Huguenots

• 1. Introduction

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  The Huguenots were French Protestants who followed the Reformed tradition shaped by John Calvin. In 1572, roughly one person in ten in France belonged to their community. By 1686, only about one in a hundred did. That is a fall from ten percent to one percent in little more than a century. Behind that collapse lie royal edicts, civil wars, forced conversions, and a flight across borders and oceans. This documentary asks where the name Huguenot came from, since nobody can say for certain. It asks how a faith that won over nobles and townspeople came to be outlawed. And it asks where the survivors went, and what their departure cost the kingdom they left.

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• 2. A Name Nobody Can Trace

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  Besançon Hugues died in 1532, yet his name may still echo in the word Huguenot. He was a burgomaster in Geneva, and he was Catholic. He led the Confederate Party, which wanted freedom from the Duke of Savoy and an alliance with the Swiss Confederation. One theory says opponents twisted his name into a pun. The Dutch word Huisgenoten means housemates, and the German word Eidgenosse names a citizen of one of the Swiss confederate states.

  The historian O. I. A. Roche pressed this case in his 1965 book The Days of the Upright. He pictured Bible students in the Dutch-speaking north of France meeting secretly in each other's houses. On the Swiss and German borders, he wrote, such people were called oath fellows, bound together by a vow. Roche said the word, though often used with scorn, became "a badge of enduring honour and courage". Another account says the label first landed on the conspirators of the Amboise plot of 1560. They were aristocratic Reformed Church members who tried and failed to pull power away from the zealously Catholic House of Guise.

  Not everyone accepts a foreign origin. Janet Gray argues that a word spreading so widely in France must have been born in French. She and others point to Hugues Capet, a king who reigned long before the Reformation and was remembered as a man who respected people's dignity and lives. On that view, huguenote would mean something like little Hugos.

  A third family of theories is Catholic and far darker. In Tours, a legend told of the ghost of le roi Huguet, haunting a gateway named for Hugon, an ancient Count of Tours remembered for evil deeds. The prétendus réformés, the supposedly reformed, gathered at night to pray and sing psalms. Priests and townspeople mocked them as heirs of those night-roaming spirits.

  Reguier de la Plancha, who died in 1560, gave a similar account. He listed the spirits of other towns: le moine bourré in Paris, le mulet odet in Orléans, and le loup garon in Blois. Paul Ristelhuber leaned toward this Catholic explanation in an 1879 introduction to Henri Estienne's 1566 Apologie pour Hérodote. A last suggestion held that the name mocked les guenon de Hus, the apes of Jan Hus. As late as 1911, American writers had reached no agreement.

  The Protestants themselves preferred the word reformés. Their lasting emblem is the Huguenot cross, the croix huguenote, now an official symbol of the Église des Protestants réformés. Descendants still wear it as a sign of recognition among themselves.

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• 3. Reformation in France

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  Around 1294, a Catholic priest named Guyard des Moulins prepared a French version of the scriptures. In 1487, Jean de Rély printed a two-volume illustrated paraphrase of it in Paris. French readers therefore met the Bible in their own language long before Calvin. Earlier still, Peter Waldo, who lived from about 1140 to about 1205, is credited with the first known translation into a regional French language, Arpitan. His followers, the Waldensians, built fortified places such as Cabrières. Francis I crushed them in the Massacre of Mérindol in 1545.

  Reform also stirred inside the Catholic Church. Jacques Lefevre, a professor at the University of Paris, published a French New Testament in 1523 and the whole Bible in 1530. Two of his students changed Europe. William Farel became a leader of the Swiss Reformation and helped found a Protestant republican government in Geneva. Jean Cauvin, whom English speakers call John Calvin, studied in Paris and converted. The surviving Waldensians of the Luberon later sought to join Farel and Calvin, and Olivétan published a French Bible for them. The French Confession of 1559 shows a decidedly Calvinist influence.

  The crown's mood swung. Francis I at first protected dissenters from parliamentary measures that sought to wipe them out. After the Affair of the Placards in 1534, he pulled away. Between 1555 and 1561, the movement grew fast, mainly among nobles and city dwellers. They held their first national synod in Paris in 1558. By 1562, about two million Huguenots lived beside roughly sixteen million Catholics. During the 1560s, around 1,400 Reformed churches operated across France.

  Calvin wrote in French, yet his message spread unevenly. In Germany, Lutheran writings reached ordinary readers. In France, mostly nobles took up the new faith. Where Huguenot nobles ruled in the west and south, many peasants became Reformed, but those regions stayed majority Catholic. Historians estimate that about 80% of Huguenots lived in the west and south. La Rochelle held the Atlantic coast, while Castres, Montauban, Montpellier and Nîmes were strongholds in the south. Some villages around the Massif Central and the Dordogne were entirely Reformed.

  The movement was never a single bloc. People spoke of Huguenots of religion, who followed Calvin's teaching and set up synods. They also spoke of Huguenots of the state, mostly nobles who resented the Guise family's grip on power and wanted to challenge the crown. In southern France, this second group often chafed against the strict tenets in Calvin's letters to the synods of Languedoc.

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• 4. War and Massacre

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  Henry II died in an accident in 1559, and his son took the throne as Francis II. The young king's wife was Mary, Queen of Scots. During his eighteen months as king, Mary encouraged a policy of arresting Huguenots for heresy and trying them before Catholic judges. Punishments included torture and burning. She returned to Scotland as a widow in the summer of 1561. That same year the Edict of Orléans declared persecution at an end. In January 1562, the Edict of Saint-Germain formally recognised the Huguenots for the first time. The measures masked rising tension.

  On the 1st of March 1562, the Massacre of Vassy opened the French Wars of Religion. Dozens of Huguenots were killed, though some sources say hundreds, and about 200 were wounded. In that same year, some Huguenots smashed the tomb and remains of Saint Irenaeus, an early Church father who died in 202. On the 29th of September 1567, in an event called the Michelade, Huguenots turned on Catholics in return.

  Eight civil wars followed between 1562 and 1598, broken by spells of calm. After each failed peace, Huguenot trust in the throne shrank, the violence grew crueller, and Protestant demands grew larger. The conflict also became a dynastic feud between the Houses of Bourbon and Guise, both of which claimed a right to the French crown. The Valois monarchy usually backed the Catholic side but sometimes switched when it suited. Huguenot leadership came from Jeanne d'Albret, her son the future Henry IV, and the princes of Condé.

  The worst bloodshed came between the 24th of August and the 3rd of October 1572. On the 23rd and the 24th of August alone, between 2,000 and 3,000 Protestants died in Paris. Another 3,000 to 7,000 died in the provinces. Massacres struck Aix, Bordeaux, Bourges, Lyon, Meaux, Orléans, Rouen, Toulouse and Troyes. One source puts the toll in Paris alone at almost 25,000 by the 17th of September. An amnesty in 1573 pardoned the killers. Survivors fled to places such as the Kentish coast, and some went to Poland, where the Warsaw Confederation had confirmed religious tolerance.

  Peace finally came in 1598. Henry of Navarre, now Henry IV, had given up Protestantism to win the crown, and he issued the Edict of Nantes. It confirmed Roman Catholicism as the state religion while granting Protestants equality under the throne and a measure of religious and political freedom. It also discouraged new Protestant churches in Catholic-held regions. The Edict granted 66 villes de sûreté, protected cities. In Montpellier, the political institutions and the university passed into Huguenot hands.

  That protection did not last. A Catholic fanatic assassinated Henry IV in 1610, and Louis XIII ruled under the regency of his mother, Marie de' Medici, who was less tolerant. The Huguenots built independent political and military structures, courted foreign powers, and rose in three small civil wars between 1621 and 1629, mostly in the southwest. Royal troops besieged Montpellier in 1622, and its fortifications were torn down. A royal citadel went up, and Catholics took the university and consulate. By the Edict of Alès in 1629, Protestant rule was finished.

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• 5. Revocation and Flight

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  By the mid-1660s, only 856,000 Huguenots remained in France, and a plurality of them lived in rural areas. Enforcement of the Edict of Nantes had grown patchy, and daily life had become unbearable for many. Louis XIV, who inherited the throne in 1643, pressed harder. First he sent missionaries and set up a fund to pay converts. Then he imposed penalties, closed Huguenot schools, and shut Protestants out of favoured professions. Next came the dragonnades, in which soldiers occupied and looted Huguenot homes to force conversions.

  The Edict of Fontainebleau of 1685 revoked the Edict of Nantes and made Protestantism illegal. It banned Protestant services, required that children be raised Catholic, and forbade emigration. Huguenots who stayed were forcibly converted and labelled new converts. Louis claimed that his realm's Huguenots had dwindled to just 1,000 or 1,500 people. He exaggerated, but the dragonnades devastated the community. The decree proved disastrous for the Huguenots and costly for France. It sparked bloodshed and ruined commerce. Hundreds of thousands left illegally, among them intellectuals, doctors and business leaders.

  The refugees came from every class and trade, including lawyers, merchants and officers. Some left elderly parents behind, or children too young to travel. In the north, 40% of Protestants left, against 25% in the south. Border zones and areas where Protestants were few sent out more people, such as the Paris region, Normandy and the Atlantic coast. Farmers often stayed with their land, while craftsmen and merchants made up a large share of the departures. Property was confiscated, unless a relative who converted inherited it and paid the exile, which seldom happened. Some pretended to convert to sell up first. Others slipped away overnight.

  Most travelled by night, often in disguise, and relied on guides who knew the hidden routes. Most guides were honest, but some betrayed their clients. The risk was real. Guides could be sent to the galleys until 1687, and hanged afterward. Fugitives also paid high prices for printed guides that told them which cities to reach, which to avoid and whom to contact. Many sailed from Bordeaux, La Rochelle, the Île de Ré and Nantes on English and Dutch ships. Others walked hundreds of miles toward the Dutch Republic or Switzerland. Catholics as well as Protestants sometimes helped them, and whole networks escorted fugitives across France. Many arrived starving, in rags and penniless.

  We know these journeys largely through memoirs that families wrote years later, from safety, and that were published only recently. Among them are works by Jacques Fontaine and Isaac Dumont de Bostaquet. Jean Valat of Le Vigan wrote of the years from the dragonnades to exile, and Jean Migault of Poitou kept a journal of his family's misfortunes.

  Not everyone left. In 1702, the Camisards, Huguenots of the mountainous Massif Central, rioted against the Catholic Church, burning churches and killing clergy. French troops needed from 1702 until 1709 to hunt down every band.

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• 6. Refuge in Europe

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  In Delft, the court church of the Prinsenhof has held services in French for centuries and still does. The habit began with Louise de Coligny, daughter of the murdered Huguenot leader Gaspard de Coligny. She married William the Silent, who led the Dutch Calvinist revolt against Catholic Spain, and both spoke French daily. The Prinsenhof is one of 14 active Walloon churches. Huguenots had fought beside the Dutch in the early revolt from 1568, and Pierre L'Oyseleur, a Huguenot, wrote William's Apologie against the Spanish Inquisition.

  These ties made the Dutch Republic a prime destination. After France attacked in 1672, William III of Orange emerged as Louis XIV's strongest opponent and formed the League of Augsburg. After the revocation of 1685, the Republic received the largest group of refugees, an estimated 75,000 to 100,000 people. Its whole population was only about 2 million. Amsterdam and West Frisia granted full citizen rights in 1705, and the whole Republic followed in 1715. Pierre Bayle taught in Rotterdam and published his multi-volume Historical and Critical Dictionary there. Some families still celebrate their patron Saint Nicolas, close kin to the Dutch Sinterklaas feast.

  England had sheltered Huguenots since the mid-1500s. Kent hosted the first congregation around 1548. Mary I expelled them, but they returned to London in 1559 and Kent in 1561 under Elizabeth I. Edward VI gave them the western crypt of Canterbury Cathedral, and French Reformed services are still held there each Sunday at 3 pm in the former chantry chapel of the Black Prince. The French Protestant Church of London received a Royal Charter in 1550 and now stands at Soho Square.

  Around 1700, some 40,000 to 50,000 Huguenots settled in England, and in London they made up about 5% of the population. They founded the English silk industry, wove in Spitalfields, and tended market gardens at Battersea. Others became tutors and riding-school owners for the upper classes. Families named Tyzack, Henzey and Tittery carried glassmaking to Stourbridge. A popular claim that Huguenots shaped Bedfordshire lace is contentious. The only documented lacemakers were twenty-five widows in Dover.

  Ireland also welcomed them. Huguenot regiments fought for William of Orange in the Williamite War and were rewarded with land and titles. They worshipped in the Lady Chapel of St. Patrick's Cathedral for over 150 years. In Portarlington, where a French church dates to 1696, they were the majority of townspeople. Seán Lemass, Taoiseach from 1959 to 1966, and the author Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu both descended from Huguenots. In Wales, the village of Fleur de Lys in the upper Rhymney valley still bears a French name.

  In Germany, Elector Frederick William of Brandenburg issued the Edict of Potsdam in 1685, granting privileges and churches. About 20,000 Huguenots settled in Brandenburg-Prussia, out of nearly 50,000 across Germany. They filled two new regiments and built the Berlin neighbourhoods of Dorotheenstadt and Friedrichstadt. By 1700, one fifth of Berlin spoke French. Berlin's Huguenots kept French in church for over a century, then switched to German in protest at Napoleon's occupation in 1806-07. Their descendants include the poet Theodor Fontane, General Hermann von François and Lothar de Maizière, the last prime minister of East Germany.

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• 7. Across the Oceans

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  In 1555, a couple of ships carrying around 500 people reached Guanabara Bay, where Rio de Janeiro now stands. They aimed to found France Antarctique, a French colony in South America, and included a number of Huguenots. They settled on a small island and built Fort Coligny against Portuguese troops and local peoples. The Portuguese destroyed the fort in 1560. They threatened their Protestant prisoners with death unless they became Catholic. The prisoners wrote the Guanabara Confession of Faith to explain their beliefs, and the Portuguese executed them.

  Florida saw a similar fate. In 1562, the naval officer Jean Ribault founded Charlesfort on Parris Island, South Carolina, but the wars at home blocked any return voyage. His former lieutenant René Goulaine de Laudonnière built Fort Caroline in 1564, in what is now Jacksonville. In 1565, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés founded St. Augustine nearby, routed the French, and executed most of the Protestant captives.

  Later Huguenots had better luck. Barred from New France, Jessé de Forest led a group in 1624 to the Dutch colony of New Netherland. In 1628 they founded the congregation that became L'Eglise du Saint-Esprit in New York. Newcomers took land across from Manhattan and became the first Europeans in Brooklyn, in today's Bushwick. Others bought 6,100 acres from John Pell, with help from Jacob Leisler, and named the town New Rochelle after their old stronghold. The strong men there sometimes walked twenty-three miles to a Sunday service in New York. Farther upstate, New Paltz preserves a Huguenot street among the oldest in the United States.

  In 1700, several hundred Huguenots reached Virginia, where William III had promised land in Lower Norfolk County. Colonial authorities gave them the abandoned Monacan village of Manakin Town instead. Of 390 original settlers, only 148 remained for the naturalisation act of the 12th of May 1705. In Charleston, the Reverend Elie Prioleau of Pons arrived in 1685 and led the first Huguenot church in North America. Later Charleston Huguenots grew prosperous as slave owners on plantations along the Cooper, Ashley and Santee rivers. The Charleston church is the oldest continuously active Huguenot congregation in the United States, and each spring it holds an Annual French Service entirely in French. In all, about 4,000 Huguenots reached the Thirteen Colonies.

  Assimilation came quickly. In upstate New York they joined the Dutch Reformed community and spoke English by around 1800. In New York City they had switched from French by 1730. Their descendants include E. I. du Pont, Paul Revere, Henry Laurens and Francis Marion.

  South Africa tells a similar story. Maria de la Quellerie, wife of Jan van Riebeeck and daughter of a Walloon minister, reached the Cape on the 6th of April 1652. The first documented Huguenot settler was the wagonmaker François Vilion in 1671. An organised group sailed from the Netherlands on the 31st of December 1687, and most arrived in seven ships in 1688 and 1689. Many received land in what became Franschhoek, meaning French Corner. Within three generations they spoke Dutch at home. Surnames such as Joubert, Malan, du Toit and de Villiers survive, and the settlers' vineyard and brandy skills helped build the Cape wine industry. A monument at Franschhoek was inaugurated on the 7th of April 1948, and the Huguenot Memorial Museum opened in 1957.

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• 8. Long Memory

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  By the 1760s, Protestantism was no longer the faith of France's elite. Most believers were Cévennes peasants, and the faith was still illegal, though the law was seldom enforced. About 200,000 Lutherans lived in Alsace, shielded by the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648. Louis XV's reign ended with his death in 1774, by which time Calvinism had been all but eliminated from France. The Edict of Versailles, signed by Louis XVI in 1787 and often called the Edict of Tolerance, officially ended persecution. Two years later, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen gave Protestants equal rights.

  The state later invited exiles back. A law of the 15th of December 1790 declared any foreign-born descendant of a religious exile a French national, if they returned and swore the civic oath. An 1889 law kept the benefit but required a decree for each petitioner. Foreign descendants lost the automatic right to French citizenship in 1945.

  Prejudice lingered. In the 1920s and 1930s, the extreme-right Action Française movement attacked Huguenots, other Protestants, Jews and Freemasons. They saw these groups as backers of the Republic they hoped to overthrow. Yet during the Second World War, Huguenots in the village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in the Cévennes saved many Jews. Their pastor, André Trocmé, urged his congregation to hide Jewish refugees, who were hidden or helped out of Vichy France.

  To this day, France has about one million Protestants, some 2% of the population as counted in 2003. Many live in Alsace and the Cévennes and still call themselves Huguenots. In 2013, the Reformed Church of France merged with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in France to form the United Protestant Church of France. It is now the largest Protestant denomination in the country. Abroad, groups such as the Huguenot Society of Australia and the Huguenot Society of America keep the heritage alive.

  The exodus cost France dearly. Many emigrants held important places in society, and the kingdom did not fully recover for years. Barring non-Catholics from New France may help explain why that colony stayed far smaller than neighbouring British colonies. By the French and Indian War, a sizeable Huguenot-descended population lived in British America. A 2014 study in the American Economic Review linked Huguenot migration to Prussia with a boost in industrial productivity. The persecution also ruined Louis XIV's reputation abroad, especially in England. The two kingdoms, at peace until 1685, fought a series of wars from 1689 that some historians call the Second Hundred Years' War.

  In October 1985, three centuries after the revocation, President François Mitterrand announced a formal apology to Huguenot descendants around the world. France released a postage stamp reading Accueil des Huguenots, which means France is the home of the Huguenots.

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