible change in attitudes towards the Protestants had emerged. As a result, the deputies to the major assembly of clergy of 1665 were profuse in their praise for what had been achieved, in stark contrast to their counterparts of 1660 who had been deeply sceptical of the value of the commissions.⁷⁴Close There was more to come: ten years after Mazarin’s 1656 declaration revoking de facto that of Saint-Germain (1652), a new royal declaration of April 1666 containing fifty-nine articles consolidated the changes that had occurred for the most part in less than a decade. It recapitulated the core decisions relating to the meaning and practice of the Edict of Nantes; these decisions severely affected a wide range of activities, curtailing the rights of Protestant seigneurs, the work of Protestant pastors, the authority of their consistories, the prospects for Protestant office-holders, the curricula of Protestant schools — and much more.⁷⁵Close

In a context where royal policy towards the Huguenots was subject to abrupt changes in direction, it was not surprising that efforts at confessional reunion that had faded since Richelieu’s death were revived. Despite the absence under Louis XIV of a Richelieu-like figure to lead such efforts or give them the stamp of royal support, hopes of success were strong enough by the end of the 1660s to justify suspending some of the recent ‘measures of rigour’ against the Huguenots in order to allow other tactics to be tried.⁷⁶Close The long-awaited conversion of the most influential surviving Protestant grandee, Marshal Turenne, in late 1668, seemed to crystallise such expectations; for more than a decade, it had been preceded by widespread consultations, discussions of the major theological positions, and comparisons of the régimes of the other major confessions (Anglican, Lutheran, Catholic). Turenne had no desire to be a lone convert, so he deliberately delayed his change of faith in the hope that it might trigger a wider movement.⁷⁷Close The credit for his final decision to convert was given to Bossuet, but some contemporaries attributed it to Antoine Arnauld. ‘The finest conquest of the century’, Turenne had certainly been influenced by his reading of Jansenist authors like Arnauld and Nicole, in addition to the manuscript of Bossuet’s celebrated Exposition of the Catholic faith. All three were Augustinians capable of showing ‘the perpetuity of the faith’ that Catholicism claimed to personify, and in an idiom that appealed to a Protestant such as Turenne. His conversion was also triggered by his well-known dismay over the fragmentation of contemporary Protestantism and the ensuing problem of finding a firm basis for religious truth. Turenne thus came to accept, as his conversion publicly demonstrated, that religious truth could be guaranteed only by the ‘true’ church, the custodian of ‘perpetuity’ against ‘variation’ which, as Bossuet argued, was the mark of heresy. Turenne retained serious suspicions of French (and English) Protestants — or at least the majority in the south — as fundamentally ‘republican’, and thus as having no real place in the royal body politic. Irrespective of the part that Turenne’s own and family ambitions may have played in his decision, it is clear that his protracted conversion reflected major religious developments of the mid- century.

Turenne’s conversion came just as the Peace of the Church was being negotiated, and Louis XlV’s government could contemplate war against the Dutch without having to fear the effects of religious division within French Catholicism. Thus, there was every reason to allow Bossuet, Arnauld and Turenne’s many other Catholic divines to pursue their activities after the marshal’s own conversion. For his part, Bossuet had long been engaged in such dialogue with Protestants, particularly with Paul Ferry, the eminent pastor of Metz, where Bossuet was dean of the cathedral chapter during the 1650s and 1660s. At the same time, he was writing his Exposition, dealing with Catholic teaching on controversial doctrinal questions, which was published in 1671. Needless to say, what Bossuet and his circle had in mind was the return of Protestants (reunion) to the true church; thus Protestants needed to know its teaching at first hand and not in the caricatured form assumed to be prevalent among them. But the crux lay in how Bossuet — and other convertisseurs — presented Catholicism to them, given Protestant aversion to so much of its contents. Bossuet took a consistent position by adopting the decrees of the Council of Trent as his yardstick. On all major questions of faith, Catholicism was defined by the council’s decrees; everything else was a matter of opinion, which meant that converts could not be required to subscribe, for example, to papal claims to temporal power (direct or indirect) or to infallibility.⁷⁸Close The fact that France had not formally received Trent’s decrees, and that this refusal concerned matters of discipline rather than of faith, gave Bossuet and like- minded gallicans more latitude than they would have enjoyed elsewhere in Catholic Europe. Bossuet’s redrafting of the gallican articles of 1682, in which papal primacy was largely symbolic of the unity of the church, was made with one eye on the conversion of — or reunion with — France’s Protestants.⁷⁹Close It should be obvious that Bossuet’s attempt to use strict Catholic orthodoxy as the basis for reunion with the Protestants was anything but latitudinarian in intent. He left no doubt that the Protestant Reformation was a schism, which had lost its justification with the success of the Catholic Reformation. As he would argue in another major work, truth is older than error, and the history of Protestantism was strewn with ‘variations’ which were characterised by novelty and innovation.

Bossuet was far from alone in challenging the Protestants and their beliefs. By the 1660s and 1670s, the Jesuits had largely abandoned the ‘controversies’ — as they had the political debates a generation previously; only one of them, Maimbourg, made a widely read if not especially penetrating contribution, mainly in the form of historical accounts of past heresies, to the polemics with the Protestants from the early 1670s onwards.⁸⁰Close The Jesuits’ scholarly place was to be taken over by the Maurist-Benedictines and the Oratory. But the major surprise was that the real heavyweights now came from a quarter that Maimbourg had spent most of his time attacking — the Jansenists. An important and unexpected dividend of the Peace of the Church of 1668–69 was that it released a considerable number of accomplished Port-Royalist writers and scholars who had previously been either imprisoned, on the run, or busy defending their own cause. Their range of intellectual interests was especially wide, and they included history, patristics, biblical exegesis and liturgy, as well as moral and controversial theology, all of which were exceptionally valuable for debates with France’s Protestants.⁸¹Close The result was ‘a veritable explosion of scholarly energy’.⁸²Close Over the next decade or more, they seriously raised the quality of Catholic thinking and writing across a broad front, adding considerable weight to the polemical argument used by Bossuet and other controversialists that Catholicism’s self-reform was such as to remove any justification for the continuation of Protestantism as a separate ‘sect’. The leading Jansenists, especially Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, piled the pressure on their Protestant opponents; as Augustinians with a reverence for Christian antiquity and an experience of defending a minority cause, they became the most dangerous opponents of Protestant positions. The Jansenists’ involvement in interconfessional polemic began before the Peace of the Church, but it increased markedly after 1669. Arnauld (or rather Pierre Nicole) produced a short, first version of the massive Perpetuity of the faith of the Catholic church concerning the Eucharist in 1664 which, in response to subsequent Protestant rebuttals, was expanded to three volumes between 1669 and 1674; its title alone gives a clear signal of its line of argument.⁸³Close That was only the beginning; the indefatigable Arnauld published a series of bruising new ‘controversies’ during the 1670s and early 1680s, whose titles frequently accused the Protestants of impiety in both morality and doctrine.

Controversy and exchanges in print thus poured off the presses during the 1670s, increasingly pigeonholing the Huguenots as schismatics and rebels, whose religion and church were false and without warrant. Such accusations were heavily loaded politically, and enabled those employing them to perpetuate the myth of rebellious Protestants, their ultra-royalism notwithstanding. This shift itself reflects the relative trajectories of Catholicism and Protestantism in France since the age of Richelieu, when French Catholicism still had to put its house in order. This weakness was one important reason why its propagandists were unable to impress or seduce their opposite numbers for a long time. However, by the 1660s and 1670s, the situation was changing, especially after the intra-Catholic Jansenist feud had been suspended. The Catholic Reformation had begun to show results — pastoral, educational and intellectual — that increasingly licensed its apologists to claim that whatever reasons there might have been in the past for Protestants to leave the church of their ancestors, they were no longer valid.⁸⁴Close The Protestants should thus return to that church now that it had been successfully restored to its splendour. If they refused to do so, it was owing to their rebellious, schismatic and insubordinate nature. The RPR did not constitute a church, and what they believed and practised was not a religion.

Turenne’s conversion probably dented Protestant resistance much less than it stirred Catholic ambitions. He immediately tried to persuade Louis XIV to take the lead and produce a rapid solution, while the king himself was keen to revive Richelieu’s earlier four-step plan for reunion in late 1668 and early 1669. But with the papacy as hostile as ever to a gallican inter-confessional conference that would pave the way for reunion, nothing came of this particular approach.⁸⁵Close It was accepted that funding the number of conversions it envisaged would be expensive, although Louis XIV seemed willing to set aside such sums. But actually producing the funds proved far more difficult over the following years, and Turenne died, in 1675, before anything serious had been attempted. One of the unavoidable questions was how precisely to use money during the process of converting Protestants, and their pastors in particular.⁸⁶Close Quite coincidentally, in the early 1670s the new Port-Royalist bishop of Grenoble, Le Camus, set about converting the Vaudois population in his diocese, and he came up with a non-violent method, which included providing financial support to sustain those converted in their new condition. His successes impressed governing circles at court, and in 1676 Louis XIV was persuaded to adopt Le Camus’s approach and establish what soon became known as ‘the conversion fund’ The assemblies of clergy had long had a similar fund to support ex-pastors, and continued to use it during the 1670s.⁸⁷Close But despite not being fully spent over the years, it no longer matched the growing ambitions of the mid-1670s. The Company of the Holy Sacrament and the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith had also provided funds in the past, but they were more haphazard in size and regularity.⁸⁸Close Ironically, it was the régale that was now designated to provide the monies needed for the new fund to operate. Administered by a recent Protestant convert and friend of Le Camus, Paul Pellisson-Fontanier, the ‘conversion fund’, as it became known, would come to be perceived as one of the most odious initiatives of these years. The intention was to make conversion thinkable, especially for Protestant ministers who, once they had converted, would have had no obvious source of income to maintain themselves and their families. It is not hard to see how easily such an intention could become an inducement to, and a reward for, conversion, and thus wide open to the abuses that quickly followed, such as the misappropriation of the funds themselves, and the multiple or dubious ‘conversions’ that gave it a bad name. In the event, the individual pensions were too small to tempt most potential converts, with the result that the total number of conversions officially recorded for the four years 1676–1679 was disappointingly low at just 10,000, nearly half of which were credited to Le Camus’s own efforts in Grenoble.⁸⁹Close Such limited progress almost certainly helped to garner support for tougher methods in dealing with Protestants in subsequent years.

These were not the only noteworthy cases of the meshing of local and countrywide initiatives during the 1660s and 1670s. The chambres de ledit were, as we have already seen, under severe pressure from the alliance of the parlements and the Catholic church leadership, precisely because their activity was a thorn in the side of both parties. The crown’s reluctance to either transfer jurisdiction over confessional lawsuits to the parlements or to reintegrate the chambres within the parlements themselves did not prevent lesser measures that would curtail the chambres. Perhaps the most significant was a royal council decree of November 1664 designed to prevent them from accepting lawsuits concerning the affairs of the ‘communities’ (cities, towns, villages) of France since, as the decree famously put it, ‘all communities are to be considered as belonging to the Roman, Catholic and Apostolic church’. Such a decree illustrates how difficult it was to distinguish local ‘political’ problems from others of an inter-confessional nature. Its immediate intention was to restore to the increasingly hard-line parlements a substantial slice of jurisdiction over towns with a Protestant population, while also insisting that Catholic schools, hospitals and other institutions be established in Protestant-dominated towns. And, as one historian has put it, if all the communities of the kingdom were to be considered Catholic, there was ultimately nothing to prevent a similar logic from being applied to the kingdom itself.⁹⁰Close

Only two years later, in 1666, the last grands jours in French history were held by the parlement of Toulouse in Le Puy and Nîmes (October 1666-February 1667). The chambre mi-partie of Castres made strenuous efforts to be represented among the magistrates involved in the assizes but, as Louis XlV’s Memoires admit, that was not deemed ‘advantageous to religion’ and the chambre was successfully given the run-around.⁹¹Close This was effectively a green light to the Toulouse parlement for what was perhaps one of the most symbolic confrontations of these years — France’s most ultra-Catholic parlement facing its most irreducible Protestant ‘stronghold, Nîmes and its environs. During the three months that the grands jours spent in Nîmes, it ‘rained’ decrees (180 in all) on the Protestants, as the parlement sought to impose its authority in parts of Languedoc that had hitherto kept it at bay; judging by the parlements subsequent activities, from 1667 to 1682, the experience of the grands jours enabled it to extend its power more widely by imposing measures first taken at Nîmes throughout its vast jurisdiction.⁹²Close The grands jours relied on the existing legislation, and especially that of the previous few years, to marginalise the Protestants by trying to drive them out of offices, royal and municipal, but also from numerous professions, close their schools altogether or, if that was not possible, prevent the teaching of religion in them.⁹³Close By requiring, for example, the Protestants to bury their dead exclusively at nightfall or daybreak with an attendance of no more than thirty and, later, ten people, and banning them from singing or ringing bells for their services in public places, the grands jours aimed to ‘render them invisible and unheard’ within their own communities; the corollary of such measures would be that their Catholic neighbours regained exclusive control of the public spaces and ‘monopolised the symbols of the sacred’.⁹⁴Close

Needless to say, the repetition of such ordinances may only prove how difficult, if not impossible, they were to enforce in certain parts of France. But equally, it signifies the will of those behind them to maintain — and extend — the pressure on the Protestant communities. By the mid-1660s, for example, the clamour for outright suppression of the chambres mi-parties and the cham- bres de l’edit was increasing steadily. The crown may not have particularly liked the chambres in général, but was in no rush to make a tabula rasa of them. Yet in January 1669, only a month before it halted the current anti-Huguenot campaigns, it suppressed the chambres de l’edit of both Paris and Rouen, which were responsible for virtually all of northern and central France. Neither chambre had been especially combative in defending the Protestants, especially as their membership was overwhelmingly Catholic and their own parle- ments had little regard for them. Their suppression was essentially a gesture, but one which suggested that the remaining chambres mi-parties of Toulouse, Bordeaux and Grenoble might not be untouchable. All three were the butt of their parlements, but the crown was evidently nervous of suppressing them in 1669. Instead, it merely removed that of Toulouse from the strongly Protestant town of Castres to the Catholic one of Castelnaudary.⁹⁵Close In fact, the surviving chambres lasted another ten years, and were the first victims of the next and final anti-Protestant campaign before the revocation of 1685.⁹⁶Close

There was a certain similarity in the fate of the Protestant académies during these years. That of Montauban, which was the bastion of southern Calvinist conservatism, was removed to the remote town of Puylaurens as early as 1660. The Nîmes academy was suppressed outright in 1664, after losing a furious battle with the Jesuits, while that of Sedan followed in 1681. Saumur proved a more difficult target, but it was subjected to the legal equivalent of guerrilla war, culminating in a debilitating lawsuit of 1670 that was only resolved months before the revocation, in January 1685.⁹⁷Close Intended to cripple French Protestantism intellectually, the timing of these suppressions owed as much to local politics and pressure group campaigns as to official royal policy.

It was for external political reasons that Louis XIV suspended the antiProtestant measures in early 1669. This time the revolving door was set in motion by the prospect of war with the Dutch, even though it did not actually begin until 1672; the régime wished to avoid both internal disturbances and external reputational damage if it was seen to continue persecuting its Protestant subjects. It will be recalled that the Jansenist conflict was also set aside at the same time and for the same ten-year duration, thanks to the Peace of the Church. In a lengthy declaration of February 1669 running to thirty- nine articles, Louis XIV suspended the previous one of 1666, rather as Mazarin had done in 1656 in relation to the Saint-Germain declaration of 1652. But as the new declaration’s contents clearly show, the status quo for the Protestants in 1669 was not to be that of 1656 or 1652, let alone of 1629.⁹⁸Close At best, by 1669 they could look forward to a respite or a truce, after which another round of repression was to be expected. On the Catholic side, those most eagerly seeking the end of French Protestantism had by now learned to live with such a volte-face by the crown and to bide their time; the declaration heralded less support for repression from the court, but that would not prevent continuing efforts to absorb and impose existing measures — and to devise new ones for the future. National and local ‘timetables’ did not have to work in perfect harmony when it came to testing the limits of existing legislation. By now, the unspoken assumption was that what the Edict of Nantes did not explicitly permit was forbidden, but translating that maxim into practice could take time. The edict had become the straitjacket that it was never intended to be; its many inconsistencies, which had been both necessary and useful at its origin, had only made it more susceptible to restriction once that tactic had first showed its potential. In the late 1660s and 1670s, with continuing support from the parlements and the Catholic church, there was no reason to abandon the etouffement of the Protestants and their churches.