The Church of the Desert

When Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685, French Protestantism was simply abolished. Its churches were pulled down, its pastors expelled, its people forbidden to emigrate and required to attend Mass. Those who stayed called what they did next 'the Desert', after Israel's wilderness — they met at night in ravines, quarries and woods, several hundred at a time, with lookouts posted. In 1715 a twenty-year-old lay preacher named Antoine Court gathered a handful of others and set about rebuilding an actual church. He held a synod, restored ordained ministry and discipline, discouraged the prophesying that had led to the Camisard rising, and founded a seminary at Lausanne to train pastors who went back over the border knowing they could hang for it. The penalties were exactly that — pastors executed, men sent to the galleys for life, women shut up in towers, Marie Durand among them for thirty-eight years. Until the Edict of Versailles in 1787 finally gave Protestants a civil existence again.