Abstract
Few political decisions have roused historians to such a swift condemnation, indeed such a unanimous censure as the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, signed at Fontainebleau on 17 October 1685. At the time, however, the Revocation was greeted in France with widespread and unsolicited enthusiasm. Its partial failure—creating as it did more problems than it solved—caused disappointment and slowly led the public to question its legitimacy. Ensuing generations perceived the Edict of Fontainebleau and the anti-Protestant policies which it consecrated as an enormous error and a serious political misjudgment. Such an attitude is too well-known to merit consideration here.
Translated by Ruth Whelan. By court I mean not simply the milieu of Versailles, but the government, the authorities, those with power, beginning with, of course, the king.
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Religion prétendue réformée,“ that is, ”self-styled reformed religion,“ the legal term in France that was somewhat disparaging.
Such as Henri Martin or Ernest Lavisse, not to say Jules Michelet.
Or “whose the region, his the religion.” In France it could also be expressed as “Une foi, une loi, un roi” (“one faith, one law, one king”)—in any given territory, one religion only.
Louis Maimbourg (1610–86), for many years a Jesuit, wrote many popular history books, among them histories of Lutheranism and Calvinism. See Elisabeth Israels Perry, From Theology to History: French Religious Controversy and the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (The Hague, 1973 ).
They were no more than 6 percent of the total population of the kingdom.
This date is New Style, used on the continent. England used Old Style, ten days behind the continent.
This daughter of Henry IV of France had been married to Charles I of England and allowed to stay Roman Catholic. She had a certain influence on her husband, which proved disastrous to him
The Didcipline of the Reformed Chruches of Frane, composed in the sixteeth century, established in detail rules of organization.
Émile-G. Léonard, Histoire générale du protestantisme,3 vols. (Paris, 1961). There is an English edition, 2 vols. (London, 1965–67).
In fact, they were lukewarm and slow: see Jean Orcibal, Louis XIV et les protestants (Paris, 1951), 139–47.
Desert wilderness“—a biblical allusion—was used to describe both the clandestine meetings and the clandestine reorganization of the French Reformed Churches. The meetings took place in open air, as far as possible from villages where the local authorities—in particular, the Catholic curé (the chief parish priest)—could be aware of the meeting.
The hero of a book by Alfred Jarry, described in a grotesque and half surrealistic fashion as a ferocious tyrant.
Débonnaireté chrétienne.“
Cf. supra note 10.
Soldiers—often dragoons—were forcibly lodged in Protestant households, which were obliged to feed them; those unwelcome and ruinous guests were incited to use every harassment to obtain from their hosts the recanting of their religious particularism.
A “pastoral” letter of the bishops, who considered the Protestants in their respective dioceses as their lost sheep. As bishops and intendants jointly addressed themselves to the consistories, the negative answer was to be worded with great caution, not to appear as a subversive resistance to the civil authorities.
The principal tax.
Cf. Louis XIV, Mémoires pour l’instruction du Dauphin, ed. Charles Dreyss, 2 vols. (Paris, 1860), 2: 95.
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© 1988 Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht
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Labrousse, E. (1988). Understanding the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes from the Perspective of the French Court. In: Golden, R.M. (eds) The Huguenot Connection: The Edict of Nantes, Its Revocation, and Early French Migration to South Carolina. Archives Internationales D’Histoire des Idées/International Archives of the History of Ideas, vol 125. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2766-7_3
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