Crossing the Confessional Border: a Possible Path towards Religious Tolerance in the Bohemian and French Kingdoms? In: G. HALFDANARSON (ed.), Discrimination and Tolerance in Historical perspective, Pisa 2008, p. 125-147 (original) (raw)
The path of Protestant minorities towards religious tolerance during the Catholic Reformation was a very long and complex process. From the first third of the 17th century to the end of the 18th century, Bohemian Protestants as well as French Huguenots endeavoured to maintain their religious alterity and to obtain the equality of their Church. As they were deprived of their clergy and their worship was forbidden, the persecuted Protestants could preserve their spiritual tradition only through illegal and extra-ecclesiastic structures. Their attempt to preserve their hidden existence generated the inevitable loss of the dogmatic purity and thus caused misunderstanding and even serious conflicts with the Protestant authorities in exile. Especially the lay leaders of these secret Evangelical communities, strong personalities often perceived as the ‘enlightened’, or as the select few on the road to God, gave rise to a lack of trust and critical reactions. Their specific doctrinal beliefs, leading rather often to prophetic movements, turned out to be the only possible solution in the context of the continuous religious persecution in both states. While, at the end of the 18th century, thanks to the influence of Enlightenment discourse, the French Huguenots endeavoured to participate actively in the civic life of whole society, the Protestant minority in Bohemain lands still stuck to by its exclusiveness, blocking therefore its social integration.
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The culminating confessional rivalries in the early 17th century provided fertile ground in much of Europe, especially Central Europe, for visions of the imminent End of the World and Christ’s Second Coming. This paper offers a new perspective for the well-known topic and compares the eschatological visions in the 17th and 18th centuries of the Bohemian non-Catholics and emigrants on the one hand and the secret Huguenots on the other. While the belligerent apocalyptic visions in the Bohemian environment to the end of the 18th century saw a turning point and an opportunity to overthrow the Antichrist in the imminent coming of an allied Protestant ruler destined by God, the French Protestant prophecies appealed almost exclusively to the glory of Christ and his rule on Earth. Despite signifi cant diff erences in the religious practice and historical contexts of the two cases, we observe not only very similar physical manifestations in the prophets’ behaviour but also, thanks to these ideas, a renewal of the declining piety of the believers and the reactivation of the underground religious movement. In both environments the apocalyptic visions have been heavily criticized by legal ecclesiastical authorities in exile. Disciplinary interventions against these heterodox ideas had however a completely diff erent result, playing a signifi cant role in the process of legalization of Protestant worship at the end of the period in question.
Religious Persecution in Eighteenth-Century France
Leidschrift, 2023
Throughout the early modern period, Europe remained haunted by the religious tensions that had erupted from the Reformation. Despite the Peace of Augsburg (1555), the Edict of Nantes (1598) and the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which put an end to decades of religious wars, violence and persecution persisted well beyond. The Enlightenment and the spread of tolerationist ideas in the eighteenth century should not be regarded as the end of religious violence, but instead as a reminder that religious violence remained very much a reality in this period. Among the best-known examples of religious persecution in the eighteenth century are the Camisards, the Waldensians, the ‘Poor Palatines’, the Salzburgers, the Moravians, the Gordon and Priestley riots, to name just a few. In France, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 revived religious tensions in the Protestant provinces of Languedoc and Dauphiné after nearly a century of tolerance. Beside causing the exile of some 200,000 French Protestants towards northern Europe, the Revocation opened a century-long era of clandestinity and discrimination that would last until the French Revolution. Historians generally distinguish between three phases in this period, even though the intensity of the persecution varied between provinces. The years 1685-1715 were the most violent, marked by forced conversions, brutal persecution and the Camisards’ revolt. The second phase, from 1715 to the early 1760s, corresponds to the organised revival of the French Protestant Church through clandestine assemblies and synods and the gradual decline of state persecution; and the third phase, from the early 1760s to the French Revolution, a return to a de facto religious tolerance. This paper surveys the plight of French Protestants from the revocation of the Edict of Nantes to the French Revolution. It nuances the grand narrative of a steady path towards religious toleration by highlighting regional disparities and integrating foreign – mostly Dutch – sources. It argues overall that, despite the death of Louis XIV in 1715 and the role of the Calas affair in changing public opinion, anti-Calvinist sentiments and discriminations remained vivid in southern France until the French Revolution.
The Bohemian Reformation and Religious Practice Vol. 11
The Bohemian Reformation and Religious Practice Vol. 11, 2018
The volume contains papers selected from those presented during the Eleventh and Twelfth Symposium of the Bohemian Reformation and Religious Practice held from 18–20 June 2014 and from 15–17 June 2016, i.e. series of biennial conferences dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of the Bohemian Reformation.
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