The History of French Revolution. John Stevens Cabot Abbott
was driven to madness, and to promise any thing to escape from his tormentors. By these means, it was boasted that in the district of Bordeaux, where there were one hundred and fifty thousand Protestants, one hundred and forty thousand were converted in a fortnight. The Duke of Noailles wrote to the court that in the district to which he had been sent with his dragoons there had been two hundred and forty thousand Protestants, but he thought that by the end of the month none could be left.
In the year 1598 Henry IV., by the Edict of Nantes, had granted freedom of conscience and of worship to the Protestants. Louis XIV. now issued a decree revoking this edict. The revocation, which was signed the 18th of October, 1685, states in the preamble that "since the better and the greater part of our subjects of the pretended reformed religion have embraced the Catholic faith, the maintenance of the Edict of Nantes remains superfluous." It then declares that no more exercise of the reformed worship is to be tolerated in the realm. All the Protestant pastors were to leave the kingdom within fifteen days, and were forbidden to exercise their office under pain of the galleys. Parents were forbidden to instruct their children in the reformed faith, and were enjoined to send them to the Catholic church to be baptized and to be instructed in the Catholic schools and catechism, under penalty of a fine of five hundred livres. The Protestant laity were prohibited from emigrating under pain of the galleys for the men, and imprisonment for life for the women.
Notwithstanding the penalty, vast numbers escaped from the kingdom. No vigilance could guard such extended frontiers. In one year after the revocation, Vauban wrote that France had lost one hundred thousand inhabitants, twelve thousand disciplined soldiers, six hundred officers, and her most flourishing manufactures. The Duke of St. Simon records that "a fourth part of the kingdom was perceptibly depopulated."
These crimes perpetrated against religion filled the land with infidelity. There were even Catholics of noble name and note, as Fénélon and Massillon, who energetically remonstrated. Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Mirabeau, not distinguishing between Christianity and the Papal Church, uttered cries of indignation which thrilled upon the ear of Europe and undermined the foundations of Christianity itself.
The edict of revocation was executed with the utmost rigor. The pastors in Paris were not allowed even the fifteen days which the edict granted, but were ordered to leave in forty-eight hours. Those pastors who had children over seven years of age had those children taken from them. Fathers and mothers, thus robbed of their children, in poverty and heart-broken, were driven into exile. "Old men of eighty or ninety years were seen gathering up the last remains of their life to undertake distant journeys, and more than one died before reaching the asylum where he was to rest his weary foot and drooping head."12
The court became alarmed by the magnitude of emigration. Guards were posted at the gates of towns, at the fords of rivers, on the bridges, on the highways, and at all points of departure upon the frontiers. Still the fugitives, hiding in caverns by day and traveling by night through by-paths, in great numbers eluded their foes. Every conceivable disguise was adopted, as of shepherds, pilgrims, hunters, valets, merchants. Women of rank—for there were not a few such among the Protestants, who had been accustomed to all the delicacies and indulgences of life—traveled on foot, exposed to hunger and storms, two or three hundred miles. Girls of sixteen, of all ranks in life, incurred the same hardships and perils. They disfigured their faces, wore coarse and ragged garments, and trundled wheel-barrows filled with manure, or carried heavy burdens, to elude suspicion. Some assumed the disguise of men or boys and took the office of servants; others feigned insanity or to be deaf and dumb. In these ways large numbers escaped to Rotterdam.13
Those near the sea-shore concealed themselves in ships among bales of merchandise, and in hogsheads stowed away among the freight. There were children who passed whole weeks in such lurking places without uttering a cry. Some desperately pushed out to sea in open boats, trusting to winds and waves to bear them to a place of safety. Thousands perished of cold, exposure, and starvation. Thousands were seized, loaded with chains, and dragged through the realm in derision and contempt, and were then condemned to pass the remainder of their days as galley-slaves. The galleys of Marseilles were crowded with these victims, among whom were many of the noblest men who have ever dwelt on earth. The prisons were crowded with women arrested in their flight and doomed to life-long captivity.
It is estimated that five hundred thousand found a refuge in foreign lands. Thirteen hundred passed through the city of Geneva in one week. England formed eleven regiments out of the refugees. One of the faubourgs of London was entirely peopled by these exiles. M. de Sismondi estimates that as many perished in the attempt to escape as escaped. A hundred thousand in the Province of Languedoc died prematurely, and of these ten thousand perished by fire, the gallows, or the wheel.14 We can not but sympathize with the indignation of Michelet as he exclaims:
"Let the Revolutionary Reign of Terror beware of comparing herself with the Inquisition. Let her never boast of having, in her two or three years, paid back to the old system what it did for us for six hundred years! The Inquisition would have good cause to laugh. What are the twelve thousand men guillotined of the one, to the millions of men butchered, hung, broken on the wheel—to that pyramid of burning stakes—to those masses of burnt flesh which the other piled up to heaven. The single inquisition of one of the provinces of Spain states, in an authentic monument, that in sixteen years it burned twenty thousand men!
"History will inform us that in her most ferocious and implacable moments the Revolution trembled at the thought of aggravating death, that she shortened the sufferings of victims, removed the hand of man, and invented a machine to abridge the pangs of death.
"And it will also inform us that the Church of the Middle Ages exhausted itself in inventions to augment suffering, to render it poignant, intense; that she found out exquisite arts of torture, ingenious means to contrive that, without dying, one might long taste of death; and that, being stopped in that path by inflexible Nature, who, at a certain degree of pain, mercifully grants death, she wept at not being able to make man suffer longer."15
Louis XIV. died in 1715. He did not allow any assembly of the states to be convened during his reign. Every body began to manifest discontent. The nobility were humbled and degraded, and hungered for more power. The people had become very restive. The humbler class of the clergy, sincere Christians and true friends of their parishioners, prayed earnestly for reform. The Jesuits alone united with the monarch and his mistresses to maintain despotic sway. The court was utterly corrupt; the king a shameless profligate. Every thing was bartered for money. Justice was unknown. The court reveled in boundless luxury, while the mass of the people were in a state almost of starvation. The burden had become intolerable.
The monarchy of France attained its zenith during the reign of Louis XIV. Immense standing armies overawed Europe and prevented revolt at home. Literature and art flourished, for the king was ambitious to embellish his reign with the works of men of genius. Great freedom of opinion and of utterance was allowed, for neither king nor courtiers appear to have had any more fear of a rising of the peasants than they had of a revolt of the sheep. Vast works were constructed, which the poor and the starving alone paid for. Still there were not a few who perceived that the hour of vengeance was at hand. One of the magistrates of Louis XIV. remarked, "The conflict is soon to arrive between those who pay and those whose only function is to receive." The Duke of Orleans, who was regent after the death of Louis XIV., said, "If I were a subject I would most certainly revolt. The people are good-natured fools to suffer so long."
Louis XIV. left the throne to his great-grandchild, a boy five years of age. The populace followed the hearse of the departed monarch with insults and derisive shouts to the tomb. The hoary despot, upon a dying bed, manifested some compunctions of conscience. He left to his successor the words:
"I have, against my inclination, imposed great burdens on my subjects; but have been compelled to do it by the long wars which I have been obliged to maintain. Love peace, and undertake no war, except