The Enlightenment & Awakening Era · 1700-1710 · Cevennes
Camisard Prophetism
Part of another tradition's story
This group's story is told as part of another tradition here, rather than as its own entry.
About This Movement
After Louis XIV outlawed Protestantism in 1685, the Protestants of the Cévennes were left with no pastors, no churches and no legal existence. And out of that vacuum came prophecy. From 1688 ordinary people, many of them children and young women, began falling into trance and speaking in what they took to be the voice of the Spirit. The first widely reported was a shepherd girl, Isabeau Vincent, who preached in her sleep. In 1702 the movement turned to armed revolt. Bands of peasants known as Camisards fought royal troops through the mountains for two years, led by men like Jean Cavalier, a baker's apprentice of twenty, with prophets travelling alongside the fighters and directing them. The rising was broken by 1704 and the last resistance ended by 1710; some of the prophets escaped to London, where they caused a fresh sensation as the 'French Prophets'.
Sources
- Le Theatre sacre des Cevennes (London, 1707; ed. Misson; Eng. as A Cry from the Desart) - sworn depositions of exiled Camisard prophets (Marion, Fage, Cavalier) (primary) — The movement's own voices, in exile; the collection was assembled to defend the French Prophets in London, so it's an advocacy compilation.
- Memoirs: Jean Cavalier, Memoirs of the Wars of the Cevennes (1726); Abraham Mazel's and Elie Marion's memoires; the child- and women-prophets record (Isabeau Vincent, 1688, via pastoral and hostile observers) (primary) — Participant memoirs, written some years after the events; the material on Vincent comes through outside observers, not her own words.
- The persecution record: intendants' interrogation and trial records, abjuration registers, galley rolls (Tournier's Les galeres de France series), execution records (primary) — The movement's shape here is reconstructed from its persecutors' own records; testimony was given under torture and threat.
- W. Gregory Monahan, Let God Arise: The War and Rebellion of the Camisards (OUP, 2014), with Lionel Laborie, Enlightening Enthusiasm (Manchester, 2015) (secondary) — Laborie covers the movement's afterlife among exiles in London.
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 7, 'Continental Protestant Europe' (Lehmann), with the toleration chapter (reference) — The nearest chapter covering the Huguenot aftermath.