Religious Persecution in Eighteenth-Century France (original) (raw)

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.