ART. IX.-Histoire de la Restauration du Protestantisme en France, au XVIII siècle, d'après documents inédits. Par EDMOND HUGUES. 2 Tomes. Paris: 1872.

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ON the map of modern France four departments, those of

the Ardêche, the Lozère, the Hérault, and the Gard, now serve to divide the mountainous province which was the scene of the Camisard rebellion. Among the fastnesses of the Cevennes the Huguenot rebels held out for two years against the troops of Louis XIV.; there, after the collapse of the Cevenol rebellion, Protestantism received what seemed to be its death-blow, and yet there, through the efforts of Antoine Court, it again raised its head, and vindicated the prophecy of Calvin with regard to his party-We shall die; but in dying 'a victory will yet be ours.' Such a death and such a victory were, however, as may well be believed, very critical moments. in the history of Protestant France. They were periods so marked that they may be called a death and a resurrection, and if Jean Cavallier, the Camisard soldier, was the hero of the fall, Antoine Court was the angel of the rising again, of the Protestant Church and Creed.

To judge of the work which Court constructed and consolidated, we must first look a little at the ruins from which it rose. It was in 1702, that Esprit Fléchier, the well-known Bishop of Nismes, and Lamoignon de Bâville, the Intendant of Languedoc, were desired to quell a rebellion which had been provoked in the south of France by the cruelties of the Dragonnades. No doubt the existence of any such rebellion against his armies and his will was a disagreeable surprise to the autocrat whom Madame de Maintenon governed at Versailles, but who from Versailles governed France as no sovereign had ever done before. It must have been the more surprising to Louis, because during the hundred years of peace that had elapsed since the promulgation of the Edict of Nantes, the constituency of the French Protestant body had been very materially altered. Force, fraud, bribes and cajolery had all been employed for this purpose, but besides these direct methods the healing influences of toleration had had their effect, and conversions had become both frequent and numerous to the Catholic Church. The evangelical temper, the preaching, and the energy of Saint Francois de Sales had brought back on one occasion six hundred converts from the schools of Zwingle and Calvin. In the first year of their mission it was computed that the sœurs grises of Saint Vincent de Paul converted not

less than seven hundred and sixty souls; nor were these solitary specimens of the influence possessed in France by the Gallican Church, when Sulpicians, Oratorians, Lazaristes, Carmelites, and the reformed order of Benedictines, had lent to her a distinction and a lustre of good works without parallel in any age or country.

The supineness, the ignorance, the moral corruption, and the formalism which the first reformers had found to blame in the National Church had been now replaced in France by a spirit of religious enterprise. The presence of the Huguenot party, acting at once as a stimulant and corrective, had caused a potent Catholic revival. The young were now educated, the poor were relieved, the sick visited, the clergy trained, and though, no doubt as far as schools and colleges were concerned, the Huguenot Church was by no means inferior to her great rival, yet there can be no denying that on the whole the results of the Edict of Nantes had been such as to justify the promise which Henri IV. made to the Pope-I will take care,' that astute monarch had written to Clement VIII., 'so to manage ⚫ the Edict which I have published for the tranquillity of my kingdom, that its most important and solid results shall be in favour of the Catholic religion; and this indeed is beginning to appear.'

Less far-sighted than the great Béarnois, and blinded by the passion for uniformity, which he shared with all, or nearly all, the great minds of his age, Louis XIV. revoked the Edict, and thereby converted a body of harmless dissenters from the theology of Rome into an army of furious and outraged zealots. The result certainly took the monarch by surprise, and Louis might have had even more cause to rue his mistake, had it not happened that the Huguenots now lacked the political genius, the great leaders, and the feudal princes that had glorified their struggle in the days of the Rohans and Colignys. The race of giants was extinct, and of the men of note who remained to the Calvinist party, some, like Turenne, Courcillon, and De Lorges, had just been attracted into the Catholic fold by the intrepid attitude and by the penetrating arguments of Bossuet, an antagonist whom no Huguenot could baffle, and whom few were able to resist.

In the lower and middle ranks of French society, and at a distance from the capital, the case, however, was different. Calvinism, of which the austere tenets had failed at first to stir with any profound emotion the hearts of the French populace, had at last gained, and it now held, a great influence over the people of southern France. There the small local

gentry, the probes hommes, the magistrates, the weavers, the artisans, and the shepherds were deeply imbued by it, and the presence of excellent primary schools, and of five flourishing colleges, all attested the affluent and educated condition of a Church, which in the provinces south of Loire cannot have numbered less than 162,000 souls. It was upon these communities that the Dragonnades fell. As if in derision of the memory of Henry IV., they began in Béarn, then desolated the whole of Languedoc, and by the time that they had reached the provinces lying westwards of the Rhone, they had covered half the patrimony of King Louis with a desolation more wide-spread, and a slaughter more terrible, than any that had been seen since the crusade of De Montfort against the Albigeois. And the Albigeois crusade still went for something in the matter.

The race of Languedoc, with its admixture of Iberian, Gothic, Greek, and Saracenic blood, still kept its jealousy of the Franciman' provinces, and Huguenots professing the tenets of the Calvin who had preached to them at Bérac, nourished the same dislike to Catholicism which their Arian ancestors had felt to the Athanasian Creed and the arms of Clovis, and which their Albigeois progenitors had also had good reason to feel towards the orthodoxy of De Montfort. Catholicism, the Languedociens observed, had never done them any good. Once it had come with barbarism, and once with feudality in its train, and this third time it offered them the sword and the despotism of a bigoted king. They rebelled. When the rest of France lay prostrate, when over 1,500 pastors and 2,300 elders had been driven into exile, when England, Ireland, Holland, Switzerland, Russia, Prussia, India, and even Constantinople had received their quota of refugees, the provinces of the South rose, and unfurled the standard of a war between sovereign and subject, between the two halves of France. More than this-the daring Camisards enlisted the sympathy of Savoy, and they envoked the help of an English fleet in their desperate but furious struggle. For two years, from 1702, to the spring of 1704, when after the lost battle of Langlade, Cavallier laid down his arms, they waged their guerilla warfare, and many a spot among the grey limestone ledges, among the volcanic peaks, among the clustering olive woods that circle the city of Nismes, or on the salt and shallow sea margins of Languedoc, was made famous or infamous by their camps, their courage, and their excesses. Sometimes burning churches and stripping the lead from the roofs, sometimes murdering priests, and at other times

disappearing among grottoes and caverns, we see these irregular and fanatical troops reappear, and giving battle to the regiments of Villars and Montrevel. Again they would vanish, but it was only because they had gone to melt more pewter bullets, and to flash messages from peak to peak, so that they might collect new reserves and fresh supplies. They sing, they fight, they prophesy, they pillage, and they pray, while such seers as Condèrc and Mazel curse all the prelates and captains of France with a more than prophetic fury. Still, though prophet and prophetess rave, and though soldiers like Cavallier feel in their souls the mystic afflatus which leads while it inspires, the strife is too unequal to be long maintained: and when Cavallier at last lays down his arms the Cevenols have to pay the price of the rebellion into which by persecution they had at first been goaded. With his froward mountaineers the policy of Louis then showed itself to be froward indeed. The party that had dared to invoke foreign help, and that had summoned English frigates into French waters, must be exterminated, and the work of the Dragonnades, which had been only interrupted by battles, marches, countermarches and retreats, was taken up again by the royal commissioners. Bishop Fléchier's spiritual arm was even more heavy than had been the sword of the marshals, and there fell upon Protestantism a period of silence and of suffering which cannot be matched or surpassed in the history of any Church, The nation acquiesced in the result. Imbued with that passion for the national unity and for the national aggrandisement which the victories of Louis had formed into a sort of cultus, France acquiesced in a barbarity which had just cost her in money, blood, skill and distinction more than she could ever hope to repair. She was content that religious unity should have been achieved at any price, and content that the war should now be at an end. If the heresy was finished also, so much the better, and thus it happened that in favour of toleration no voice was ever raised. In the meantime the men of Languedoc, fierce, passionate, stubborn, and vindictive,' as they might be, had found their master; galleys and prisons were full, if villages were roofless; lawyers, artificers, gentlemen and men of letters, all were gone, and with the flocks the pastors had also perished.

This period of desolation is not, however, the one which we have now to illustrate, for M. Hugues, though he is of course obliged to dwell on its features, is happy to be able to call his book a History of the Restoration of Protestantism.'

Yes, contrary to all hopes of her enemies and to all expecta

tions of her friends, Protestantism was restored, and that mainly through the heroic exertions of Antoine Court. It actually happened that a Church which in 1705 did not possess a pastor, a congregation, a temple, or a synod, was in 1787 able to ask from Louis XVI. a recognition of its claims, and to take again a first place among the Protestant communions of Europe. How this work, so little short of a miracle, was accomplished, and this result achieved, M. Hugues' book tells us. The papers which he has collected have long remained unedited at Lausanne, but he flatters himself that he has not done amiss in offering to France, in the morning after her recent disasters, an example of how a people, be its fall ever so great, may yet rise again through patience, unity, and strength, and by devotion to a common cause. The work itself contains much that is valuable to the history of the Protestant Church, besides containing a biography of a real Christian hero, whose name is perhaps unknown to many of our readers. It is for this reason we notice it.

In the year 1696, and while the Dragonnades were being felt all around them, a man-child had been born at Villeneuve, in the Vivarais, to Jean and Marie Court. To that child they had given the name of Antoine, and as they did so they had observed that it would be a very great good fortune for their son were they to dedicate him to the service of God.' He was so dedicated, not only to the pastoral office, but to an unusual amount of suffering and of endurance, and to a priestlike career, which, if it was too long for its pains, was only too short for all that it had to accomplish. He was brought up by a woman. Jean Court died in 1700, and on Marie Gébelin, a widow of thirty-two years of age, had devolved the task of carrying out any plans that they might have formed together with regard to their boy. By day Antoine went to school, where he was stoned and hooted at as a Huguenot, but when the evenings closed in, it was then that the peasants of the Vivarais instructed their households in the Calvinistic faith. Their houses were poor and bare, scattered about on the sides of the sharp and contorted hills, or in the shadow of immense chestnut forests, where these people were fed from fields of rye and buckwheat. In their circles strange tales of martyrdoms and of hairbreadth escapes were whispered about, and when the troops of Villars had dispersed the last congregations of the Cevennes, it was only in secret that the sermons of pastors, the dying speeches of confessors, and the prophecies of seers could circulate from mouth to mouth.

On such tales the youth of Antoine Court was fed, and when