The Reformation Era · 1559-1685 · France
The Huguenots
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About This Movement
France's Protestants organised themselves before any ruler told them to. In 1559 delegates met secretly in Paris to adopt a confession of faith and a book of discipline, creating a national church inside a Catholic kingdom. What followed was nearly a century of civil war and precarious tolerance — the St Bartholomew's Day massacres of August 1572, the Edict of Nantes in 1598 that gave them legal existence and fortified towns, then the slow erosion of that edict until Louis XIV revoked it in 1685. Rather than convert, several hundred thousand left, carrying their trades, their psalters and their memory of what it was to flee into England, the Dutch Republic, Prussia, Switzerland, South Africa and the American colonies.
Sources
- Gallican Confession (1559) and Discipline ecclesiastique, with the national synod acts (Quick, Synodicon in Gallia Reformata, 1692, English) (primary) — A persecuted national church's complete self-governing record.
- Jean Crespin, Histoire des martyrs (1554 and expansions) (primary) — An early example of the Reformed martyrology genre taking shape — documentary letters presented within a shaping, partisan frame. Available in full only in French.
- Memoirs and refugee narratives: Charlotte Arbaleste de Mornay's memoirs (Eng. trans. Crump, 1926); Jean Migault's Journal (dragonnades and flight) (primary) — A woman's massacre-survival account and a schoolmaster's family refugee narrative from the 1680s.
- The Marot-Beze Psalter in Huguenot practice - sung at the stake, in battle, in secret assemblies (primary) — Psalm-singing was the tradition's most ordinary act — and, sung at the stake or in secret, its most defiant.
- Barbara Diefendorf, Beneath the Cross (OUP, 1991), with Philip Benedict, Christ's Churches Purely Reformed (2002), chapters (secondary)
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 6, ch. 8 'The second wave of Protestant expansion' (Benedict), with ch. 15 (Gregory) (reference) — The chapter's author, Philip Benedict, is the tradition's leading historian.