Culture

Bonus: Giving a &*%$

Jeffrey Overstreet

“Christian film critics and readers weigh in on hearing no evil, and what makes language in film wrong, right, and R-rated.”

Christianity Today July 1, 2001
Working daily in downtown Seattle, I find myself exposed to harsh language all the time, whether in business meetings or walking through a gang of kids on the sidewalk. Later, as I accelerate through rush-hour traffic, I discover that I can use these words as well, lashing out with blunt verbal instruments in the safety of my enclosed vehicle. What is the cause of my stumbling? Have I seen too many movies? Or was I wrong just to leave the house? It is very difficult to be in the world without being somewhat of the world. That is the daily wrestling match for the Christian. And we all fall short.

But cussing in the movies is a different problem. In part one of this series, professional critics and readers discussed cinematic nudity. Some avoid even being confronted with it. Others turn away. Still others don’t think twice about it. Many struggle somewhere in between. Does bad language in film carry similar cautions and prohibitions?

Critics on Cussing

Steve Lansingh (The Film Forum) writes, “To demand from our movies and from our unsaved friends that they not curse is to destroy the Gospel message: We preach that Jesus can transform the soul, but we expect people to reform themselves before they even approach us. We should instead hold ourselves to Paul’s exhortation to ‘let no unwholesome talk come out of your mouths,’ and by example show that we have no reason to cuss or offend; neither need we engage in hateful denouncements, idle chatter, and backstabbing gossip, which unfortunately have been blights on the church throughout history.”

Rich Kennedy (Lansingh’s colleague at The Film Forum) also sees many Christians walling themselves out of their mission field. “To avoid profanity and vulgarity is to almost universally cut yourself off from the world around you. You give yourself some small respite from what you believe to be dishonoring to God, but you shut yourself off from what your neighbor is trying to say. You demand that your neighbor talk to you only in a way that you deem acceptable and … he may refrain from sharing what is on his mind sometimes because of what he might think will offend you. Just as believers are starting to engage and thrive in the world outside ‘Sunday morning,’ whether in academia or popular culture, evangelicals are trying to craft … a ‘pure’ subculture … expecting outsiders to come to them on their terms. … From an aesthetic point of view, the avoidance of profanity and nudity for their own sakes is to cut yourself off from sources of truth, beauty, profundity, and poignant cries for help. This is just as bad as the embrace of profanity and vulgarity indiscriminately.”

Kennedy finds two examples of profound but profanity-laced art in the works of Richard Pryor. “Pryor’s concert films of the late ’70s and early ’80s are priceless performances of unique insight and truth … breathtaking examples of masterful storytelling. They are redolent of casual profanity and vulgar topics. To edit or censor these films would eviscerate them. They communicated profound truth. … They say much about Pryor himself and his peculiar fragility at the time. The monologues about going to Africa for the first time and of how Jim Brown rescued him from his addictions still bring tears to my eyes upon recall after 20 years, for their poignancy even as they are funny.”

Matthew Prins (The Christian Century) has not found cussing to be a very contagious disease for discerning adults. “I have a bit of a needle phobia. I hate getting blood taken, and I hate shots; if either of these are necessary, I get lightheaded. [If] I see someone taking intravenous drugs on-screen … am I tempted? Do I want to start shooting up cocaine? I have no reason to swear, I don’t foresee ever wanting to swear, and seeing it flickering 20 feet tall isn’t going to change that.” When he considers the example he sets for others, he adds a condition: “If I had a child, I’d have to rethink this all.”

Michael Elliott (Movie Parables) feels we should be more concerned about the attitude that drives the language. “Words are simply a shell. They are symbols … tools used to communicate thoughts, ideas, concepts, images. A person can be offensive, hurtful, or profane and never use a ‘dirty’ word. And so-called ‘dirty’ words can be (and often are) delivered so haphazardly or thoughtlessly that they carry little to no message and are therefore innocuous. As a writer, I find that because ‘profanity’ is so inexact a form of communication, it is undesirable if only for the reason that there are better and clearer ways to send the messages I wish to convey. It would be nice if today’s screenwriters would take a similar view.” He finds, usually, that cussing indicates “a lazy, undisciplined or undereducated individual.”

Chattaway Consults Shakespeare, Scripture

Peter T. Chattaway (B.C. Christian News, Books & Culture) can name works, popular, classical, and even Christian, in which the vernacular plays an important part. At the movies, he highlights When Harry Met Sally: “The f-word is used four times, precisely. Twice, it is in the scene where Billy Crystal’s character tells his best friend … that his wife is leaving him; it underscores the blunt emotional pain he’s going through. If that film had been filled with that kind of language, the impact of those scenes would have been heavily, heavily diluted. But it wasn’t.” On the other hand, Chattaway argues, it isn’t hard to find examples of profanity abuse. Actors’ tongues in The Score shoot off more often than the guns of Saving Private Ryan.

If we abandon cuss-peppered works, Chattaway reminds us, we must turn our backs on Shakespeare for all of the “coarse humor that exists in his plays. Much of it goes undetected nowadays, but if people are going to lay down the law with regard to four-letter words (or words that sound like four-letter words), they might want to take a closer look at the Bard and some of his better-known works.” He adds that those who criticize Harry Potter‘s occasional curse should revisit Narnia and Middle Earth. In The Chronicles of Narnia, “The magician in The Magician’s Nephew can’t help referring to the White Witch as a ‘dem fine woman,’ and in the first chapter of The Silver Chair, Jill says ‘Dam’ good of you’ to Eustace. Does spelling it ‘dam’ instead of ‘damn’ make it okay, somehow?”

Then Chattaway goes one step farther. Shall we censor Scripture?

It all depends on your translation, of course. I remember [a professor] leading a course in Philippians, and talking about a vulgar term used by Paul [that] the New International Version had covered up with the word ‘rubbish‘; the King James Version’s ‘dung‘ was a wee bit more accurate, he said. Essentially … Paul was saying his accomplishments as a natural-born Jew and a law-abiding Pharisee weren’t worth s***. Thomas Cahill, in Desire of the Everlasting Hills, translates one of Jesus’ sayings, from Mark 7:18-19, as: ‘Don’t you see that nothing that enters a man from the outside can make him ‘unclean,’ since it doesn’t go into his heart but into his bowels and then passes out into the s***hole?’ Cahill says in a footnote that the word aphedron is commonly translated privy or sewer but in actuality it was Macedonian slang that would have sounded barbarous to Greek ears; the NIV, tellingly, omits the word altogether and translates this phrase ‘out of his body.’ Of course, Jesus probably spoke in Aramaic, not Greek, so what we have is a translation of what Jesus said. But it’s still there in the Bible.

But wait, there’s more. “In Saint Paul Returns to the Movies: Triumph over Shame, New Testament scholar Robert Jewett discusses how Paul’s use of the words we translate as ‘circumcised’ and ‘uncircumcised,’ which come up during the circumcision debates in the early church, parallels our modern use of words like ‘d***head.’ He also mentions ‘the bits in the Bible where people use such words abusively—when Saul calls Jonathan a ‘son of a perverse and rebellious woman‘ (NIV), ‘son of a bitch’ (early Living Bible), ‘fool’ (later Living Bible), and ‘stupid son of a whore’ (NLT), for example.”

So are we to conclude that cursing should go unchecked, if it can be found in such integral works? Chattaway concludes, “We definitely aren’t supposed to emulate that sort of thing, but apparently it’s okay to read, and be aware of, stories in which people do talk like that. As always, people have to set their own limits, and what you cannot do in faith becomes sin for you, as per Romans 14. I think we always have to listen to what people are really saying—the meaning behind the words—rather than to focus on the words themselves and make a big deal of those.”

Other scriptures were mentioned in these critics’ responses regarding what we hear. Rich Kennedy reminds us of Romans 14:4, which cautions us not to judge others for their behavior, and thus, their language. As for watching one’s own mouth, Michael Elliott cites several Scriptures that advise him on the matter: Titus 2:7-8, which addresses how one should speak; Matthew 12:36, where the Lord promises to hold us accountable for our words; and Ephesians 4:29, which again advises us to speak cleanly.

Strong Language from Readers

Again, these questions provoked an e-mail flood. What follows is only a sampling. Some find movie cursing so offensive as to recommend running at the first sign of it. Sean Carlson writes, “What’s sad is the number of Christians that do tolerate the swearing and support Hollywood by going to see their outpouring of trash. What you watch and listen to has an impact on your relationship with God. Where sin is, God cannot be! Unless it is a Christian film or rated G, I do not care to see it.” Beth Nealon has strong reservations about exposure to profanity, but she does distinguish between the act of swearing and the referencing of a cuss word, as evidenced in her own response: “An excess of foul language offends me deeply, especially the use of God’s names, and the F-word. I don’t bristle so much at the use of ‘hell’ or ‘damn,’ although I don’t like my children to hear them used regularly. My main objection to swearing is that it shows a lack of ability of the speaker (i.e., the writer) to express himself with meaningful words … I am simply disgusted at the lack of imagination or intellect revealed.”

Ryan Dobbs calls for caution and discernment rather than total avoidance. “Our minds and consciences can be seared by the oversaturation of inappropriate material that we might consume. If hearing profanity—or seeing nudity, for that matter—causes you to stumble in your walk as a Christian, I believe that it would be time for you to reevaluate what you are allowing yourself to watch and to hear.” Dobbs is also concerned about the message such moviegoing sends to others. “If going to an R-rated movie … causes another person to stumble in their walk with the Lord, or if it damages our awesome duty to be ambassadors for Christ to the lost of the world, then we should make it our priority to distance ourselves from such activities. Our responsibility to Jesus Christ is much more important than our enjoyment of a good movie.” Dobbs cites James 3:9-12 and Colossians 3:17as helps.

Doug Deweese answers with more tough questions: “When Jesus ate with sinners, did he lay the rules out about what could not go on in his presence? I think not. Do you think the fishermen Jesus hung out with did not have a little salty language? What kind of names did Matthew have to endure? And when Paul got run out on a rail, did they put it nicely? Sometimes we Christians would rather act like Pharisees and separate ourselves from those we think probably aren’t [Christians]. Profanity is a very real part of life. If we truly want to know what’s happening in the world so we can respond appropriately, movies are probably the best places to hear the language of the world because it is fictional and does not have to become a part of us.” He adds, though, “Ratings ought to be more strict … on language.”

Others think it important to pay attention to our culture, and that art will reflect the flaws and the failures of that culture. Andrew Zahn agrees that movies tend to overdo it. “Films for adults, based on the premise of reflecting real people in situations we can relate to, would naturally contain profanity … to maintain the realism. Profanity in films of this type can be overdone (and often is), but this is more a matter of bad taste and unimaginative scriptwriting than morality. In movies, I expect sinners to sin, and I expect pagans to act like pagans.” Jason Cusick agrees: “As in the case of nudity, using questionable content needs to be character-driven. If in a movie I see a total pagan get mad, I expect him to cuss and find him less than believable when he doesn’t. The Bible does say not to let unwholesome words come from your mouth, and that obscenity and coarse joking should not have place with us (Ephesians 4:29, 5:4), but I take non-Christians at face value.” He has a further challenge for believers: “I think one main issue for us is choosing our battles with regard to engaging the culture. If we major in censoring people for cussing, we will never hear what they are thinking or feeling, because we will refuse to listen to the language they are speaking.” Michael Herman, who runs ChristianityToday.com’s Music channel, shares this view: “The world uses this language, and the movies we watch at the theaters are made by people in this world, portraying people in this world. Profanity will be in the majority of films, to different levels.”

Herman adds that context is crucial: “A ‘Little House on the Prairie’ setting wouldn’t call for that language to present authenticity. But a comedy about life in the city most likely would.” Likewise, Tim Plett says the setting might dictate the tone of the language: “There are times when the cursing simply overwhelms any positive value of a movie. I simply find no entertainment value in a character with a potty mouth. Other times it seems thoroughly ‘in character.’ In the film In the Name of the Father, for instance, the characters were foul-mouthed, but it seemed in keeping with who they were.” (Note: The foul-mouthed characters were primarily incarcerated convicts of all shapes, sizes, and sins, which further accentuated the innocence and cleaner speech of the imprisoned hero.) Tim Frankovich finds foul language in some contexts quite inappropriate … and inaccurate: “What bothers me the most is not the films set in contemporary contexts, but the films set in the past or future that are filled with profanity. Yes, people cursed in the past, but not to [that] extent. When Apollo 13 came out, and the astronauts were interviewed around here (I live around the corner from NASA), they all praised the film for its accuracy, etc., except for one point: ‘We didn’t talk like that. We didn’t use words like that back then.'”

Conclusions on Cursing?

Clearly, as with nudity, the answers don’t come easy. There’s no mistake—it grieves God when someone uses his name in vain, or uses idle words, and it should grieve us as well. But is it Christlike to shut the door and turn away from the sin of the world? We are to take up our cross daily. Feeling Christ’s grief is part of sharing Christ’s glory; the more we become like him, the more the sins of others—and moreso, our own—should sting. The early church was a place to which sinners ran, where they found acceptance, welcome, and encouragement. Like missionaries spreading our arms to a foreign culture, we must learn to understand the language, however difficult or flawed it might be, and then we must serve in humility, aware that there is sin in own language, our own hearts, no matter how many four-letter words we ever say. Close the doors, ignore the culture’s art and expression, and how will we know their feelings, their hurts, their specific needs?

I also find it interesting that bad language, sexual impropriety, and violence onscreen are so unbearable to so many, and yet other sins such as lying, inappropriate anger, pride, and selfishness can be found in the tamest of children’s stories, right down to Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse. A Christmas Carol turns loose a Scrooge who demonstrates all kinds of evil right in front of our eyes. Surely his selfishness is exaggerated and hardly tempting (or is it?), but the more we draw near to God, the less tempting all the rest of these should become.

“Dirty words” get used as blunt instruments, with little thought to what they actually mean. They do mean something. There is a time and a place for them to be carefully employed, like guns, for a precise objective. The saints have indeed used harsh language, but if they did so correctly, they were actually “speaking the truth in love.” Otherwise, such bad-mouthing reveals weakness, flaws, dangerous haste (which, in the course of a story, might be revelatory of a character’s personality). Sharp words used out of place are tools of violence.

Which brings us to part three of our series.

Next week, we will raise questions about violence in the movies. The silver screen is showing us more violence all the time, even inventing new varieties. When should we take notice, and when should we shut our eyes? When is the cinema exposing violence, and when is it committing violence?

Copyright © 2001 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

History

Order in the Church

Raymond A. Mentzer

Reforming doctrine was just the beginning of a vigorous campaign to restructure Christian life—at church, at home, and in each believer’s heart.

On Friday morning, March 31, 1542, the wife of sheath-maker Louis Pyaget appeared before the Geneva consistory to make an account of her faith. According to records, she “[s]aid she has a daughter who knows her faith better than she, and she did not know it except in Latin as in former times, and in the French language she could not say her creed; in Latin in a general way. And she does not know it in another language and does not understand it otherwise, and as for the sermons she has not frequented them.”

What was the meaning of the Reformation for ordinary, largely illiterate men and women in France and nearby city-states such as Geneva? How do we interpret the plight of a distraught woman who, like Madame Pyaget, was raised Catholic and admitted that she was unable to “comprehend anything, no matter how much they instructed her” in the new religion and its practices? In what ways did the Protestant innovations seek to transform her daily life?

The Huguenots restructured ritual and ecclesiastical institutions in order to teach the essentials of Christian doctrine and nurture proper conduct. While people’s receptivity varied, church leaders tenaciously pursued a broad reform of everyday behavior and lifestyle, which, in their minds, completed the reform of theology.

Instruction and rebuke

The Reformed churches labored to convey the truths of Christianity primarily through sermon services and catechism lessons. The congregation gathered each week for the Sunday morning sermon, focusing on God’s truth as contained in Scripture and Scripture alone.

Children and some parents also assisted at afternoon catechism sermons, which were typically based on John Calvin’s published catechism. Adults attended additional catechism lessons in the days leading up to each of the four annual celebrations of the Lord’s Supper—at Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, and in early September.

Church officials expected congregants to memorize the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostles’ Creed. Failure to partake of the liturgy or the inability to recite one’s prayers drew immediate attention from the consistory.

When Jehan de Carro stumbled over the prayer and confession before the Geneva consistory in December 1542, he was advised “that he should come to instruction to know whether he will be given Communion, and before he comes to Communion he should come here Thursday and go to the catechism on Sundays and frequent the sermons; otherwise he will be rigorously punished.”

Every local Reformed church possessed a consistory. It was a supervisory body, which, depending upon the size of the congregation, had one or more pastors, between a half dozen and a dozen elders, and several deacons.

The lay elders and deacons gathered with the pastor according to an established schedule, usually once a week in urban centers, every other week or less in rural areas. With the pastor serving as moderator, they conferred on details of church administration, oversaw the distribution of aid to the poor, and discussed various breaches of Christian conduct that had come to their attention.

The elders, in particular, shouldered heavy responsibility for monitoring proper behavior. They watched over the congregation, ensuring that the faithful lived and worshiped according to acceptable religious and moral standards. Larger churches usually divided the town into administrative districts and assigned an elder to each.

The elders regularly reported to the consistory on the various misdeeds—absence from services, Sabbath breach, quarrels, fornication, dancing, playing games, and the like—that had taken place within their assigned neighborhoods since the group’s previous meeting. They also kept “dishonor roles,” listing those whose failings were especially grievous or who balked when ordered to perform public repentance. The elders were expected to visit every family within their districts on an annual basis.

Toward a godly society

The behavioral goals to which Reformed churches and their consistories aspired reveal, in important ways, the Huguenots’ monumental attempt to eradicate what they considered a corrupt and superstitious medieval culture, instituting a godly society in its place. In everything, the Reformed churches strove to observe biblical guidance, especially the Ten Commandments.

Worship followed an established schedule and acquired an educational character. The faithful sat quietly in pews (a recent introduction) and listened attentively. No longer could people wander about, as they had at some medieval services.

The church further forbade the conduct of business on Sunday. The consistory chastised a farmer, for example, for hauling grain on the Sabbath and others for conducting business in their shops.

Contamination by contact with an ungodly world, and with Catholics, concerned the reformers deeply. Sorcerers and fortune-tellers, a common feature of that society, were deemed threatening and summarily chased from Huguenot towns and villages. Persons who traveled to Catholic cities were often questioned when they returned. The mere appearance of a rosary in Geneva in May 1542 caused a number of women to be summoned by the consistory, which did not drop the matter until the rosary was found and confiscated.

The Huguenots’ desire to eliminate Catholic excesses led, for example, to a furious offensive against dancing. Officials punished more people for dancing than for sexual immorality. Why? Not only did dancing entail provocative gestures and immodest ditties, but it was often associated with Catholic, and hence “idolatrous,” religious customs such as votive festivals.

Other activities aroused condemnation both for their unhealthy effects on individuals and for the possibility that their pursuit would bring scandal on the Reformed church. Blasphemy and other offensive language obviously had no place in Huguenot communities. Neither did risqué dress, extravagant makeup, ornate hairdos, dice and cards, drink, or idle distractions such as tennis and bowling. Even mildly athletic games such as quoits or skittle smacked of indolence, while playing cards and throwing dice could involve wagering and thus constituted avarice.

“Every family a church”

Huguenots focused reform efforts on family life as well. “Every family of the pious ought to be a Church,” Calvin said, and his followers took him seriously. Everything from sexual comportment and marriage contracts to childrearing and domestic squabbles came under the consistory’s scrutiny.

Couples had to honor betrothal vows, publish marital banns (announcements of the intent to marry), refrain from marrying close relatives, and obtain parental permission to wed. Men and women living together without benefit of holy matrimony were told to marry immediately.

Consistories invariably summoned and punished women who became pregnant out of wedlock—and, if known, their partners. Still, individuals accused of sexual misconduct tended to be women, and the slightest hint of sexual impropriety led to consistorial investigation. An unmarried washerwoman named Claudaz was imprisoned in Geneva because she was accused of being pregnant; she was freed only after appearing before the consistory three times to protest that she had been falsely accused.

Though less obvious than sexual misconduct, discord within families also attracted the church’s watchful gaze. Consistories promptly investigated reports of married couples living apart or fighting, and they frequently exhorted such couples to “live together in peace as they promised God in front of the church, and to frequent the sermons.”

Intergenerational conflicts, too, aroused authorities’ attention, for Calvin’s statement, “Piety toward parents is the mother of all virtues,” applied equally to young and adult children. The consistory of one village scolded a married woman for her “irreverent” treatment of her father. Several men at another town were told on various occasions to obey and honor their mothers and to cease “annoying” them.

An oasis of peace

Above all, the Huguenot community was determined to reduce strife and aggression, simultaneously promoting the settlement of disputes and fostering public peace. Pastors, elders, and deacons believed it their duty to promote Christian harmony.

Quarrels, both verbal squabbles and physical brawls, were frequent. Men called one another thief and cheat, cowardly and dumb. They would raise fists, throw stones, brandish sticks and swords, and draw pistols.

Although quarreling was largely a male offense, women fought too. Female insults concentrated on a woman’s sexual virtue. A widow slandered her neighbor, intimating that the woman had several pregnancies prior to her marriage.

Once an old man caught his daughter in the act of robbing his house. When he resisted, she sent him to the floor with a quick punch.

Reformed pastors and elders went to great lengths to settle these animosities. The consistory demanded solemn promises that the combatants would forget past differences and live henceforth in peace and friendship.

Feuding parties “extended the hand of friendship” and promised to live amicably. Disputants were told to “forget the past,” reconcile and shake hands. Mediating conflict always ranked highly among the Huguenots’ objectives.

It is somewhat difficult to reconcile this emphasis with the fact that the Huguenots engaged in a protracted, bloody series of wars with their Catholic neighbors. Religious leaders took note of the violence, of course, but they tended to characterize the conflict as defensive—the safeguard of the one true religion from its diabolical opponents.

Still, many Huguenots, especially those from the ranks of the nobility, must have appeared too enthusiastic in their pursuit of war, though the church refrained from chastising them explicitly.

From ideals to reality

The success of this effort to reform society is difficult to judge. It certainly had plenty of detractors.

A law clerk complained that if he wanted “auricular confession” he would convert to Catholicism. A student challenged the consistory to explain by what “Scriptural authority” it presumed to interrogate him, while a notary labeled the entire system no more than a “human invention.”

Apparently they had heeded their pastors’ counsel to read Holy Writ and were astonished to find no mention of the consistory.

Most people, however, complied and reoriented their lives. At the very least, most members of the French Reformed churches attended services regularly, knew their catechism, and shared in the Lord’s Supper four times a year—up from their medieval ancestors’ once-yearly participation.

Although measuring changes in demeanor is tricky, anecdotal evidence offers a few clues. A woman could not forgive a cobbler for “gravely offending and injuring” her. Unable to “soften her heart,” she hesitated to participate in the Lord’s Supper because of a “heavy conscience.”

A man absented himself “voluntarily” due to his acrimonious litigation with another member of the congregation. Others refrained because of ongoing quarrels and rancorous squabbles with business associates, neighbors, and relatives.

Though faults remained, these believers had internalized Reformed religious ideals and applied them to their daily lives. The Reformation touched them in profound and enduring ways.

Raymond A. Mentzer is Daniel J. Krumm Family Professor in Reformation Studies in the School of Religion at the University of Iowa.

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History magazine. Click here for reprint information on Christian History.

History

The French Wars of Religion: Christian History Timeline

CH Timeline

In this series

1555 Peace of Augsburg in Germany allows rulers to choose religion for their region

1555 First Protestant Church in Paris organized in a home

1556 Philip II named king of Spain

1558 Elizabeth I becomes queen of England

1559 First national synod of Reformed Churches of France

1559 John Calvin made a citizen of Geneva

1560 Protestant Conspiracy of Amboise to kidnap king of France fails

1561 Anti-Protestant edict begins to drive refugees from France

1562-1563 First War

1562 Forces of Duke of Guise massacre Protestants at Vassy

1563 Treaty of Amboise ends First War

1563 Council of Trent closes

1564 Calvin dies

1567-1568 Second War

1568-1570 Third War

1568 Treaty of Longjumeau ends Second War

1569 Peace of St. Germain ends Third War

1572-1573 Fourth War

1572 St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre

1574 Truce ends Fourth War

1574 Charles IX (right) dies; Henri III (left) becomes king of France

1576 Fifth War

1576 Pro-Protestant Peace of Monsieur signed

1576 Militant Catholic League forms

1577 Sixth War

1577 Sixth War ended by slightly restrictive Peace of Bergerac

1580 Seventh War

1580 Treaty of Nerac and Peace of Fleix end Seventh War

1584 Duke of Anjou dies; Henri of Navarre becomes heir to French throne

1588 Henri III forced to surrender to Guises and Catholic League

1588 English navy defeats Spanish Armada

1589 Henri III stabbed, names Henri of Navarre his successor

1589 Catherine de Médicis dies

1593 Henri IV converts to Catholicism

1598 Edict of Nantes returns civil and religious freedom to Protestants

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History magazine. Click here for reprint information on Christian History.

History

Huguenots and the Wars of Religion: The Gallery – The Inner Circle

Emily Alger and Matt Donnelly

Huguenot intrigues swirled around a handful of key figures.

In this series

Catherine de Médicis

1519-1589“Madame la Serpente”

In 1575 a heavily slanted piece of propaganda called the “Marvellous discourse on the life, actions and misconduct of Catherine de Médicis, queen mother” disparaged France’s acting regent as “a woman, a foreigner, and hated by everyone.” The first two charges were undeniably true, and she had double-crossed enough people to make the third nearly true as well.

Catherine became queen of France by family connections and chance. A member of the ruling Médicis family of Florence, she was betrothed at age 12 to the prince who would later become France’s King Henri II. France sought the match not because Catherine had money or beauty (she was described as being small and thin, having indelicate features and bulging eyes, a Médicis trait), but because of her distant relation to Pope Clement VII.

She married in 1533, at age 14, then failed to bear children for the next 10 years. The entire court wished Henri to divorce her, but he chose instead to take a mistress, Diane of Poitiers. Upset by the affair but powerless to do anything about it, Catherine turned to astrologers and magicians in a frantic quest to bear a child. In 1544 she finally delivered a future king, Francis. She eventually bore seven other children, two of whom would also rule France in turn. Still, Henri rejected her.

When she could not win Henri’s love, Catherine befriended Marguerite of Navarre, Henri’s aunt. Marguerite was a great friend of John Calvin and supported the Protestants with money and position. According to Protestant writers, Marguerite persuaded Catherine to begin reading her Bible. An archbishop was so horrified that he confiscated the Bible, likening Catherine’s behavior to eating from the forbidden Tree of Knowledge.

Catherine’s true religious views are unknown. Raised a Catholic, at times she seemed to sympathize with the Huguenots, but it is unclear whether she favored their doctrine or simply wished to keep peace in her kingdom. Her political aspirations certainly outweighed her piety. A Catholic official, Nuncio Frangipani, once wrote, “This queen no more believes in God than does any member of her suite.”

Pretence or not, her sympathy for the Huguenots abruptly ceased while her son Charles IX was king. During his reign, the Huguenot leader Gaspard de Coligny became good friends with Charles and gained influence over him. Fearing for her position, Catherine conspired against the Huguenots with Henri, duke of Guise, the Catholic leader. After convincing a reluctant Charles to go along with her plans, she arranged to have the French Protestants—including her erstwhile friend Coligny—massacred while they were in Paris to attend her daughter Marguerite’s wedding.

In the long view, the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre backfired, because instead of eradicating the Huguenot faction, it plunged France into a series of bloody conflicts that would destroy the Valois-Médicis line. Catherine repeatedly switched confessional loyalties and attempted to forge ties with both Protestant and Catholic countries, but no one trusted her (the Spanish called her “Madame la Serpente”). Both sides reviled her, producing massive quantities of libelous propaganda. Catherine amused herself by reading the articles and correcting them.

At age 70, Catherine died an embittered woman. Supposedly her last words were, “Blood! Blood! There is a river of blood! … The devils are after me! They are dragging me down to hell!”

Emily Alger is a freelance writer and contributing editor for Suite101.com’s Christian Books section.

Gaspard de Coligny

1519-1572A friend betrayed

Those who knew Gaspard de Coligny said he was a simple man who frequently chewed on toothpicks. Born into the powerful Montmorency family in 1519, he entered the military and distinguished himself in battle against the Protestants, earning the title of admiral in 1552. King Henri II (Catherine’s husband) appreciated Coligny, and the two became close friends and hunting companions.

Coligny converted to Protestantism in the 1550s through a study of the Bible and the works of John Calvin and Martin Luther, but he didn’t publicly declare his support for the Reformation until after Henri II died, in a jousting accident, in 1559. As a tireless crusader for religious freedom in France, Coligny became a hero and a leader of the Huguenots.

After the king’s death, Catherine’s young sons began to assume the throne in succession, and she became the real power in the land. In the early 1560s, as de facto ruler of France, she enthusiastically supported Coligny’s plans for Huguenot journeys to the New World to found Protestant colonies there. She also initially supported Coligny’s attempts to broker a peace between Catholics and Protestants.

But fearing that Coligny’s friendship with her son King Charles IX (1560-1574) was undermining her influence, and because Coligny was agitating for France to go to war with Spain over Holland, she betrayed Coligny. On August 22, 1572, Coligny, head of the Huguenot armies, barely survived a bullet fired by an assassin, who was almost certainly hired by Catherine and members of the Guise family.

After the attempt on Coligny’s life, Huguenot leaders recommended that he leave Paris immediately, but he refused. He trusted the young king, who frequently referred to Coligny as “my father.” Little did he know that Catherine was at that hour successful in convincing her son that Coligny was plotting to overthrow the government. Charles is reported to have said to her, “Well, then kill them all, that no man be left to reproach me.” Thus the fate of the Huguenots was sealed.

On the night of August 24, 1572, the palace bell rang, which was Catherine’s signal for the slaughter of Huguenots to begin. Coligny was one of the first to die.

A group of assassins broke into his home, and Besme, a German mercenary, stabbed Coligny through the stomach with a sword, leaving him for dead. The leader of the assassins, Henri of Guise, called out, “Besme! is it done?” In response, Coligny was thrown out the window, where he died at Guise’s feet.

Matt Donnelly is a freelance writer living in Minnesota.

Henri of Navarre

1553-1610Strong leader, flexible faith

As the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre raged outside the Louvre, young Henri of Navarre stood before the enraged King Charles IX, who shouted, “La mort ou la Messe”—death or conversion to Catholicism. Henri chose the latter.

Henri might have been expected to show more resolve. His mother, Jeanne d’Albrêt, had passionately supported the Protestant cause. Several victims of the massacre had been Henri’s wedding guests days earlier. And conversion was only a partial solution—Henri saved his life, but he would spend the next three years as a prisoner of royal counselors.

Henri did not seem to mind. A few weeks after his conversion, he played tennis with the Duke of Guise, a driving force behind the massacre.

Henri’s marriage to the king’s sister Marguerite—a symbolic union of Protestantism and Catholicism—had been intended to foster peace during the devastating Wars of Religion. Instead, it became the unhappy context of the infamous massacre and a public demonstration of Henri’s seemingly pliable convictions.

“Those who follow their conscience are of my religion,” Henri said. Of course, he also said, “Religion is not changed as easily as a shirt.”

When Henri finally decided to escape his royal captivity, his skills as a hunter proved useful. One night he disappeared into a thick forest on horseback. He eventually made it all the way to his small southern border state of Navarre, where he quickly converted back to Protestantism.

He left behind a loveless arranged marriage, strained by scandal as well as different temperaments and faiths. Both he and Marguerite were involved in numerous infidelities, though they had little passion for each other and never produced an heir. Shortly after the union, “We never slept nor spoke with each other any more,” Marguerite reported. The marriage was later annulled.

In normal circumstances, Henri never would have become king. His cousin Charles IX had two healthy brothers, Henri and Hercule (called François), whose claim was stronger than his. Yet upon seeing Henri as a boy, Catherine’s court prophet Nostradamus had inexplicably predicted that he would reign over all of France.

In 1584 François died. Henri III, who had become king when Charles died 10 years earlier, declared Henri of Navarre the heir presumptive. French Catholics, 90 percent of the country’s population, reacted with outrage and disbelief. How could the Church tolerate a Protestant king, when the job would require him to act as the national protector of Catholicism and to eradicate heresy? Pope Sixtus V excommunicated the heretic, and after the assassination of Henri III in 1589, the Catholic League supported rivals to the throne.

The wars that followed demonstrated that Henri of Navarre, now Henri IV, was made of sterner stuff than his effeminate predecessor, who at his coronation had shrieked that the crown was hurting his head. Henri IV not only commanded armies, but he fought alongside them in hundreds of battles and sieges, leading charges and suffering numerous wounds along the way.

Henri’s military prowess, though, took him only so far. Out of money as his army laid siege to Paris in 1593, he faced a crisis. While he might eventually capture the city, he doubted that any military victory would enable him to capture the hearts of the overwhelmingly Catholic French. Only conversion would bring him the crown.

Some of Henri’s advisers argued that abjuring Protestantism would betray his people and all they had suffered. But the staunchly Protestant Duke of Sully spoke for many war-weary Huguenots when he reportedly counseled, “Paris is well worth a Mass.”

Although Henri’s final conversion disappointed some and brought accusations of hypocrisy from others, it ended the Wars of Religion and made national restoration possible. Moderate elements of society applauded, and one periodical declared, “There is no peace so unjust that it is not worth more than the most just war.”

In spite of his confessional wavering, Henri took his beliefs seriously. He astonished his Catholic instructors with his theological knowledge, then unnerved them by tearfully asserting that they must make certain of his salvation, for he was trusting them with his immortal soul. However, he disparaged some Catholic doctrines as “rubbish which he was quite sure that the majority of them did not believe.”

Politically, Henri proved to be an astute leader. In one of his first acts as king, he declared general amnesty. He let go of personal grudges, too. He took his worst enemy, the Duke of Mayenne, on such a brisk walk that the rotund nobleman was soon huffing and sweating. Henri finally halted and embraced him, saying, “This is all the vengence you will ever suffer from me!”

Out of concern for the peasantry, he forbade nobles from riding over crops when hunting. He spoke of his desire that there be a chicken in every pot. He rebuked troops who pillaged the poor by declaring, “To rob my people is to rob me.”

Henri was considerably less keen in his personal life, especially around women. For example, he adored hunting but rarely bathed afterward. On her wedding night, his second wife, Marie de Médicis, drenched herself in perfume, but she was still overpowered by his odor. Concurrent mistress Henriette D’Entragues told him he smelled like carrion.

Henri introduced these two women upon Marie’s arrival in Paris, saying, “She has been my mistress—now she is going to be your most biddable and obedient servant.” Henriette had to be physically forced to curtsy to Marie, whom she called Henri’s “fat Florentine banker” (he had married Marie in exchange for the cancellation of a large debt France owed her family). Marie bore him seven children, beginning with Louis XIII, an unquestioning Catholic who later promoted Cardinal Richelieu.

One act stands out in this mixed legacy. In 1598 Henri signed the Edict of Nantes, which gave Protestants legal recognition and ended the Wars of Religion. The price of this peace was allowing the Huguenots to exist as a separate state within France’s borders.

Though hailed today as a landmark act of toleration, the compromise was seen by some Catholics as a betrayal of Henri’s coronation promise to defend the faith. In 1610 he, like Henri III before him, was assassinated by a fanatical Catholic.

Reagan White is a freelance writer for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

Cardinal Richelieu

1585-1642Servant of the state

A brother’s abrupt decision to become a monk rather than a bishop put the benefice that supported Armand-Jean du Plessis de Richelieu’s family in jeopardy. Although Richelieu was then a promising student at France’s leading military academy, his mother informed him that he must leave and begin theological studies.

Richelieu accepted without protest, cloistered himself with the texts of his new discipline, and never afterward expressed any hint of resentment. His ambitions could be as readily assuaged in the politically powerful Catholic Church of the seventeenth century as in the military.

Richelieu quickly won support from both Protestants and Catholics in his bishopric through tax reduction. He told Huguenots wary after long years of strife, “I know that there are some of this company who are not one with us in Faith, but I hope they shall be one with us in love.”

While pragmatic and tolerant, he was also immensely self-confident; during this time he wrote an essay titled “Who Will Be My Equal?” Hubris was made prophecy by his rapid rise to power, which saw him appointed both cardinal and Louis XIII’s chief minister before his fortieth birthday.

His guiding principle for governing was raison d’état (reason of state), which gave the state’s welfare priority over other ethical concerns. “A Christian,” he wrote, “cannot too soon forgive an injury, but a ruler cannot too soon punish it when it is a crime against the state.”

Because of his conviction that enemies of his policies—and his person—were among the enemies of France, both were punished ruthlessly. “Give me six lines written by the most honorable of men, and I will find an excuse in them to hang him,” he is reliably quoted in the play Mirame.

Richelieu believed France’s greatest challenge was its fragmentation. Accordingly, the problem with the Huguenots was not their faith, but their status as “a state within a state.” His campaign against the symbolic Huguenot stronghold of La Rochelle was carried out with steely determination, finally wringing surrender from the siege’s survivors after 13 months. Yet after his victory, Richelieu stunned Huguenots and outraged Catholics with his leniency. Soon Huguenot industry was reintegrated in the economy of a more unified France.

Richelieu next challenged the autonomy of the nobility by ordering the demolition of their fortifications. To help drive home the new principle of centralized authority, he also banned dueling and promptly executed the first nobleman who defied him. “It is a question of breaking the neck of duels or of your Majesty’s edicts,” he told the king.

The cardinal’s campaign to solidify France sometimes took surprising turns. At one point he paid the Protestant king of Sweden to turn the tide against the Catholic Hapsburgs during the Thirty Years War—a counter-intuitive strategy that succeeded in undermining his country’s rivals. He has since been both hailed as a founder of modern France and blamed for the French Revolution.

Shortly after Richelieu’s death, in 1642, Pope Urban VIII evaluated his career by saying, “If there is a God, he will have much to answer for. If not, he has done very well.”

—Reagan White

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History magazine. Click here for reprint information on Christian History.

History

Huguenots and the Wars of Religion: Did You Know?

Interesting & unusual facts about the Huguenots—and their enemies.

In this series

Hu-gue-what?

No one knows for sure how French Protestants got the nickname “Huguenots” (pronounced HYU-ghe-nahts in America, HYU-ghe-nos in Britain). One theory proposes that the word was derived from German Eldgenosen, "oath fellows,” which was used to describe a Genevan political movement. Or perhaps a leader of that movement, Besancon Hughes, lent his name to the group. Scholar Janet Gray, however, supports a more colorful—and philologically sound—theory. In Tours, an early Protestant stronghold, a spirit called King Huguon was believed to haunt one of the city’s gates at night. Protestants held their illegal religious services near the same gate after dark. According to a manuscript from 1566, “The one who derived Huguenot from Huguon was a monk who, in a sermon reproaching the Lutherans, as those who met at night were called, said that it was necessary henceforth to call them Huguenots because they went out at night like him.”

Creed-crossed lovers

The Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre began soon after Protestant Henri of Navarre wed Catholic Marguerite of Valois. More than 400 years later, the prospect of a cross-confessional marriage once again sent shudders through the upper echelons of French society. In the summer of 2001, Chartres Cathedral was booked for the wedding of Duchess Tatjana d’Oldenbourg, a Protestant German aristocrat, and Jean d’Orléans, a Catholic noble who would be in line for the French crown if that country ever reinstituted its monarchy. But even though Jean is heir to only a theoretical throne, his family opposed the marriage, fearing it would undermine their legitimacy. Jean broke off the engagement.

Stranger than fiction

Cardinal Richelieu (see “Gallery“), the Huguenots’ worst enemy during the reign of Louis XIII, is famous as the bad guy in Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers. (A smarmy Tim Curry played him in the 1993 movie.) If Dumas had wanted to stock his novel with really outrageous characters, though, he should have included Richelieu’s siblings. One of the cardinal’s brothers at times believed himself to be the first member of the Trinity, and one of his sisters thought her posterior was made of glass.

Midnight ride of Paul de Rivoire?

Paul Revere’s Huguenot parents may have changed their foreign-sounding moniker to better blend in with American society, but that didn’t keep the Revolutionary hero from making a name for himself in his new homeland. Other famous Americans of Huguenot descent include:

“Swamp Fox” Francis Marion
Federalist leader Alexander Hamilton
Naturalist John James Audubon
President Theodore Roosevelt

Mixed-up monarch

If, after reading this issue, you’re still not sure what to make of Henri IV—the French king who changed religions about as often as he changed his socks—don’t fret. French historians and citizens have judged him in drastically different ways since his death in 1610. In his day some artists portrayed him as Hercules, Mars, Perseus, and Alexander, while some biographers cast him as a cross between Satan and the village idiot. In 1728 Voltaire extolled him in an epic poem La Henriade; in 1792 revolutionaries tore down his statue on the Pont Neuf in Paris. Perhaps historian Jules Michelet, writing in 1857 and reflecting the high Romanticism of his own era, came closest to an apt description: “He cried out of love, he cried out of friendship, and he cried out of compassion. But none of this made him any the more constant in anything.” Today Henri is France’s most beloved king.

Generation gap

A counselor to King Henri IV, politician and poet Agrippa d’Aubigné tirelessly promoted the Protestant cause (see “Slaughter, Mayhem, and Providence“). Partially as a result of d’Aubigné’s influence, Henri’s policies introduced broad toleration for the Huguenots. Unfortunately both Henri and d’Aubigné’s son, Constant, abjured the Calvinist faith. In the next generation, d’Aubigné’s grand-daughter married Henri’s grandson Louis XIV, the king who put even more effort into expunging Protestantism from France than d’Aubigné had put into saving it.

Massacre—live onstage!

When Giacomo Meyerbeer’s opera Les Huguenots opened in Paris in 1836, reviewers had grave doubts. "[I]t was a bold and even hazardous attempt to bring such a subject as the religious disputes between the Catholics and the Huguenots, and the horrors attached to the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew, within the range of the lyrical drama,” one critic wrote. But most Parisians agreed that Meyerbeer, a Jew who sided with neither faction, managed the feat. “Any criticism would have to fall silent in the face of such an overwhelming success,” a reviewer crowed. The show brought in 11,300 francs in its first two months—an unheard-of amount—and in 1900 became the first opera to rack up 1,000 performances.

Stamp of approval

Though commissioned for the 300th anniversary of one of the bleakest events in Huguenot history, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (see “Escape from Babylon“), this stamp proclaims “Welcome Huguenots.” It also features the distinctive Huguenot cross. Each arm of the cross broadens and splits into two points. The eight total points represent the eight Beatitudes. The spaces between the arms are sometimes stylized as four hearts, representing loyalty, topped with four lilies, representing purity. The appendage, a dove, symbolizes the Holy Spirit.

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History magazine. Click here for reprint information on Christian History.

History

The French Wars of Religion: Christian History Interview – A New War of Religion?

Sebastien Fath

Pluralism and evangelicalism collide in contemporary France. A conversation with Sébastien Fath.

In early summer the French Parliament passed anti-sect legislation that some evangelicals and members of other religious minorities fear could restrict their freedoms. This legislation is a far cry from Louis XIV’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, but it does raise questions about France’s religious climate. To get a clear picture of the situation, Christian History contacted Sébastien Fath, a social scientist with France’s National Center of Scientific Research and teacher at the Sorbonne University in Paris.

Why is France, a country that prides itself on pluralism and tolerance, suddenly suspicious of religious minorities?

Generally speaking, pluralism has never been so present in the French society. The challenge is learning to live together in a more and more plural society. The State has tried to adapt itself, but it isn’t sure of its way yet. The local management of pluralism has its difficulties, too, but on the whole religious freedom is fully respected. Evangelicals, among other religious minorities, are very satisfied with it.

At the same time, though, French society reacts very strongly to the issue of cults and sects. The public was shocked by the collective suicides of the Solar Temple Order that occurred in Switzerland, Canada, and France in 1994 and 1995, when 78 people died. Also, France’s political culture traditionally legitimates state intervention when social order seems threatened. Because the pluralistic society in France is less established than it is in America, cults and sects seem like a bigger threat. These elements explain why this law was voted in Parliament.

Is it fair to call France’s anti-sect initiatives “religious persecution”?

The new legislation contains nothing related to “religious persecution.” To imply this would be totally inappropriate. However, one can wonder at the necessity of such a law. Henri Tincq, a prominent French journalist, recently wrote in Le Monde that this law was “a progress for democracy.” I wouldn’t be so sure. Many believe that the existing legislation would have been quite sufficient to curtail the sectarian drift.

Whether the legislation might lead to religious persecution is a different question. The law contains provisions against “abuse of weakness or dependence,” which seems to be very difficult to define. French evangelicals and other religious minorities have good reasons to fear that the new anti-sect legislation might encourage some localized forms of intolerance. Only time will tell if the actual application of the new law will lead to problems in the free practice of religion.

Does the specter of religious intolerance bring up any memories of the sixteenth-century Wars of Religion?

Unfortunately for French evangelicals today, outspoken evangelism appears to some parts of society as a new “war of religion.” Proselytizing has bad press. The French media tends to favor a “religiously correct” picture of a respectful, modern religion that doesn’t proselytize or defend an absolute truth on the public scene.

The best French sociologist of Protestantism, Jean-Paul Willaime, describes French culture as one in which religion is relegated to the private sphere. One can easily foresee the consequences for evangelicals. Active evangelism is their non-negotiable mandate, but it isn’t well accepted culturally in France—even if, in principle, the law cannot set any obstacles to it.

What other factors make evangelicals somewhat suspect in France?

The French are very proud of their republican model, and they resent the fact that, during the twentieth century, the main reference in the world became the American model. They also fear that their Republic, where the state assures equality of rights, will be swept away by a “limp democracy,” where interest groups trample over the weaker members of society. This is why French leaders from General de Gaulle to Jacques Chirac (and his Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, born into a Protestant family) have tried to limit the American influence in France, often with symbolic measures like legislation against American words entering the French language.

This can sometimes create difficulties for Protestants, and specifically evangelicals who cultivate many links with American evangelicals. When Billy Graham campaigned in France in 1955, 1963, and 1986, he was regularly accused of being “an agent of American imperialism.” French evangelicals have been aware of this difficulty for a long time and have learned to adjust to it.

But evangelicals get some positive recognition, too. A well known French Protestant hymn, “La Cévenole,” recalls the heroic resistance of the Huguenots during the times of persecution. It has been nicknamed “the Marseillaise of the Protestants.” This hymn was written by prominent evangelical pastor and hymn composer Ruben Saillens, a proof among others that French evangelicals are not an “imported product” and that they fit well in the French religious landscape.

Where do the descendants of the Huguenots fit in that religious landscape?

Huguenot descendants are found today in all categories of French society. Some of them have become indifferent to religious matters, others have become Catholic, and many have remained Protestant. Among the last group, a majority belongs to the Reformed Church of France (the main French Protestant denomination), but many can be found in evangelical churches as well—Free churches, Baptist churches, Brethren churches, and even Pentecostal churches.

The largest annual gathering of French Protestants, which draws about 20,000 people, is the Desert Assembly. Held the first Sunday of September in the Cévennes, in the south of France, it commemorates persecutions while encouraging and uniting Protestants today. The Reformed are the most numerous, but Lutherans and evangelicals are also present, a proof that the Huguenot heritage has been spread to all the branches of Protestantism.

One of the difficulties encountered historically by Huguenot families was the transmission of the faith. Because of persecutions, Huguenot identity became in some cases an inherited thing rather than a conviction, especially during the eighteenth and first part of the nineteenth centuries. Evangelicals have strongly rejected such a restrictive definition. The idea of a Protestant “ethnic group” makes no sense to them, because they are concerned with conversion rather than family history.

Evangelicals in France numbered less than 100,000 around 1950. They’re now about 350,000, a third of all French Protestants. To them as to the Huguenots of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, France remains a mission field where “salvation by grace only ” must be publicly preached.

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History magazine. Click here for reprint information on Christian History.

History

Forgotten Reformer

Robert D. Linder

As obscure now as his tiny native village, Pierre Viret once captured the hearts of the Huguenots.

Illustration by Rick Szuecs

No tourist in Geneva can miss the impressive Reformation Monument with its four towering figures: John Calvin, Guillaume Farel, Theodore Beza, and John Knox. Some visitors might even notice a series of reliefs on the statue's base, which depict various scenes from the Genevan Reformation. Yet only a sharp-eyed observer is likely to spot in one of the reliefs a spare man with a long beard preaching to a crowd of intent listeners: Pierre Viret, now virtually forgotten among the major reformers.

A changed man

Viret was born in the obscure village of Orbe, near Lausanne, in 1511. One of three sons of a poor tailor, Viret was a precocious child who benefited from a new village school where several of the teachers were trained humanists and suspected Lutherans. He developed an interest in the classics and theology which, in 1528, led him to study for the priesthood. He entered the Collège de Montaigu at the University of Paris at about the time Calvin was leaving and Ignatius Loyola was enrolling.

Viret left Paris two years later a changed man. The new Protestant ideas that were flourishing at the great university led to Viret's personal commitment to Christ.

Returning to Orbe, he found the village divided into Protestant and Catholic factions. Then Farel, the traveling evangelist largely responsible for this division, challenged young Viret to become a minister of the Gospel and to preach the Reformation in his native village. Viret resisted, then yielded to what the older man seemed to be certain was the will of God for Viret's life.

Viret possessed outstanding gifts as a Gospel orator. He won Orbe over to the Reformation. He was then asked to preach in Payerne, where he was badly wounded when a band of Catholics attempted to kill him, and at Neuchâtel before linking up again with Farel in Geneva in 1534.

Viret and Farel preached salvation and reform in Geneva for the next two years. The city was in an uproar: its citizens had decided to cast off the rule of the Catholic Duke of Savoy, but they had not yet embraced Protestantism. Viret celebrated the first Genevan baptism according to evangelical forms, took part with Farel in the debate that convinced the Council of Geneva to renounce Catholicism, and, in 1536, silently witnessed Farel accost Calvin and inform him of God's will for his life.

Catholic radicals tried again to silence Viret's voice, this time by poisoning his spinach soup. Viret suffered from digestive problems for the rest of his life, but he would not be intimidated.

Leading Lausanne

With the Protestant faith now firmly planted and Calvin ensconced alongside Farel, Viret left Geneva to help consolidate the Reformation in Lausanne, the chief city of his native Pays de Vaud. His ministry flourished in Lausanne as the city became overwhelmingly Reformed under his leadership. He also founded, supervised, and taught at an academy to train Protestant leaders and established social services to care for the city's unfortunate.

Viret lived in constant tension with the authorities in Berne, however, who wanted to keep a tight political rein on Lausanne. Following a confrontation at Easter 1559, the Bernese exiled Viret.

Soon thereafter, Viret joined his old friend Calvin in Geneva, bringing with him many of the Lausanne ministers, all but one of the faculty of the Academy of Lausanne, and nearly 1,000 of his parishioners. Calvin's city became the undisputed center of the Reformed world.

The Genevans loved Viret. They immediately elected him a minister of the Geneva Church and assigned him a salary of 800 florins plus 12 strikes of corn and two casks of wine a year. The Council also provided him a commodious house, which Calvin noted was bigger and better furnished than his own.

Despite his important assignment and generous treatment, Viret grew restless. Geneva was now almost completely Protestant and firmly under Calvin's theological control. News from France, where Protestants suffered harsh persecution and lacked pastoral guidance, turned his mind to a new challenge.

Harvest fields of France

In 1561 Viret requested leave from the Geneva Council and Company of Pastors to visit the land of the Huguenots. The official reason was that his ailing health demanded warmer climes. However, once in southern France, he quickly recovered sufficient strength to engage in continuous rounds of impassioned preaching.

He traveled first to Lyon, and then on to Nîmes, where he regularly preached to crowds numbering as many as 8,000—almost the entire population. Riots followed many of his sermons, despite Viret's pleas for peace. The disorders eventually subsided, and within a few months Nîmes was solidly Protestant.

In the meantime, invitations poured in from churches in Paris, Orléans, Avignon, Montauban, and Montpellier. The leaders of Nîmes begged him to remain with them. Finally, after much prayer, Viret moved to Montpellier, where he saw the conversion of nearly the entire faculty of the city's famous medical college. Only the outbreak of the first War of Religion interrupted his ministry. Though there was fighting in the Montpellier area, Viret's personal intercession apparently kept bloodshed to a minimum.

He then returned to Lyon, the major city of southeastern France, to begin a three-year ministry. Despite ill health, civil war, and a violent outbreak of the plague, Viret was able to establish his moral authority in the city. He preached daily to large crowds, counseled the soldiers of the Protestant army, and wrote at least 12 books while revising and reprinting several more, including his monumental Instruction chrestienne. He also ministered to victims of the plague and carried on a lively correspondence with other leaders of the Protestant Reformation.

Royal authority was re-established in Lyon in July, 1563, and with it Roman Catholic worship. In the months that followed, Viret participated in a pamphlet war with the returned Catholic leader and with various radicals and dissidents in the city. This multi-sided verbal warfare continued for nearly two years until local Catholic clergy obtained a royal order for Viret's expulsion from the kingdom of France. The notice giving him eight days to leave the country was delivered on August 27, 1565.

Viret fled to Béarn in Navarre, a semi-autonomous kingdom in what is now southwestern France. He was befriended there by Jeanne d'Albrêt, the staunchly Protestant Queen of Navarre and mother of the future Henry IV of France. She made Viret one of her chief advisers and superintendent of the academy she had established at Ortez.

Catholic forces captured Viret and 11 other Reformed ministers in a surprise attack during the third religious war (1568-1570). The Catholic commander ordered the execution of 7 of the 12 but spared Viret largely because of the positive reputation he enjoyed even among his ecclesiastical enemies. A few weeks later, he was rescued by counter-attacking Protestant forces and returned to his intense and successful ministry.

Secrets of Viret's success

How could Viret, a foreigner, become the most successful and sought-after Protestant preacher in sixteenth-century France?

First, his good reputation had preceded him. Many people had heard stories of the physical and verbal attacks he had suffered as an evangelist, but they sensed no malice about him. To the contrary, tales of his gentle spirit and kindly nature were common. He was also known as an eloquent preacher and as the author of more than 50 popular books.

Second, Viret's personality and pastoral heart endeared him to the Huguenots. Like his listeners, he knew sorrow: his first wife, two daughters, and a son died in the plagues that visited Lausanne, and he also lost two daughters and, eventually, his second wife to the plague during his years in France.

His letters to his friend Calvin reveal how these losses almost broke his spirit. Following the death of his first wife in 1546, he wrote: "The Lord has taken the half of myself from me. … I am so affected by this blow that I feel like a stranger in my own house."

Viret's well-attested sense of humor helped make him effective in both communication and conciliation. His books are laced with puns and satire, his two favorite brands of humor.

For example, one of his dialogues considered the best way to exorcise demons. One of his characters piously declares that this could only be done by fasting and prayer. Another character quips, "What a splendid way to get rid of monks and priests, who after all are real devils. Don't give them anything to eat and pray for them."

Viret's sensitivity is also illustrated by his ideas concerning education. Addressing both educators and parents, he wrote: "Some children you will have to keep bridled, some you will have to coax, some will need no discipline, some will be motivated by liberality, some by rewards and promises, and others by honor. Treat each child according to his temperament and needs. Some will have to be treated like spirited horses, some like gentle asses, and some like stubborn mules."

Third, Viret was effective and popular in France and elsewhere because of his personal piety and his biblically based ministry. Some would argue that Viret was the most biblical of all of the French Reformers. He was certainly less dogmatic than Calvin or Beza.

Though he participated in many public disputations, Viret did not seek controversy. He once wrote in a war-weary vein to his old friend Farel, "If I did not have the conviction that it was God who was pressing it on, I would never enter a controversy with a single person."

Viret believed that though Christians were sometimes persecuted, they should never be persecutors. He stressed the ancient Christian teaching that "human life is sacred" and opposed the execution of alleged heretics. Viret's spirit of conciliation seemed to lead Catholics and Protestants alike to regard him as one of the few to whom they could turn when they needed a fair-minded arbiter.

Viret died in 1571 as he was preparing for a trip to the National Synod of Reformed churches at La Rochelle. The Protestants in France greatly lamented his death. Jeanne d'Albrêt wrote to the Council of Geneva: "Among the great losses which I have sustained during and since the last war, I place in the fore-front the loss of Monsieur Viret."

Robert D. Linder is professor of history at Kansas State University in Manhattan and a widely published author whose books include the forthcoming Pierre Viret: Forgotten Reformer.

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History magazine. Click here for reprint information on Christian History.

History

Escape from Babylon

Bertrand Van Ruymbeke

As repression became a way of life in France, Huguenots faced three choices: convert, go underground, or risk everything to reach le Refuge.

In this series

In 1684, having “suffered through eight months [of] exactions and quartering by the soldiery, for the religion with much evil,” Judith Giton, a Huguenot from southern France, decided to escape. With her mother, two of her brothers, and a servant, she slipped away at night, leaving soldiers sleeping in the family bed.

The group traveled north along the Rhone and Rhine rivers to Holland and reached England in 1685. They stayed three months in London waiting for a Carolina-bound ship, then crossed the Atlantic under terrible conditions. Judith’s mother died of scarlet fever, and a storm forced them to stop in Bermuda, where the captain, having “committed certain rascalities,” was imprisoned and the ship seized. Penniless, Judith and her brothers indentured themselves to pay for their passage to South Carolina.

Once in Charleston, Judith endured “affliction … sickness, pestilence, famine, [and] poverty,” and her elder brother, Louis, died of a fever. After a few years, though, Judith “had it the way she wanted it” and thanked “God [for giving] her good grace to have been able to withstand all sorts of trials.”

Judith’s story contains many elements common to the Huguenot exodus: the quartering of troops, a night flight, a long and risky voyage filled with hardships and sorrows—but also survival, hope, freedom, and prosperity.

New Babylon

In the 1660s, France’s King Louis XIV launched a crusade to convert his Protestant subjects to Catholicism. According to the powerful “one king, one faith” principle, the country’s stability depended on the monarch and his people all following the same religion. For years legal and religious harassment alternated with financial measures to entice Huguenots back into the Catholic fold.

Huguenots, who often compared themselves to the remnant of Israel (see “Slaughter, Mayhem, and Providence,”), felt that they were living in the New Babylon, ruled by an oppressive Nebuchadnezzar.

Early royal measures aimed to restrict Huguenots’ freedom of worship. In 1663 Huguenots were told they could not conduct their funerals during the day, and the next year processions were limited to 10 people. Then the crown prohibited ministers from serving multiple churches, meaning that congregations too poor to hire a minister would die out. Laws also restricted psalm singing, one of the most distinctive aspects of Huguenot religious practice, outside the church—or even inside the church when a Catholic procession was passing by.

Church services came under royal surveillance and censorship. In each Huguenot temple, pews had to be reserved for Catholic observers, who were allowed to interrupt services and challenge the pastor.

In his memoirs, Jaques Fontaine, a Huguenot minister who fled to the British Isles, explained that Capuchins and Jesuits came to listen to his father’s sermons so regularly that “there was a bench especially marked for them in the temple … just opposite the minister’s seat.”

In addition to people and practices, the monarchy targeted Huguenot property. Authorities tore down churches and imposed severe restrictions on cemeteries. By March 1685 the crown had ordered the closing of all five Huguenot académies, which meant that Calvinist ministers could no longer be trained in France.

Huguenots faced professional restrictions, too. They were excluded from the guilds of hosiery dealers in 1681, barbers and wigmakers in 1684, printers and booksellers in 1685. By then Protestants could no longer be notaries, bailiffs, apothecaries, midwives, surgeons, or doctors. They also could not keep Catholic servants.

“Booted missionaries”

Eventually Louis XIV lost his patience with passive coercion and turned to a military solution, the dragonnades. In these campaigns, Catholic soldiers called “dragoons” swarmed Protestant communities and attempted to force conversions to Catholicism. Huguenots called the troops “booted missionaries.”

Dragoons placed enormous financial burdens on their Huguenot hosts. Fontaine had to entertain 18 of them, who lived in his home “until they had destroyed or sold everything, even the bolts on the doors.”

When property attacks fell short of the goal, dragoons inflicted physical and emotional abuse. A letter from Thomas Bureau, a bookseller from Poitou, to his brother in London details the escalating persecutions.

“As soon as the dragoons were in town,” Bureau wrote, “four were sent to our home. … They threw all the books on the floor … destroyed the carpentry work, the stacks, the windows with axes and hammers, brought their horses inside the shop, used the books as litter, then they climbed upstairs to our bedrooms and threw everything that was inside them into the streets as the mayor watched … filled with joy.”

Aggravated by the steadfast determination of Bureau’s mother and sister, the dragoons threatened “to hang them … or tie them to the harnesses of their horses and drag them through the streets like rabid dogs to serve as examples.” As threats were not enough, four more dragoons were assigned to the home. They took all of the family’s books to a square in the town to be burned.

The violence got results. Huguenots were terrified. Sometimes entire communities converted at the local Catholic church before the dragoons even reached town.

From bad to worse

The revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 made the Huguenots’ already desperate situation even worse. With this act, Louis XIV outlawed Protestantism, leaving the 700,000 Huguenots still living in France three choices: convert, enter the underground church, or flee. The last two choices carried the risk of death.

Often when a European power outlawed a religion, it ordered adherents to leave the country. France, however, forbade Huguenots to leave—except pastors, who were given two weeks to relocate or convert. Protestants who refused to abjure, who attended illegal services, or who were caught leaving the kingdom could be imprisoned, sentenced to the galleys, deported to the Caribbean, or even executed.

Most Huguenots, about 500,000, avoided these risks by renouncing their faith. As long as the ecclesiastical and civil authorities let them be passive Catholics, these “New Converts” lived with practical compromises. Huguenot theologians recognized Catholic baptism. Converts agreed to be married by Catholic priests as long as they were not forced to take Communion beforhand, meaning the ceremony was more a civil than a sacramental affair. On the threshold of death, converts refused the last rites and died as Calvinists.

Of the 200,000 Huguenots who fought their fate, about 10,000 were sentenced between 1685 and 1787. Nearly 4,000 of these were women, and most (6,500) were imprisoned. From 1685 to 1715, about 1,500 Huguenots were sentenced to life in the galleys. More than half of these were charged for attending illegal religious services and nearly one-fourth for attempting to leave France.

Even Huguenots who had already settled in a foreign country could be captured by French privateers and sent to the galleys. For example, élie Néau, a New York Huguenot merchant, was taken prisoner while crossing the Atlantic on a business trip in 1692. He remained in the galleys until his release in 1698.

In 1687 and 1688 alone, more than 400 Huguenots were deported to the West Indies. Conditions on the transport ships were horrific, and the death rate averaged 25 percent. If the deportees made it to Guadeloupe, Martinique, or Saint-Domingue, however, most found ways to escape to an English or Dutch island and eventually sail back to Europe.

To flee or not to flee

The French crown cracked down especially hard on Huguenots who tried to leave the country. A 1669 decree sentenced fugitives to confiscation of property and death. Other laws condemned those who helped Huguenots escape. On the other hand, Catholics who denounced Huguenots preparing to flee or who helped catch fugitives got the rights to one third of the victims’ property. The guards who made the arrest shared the rest of the estate.

Still, a determined minority of the Protestant community risked all to reach le Refuge.

The first Huguenot refugees left France during persecutions in the 1500s. This emigration was small, occasional, and very often led only to temporary exile. Most early refugees, including John Calvin, fled to nearby Protestant cities, mainly Geneva and Strasburg. Others traveled to England, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. A few trekked overseas to la Florida under the leadership of captain Jean Ribault in 1562. No more than 20,000 Huguenots left France between 1520 and 1660.

The late-seventeenth century exodus, in contrast, was massive, brief, and permanent. Historians estimate that about 180,000 Huguenots left France between 1680 and 1705. The movement started with the intensification of the persecutions in 1680, peaked between 1684 and 1687, and then dwindled in the 1690s, except for occasional outbreaks.

Fugitives fled primarily to preserve their Calvinism—”to live and die in the true religion,” as a South Carolina Huguenot wrote in his will. Yet many other factors entered in.

Different locations had very different emigration rates. Huguenots who lived in overwhelmingly Catholic provinces were more prone to leave than those who lived where the concentration of Protestants made persecution less painful and resistance easier to organize. Huguenots who lived in large cities or near the coast or the borders could escape at lower cost and lesser risk than those in the rural interior.

Personal and familial factors also affected the decision to flee. Huguenots who held occupations that became legally limited to Catholics had to leave or convert simply to survive economically. Flight appealed more to young people than to old, because it often required travel over long distances without the aid of horses or coaches. Even education was a factor, for a person who knew little geography or could not read a map might never reach safety.

Getting away, staying close

Resolving to abandon relatives, friends, and the comfort of home was undoubtedly difficult, but making that decision was easy compared to carrying it out. Escaping from France required courage, perseverance, ingenuity, and luck—plus plenty of money and contacts.

Fugitives paid guides, who knew how to safely reach the coast or the border, and fishermen, who provided passage to an English or Dutch ship anchored off a French harbor. Fugitives also bought maps with itineraries and lists of inns and homes where Protestants were welcome. Leftover funds were saved to bribe coast and border guards, just in case.

When choosing a destination, most refugees followed the simplest route. Huguenots who lived in northwestern France fled to England. Those who were from the Atlantic seaboard escaped to either England or the Netherlands following well-known maritime trade routes. Huguenots from southern and eastern France usually took the Swiss route, following the Rhine River to the Netherlands or settling in the German states.

Ready employment and established exile communities attracted many Huguenots to large foreign cities, some of which wooed the fleeing Protestants with promotional documents. German decrees guaranteed Huguenots generous religious, economic, and linguistic privileges, while colonial pamphlets promised abundant land, free naturalization, and freedom of worship. Because most displaced Huguenots possessed education and labor skills, they were embraced nearly everywhere.

The overwhelming majority of refugees remained in Europe—about 65,000 in the Netherlands, 60,000 in the British Isles, 30,000 in the German states (half in Prussia), and 25,000 in Switzerland. Most hoped to return to France once Louis XIV was defeated by his Protestant enemies and forced to reestablish the Edict of Nantes.

But the Treaty of Ryswick, signed in 1697 to end a nearly 10-year-old war involving France, England, Spain, and the Netherlands, dashed these hopes. It left the French monarchy’s domestic religious policy intact, meaning the Huguenots were still unwelcome at home.

The ones who disappeared

The longer the Huguenots remained shut out of France, the more they adapted to their new countries. This was especially true among those who settled in British North America. Yale historian Jon Butler argues that they essentially disappeared.

For a long time, scholars estimated that between 10,000 and 15,000 Huguenots settled in the American colonies. Thanks notably to Butler’s work, however, that estimate has been revised down considerably.

Even including the eighteenth-century Huguenot communities of Purrysburgh and New Bordeaux in South Carolina, no more than 4,000 refugees are likely to have settled in North America from the 1670s to the 1770s. This number is large compared to the 200 who settled in the Dutch colony of South Africa but represents only a tiny fraction of the total refugee population.

Huguenots founded settlements in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, Virginia, and South Carolina. New England Huguenots settled in Boston, Oxford, and in the Narragansett Bay. In New York they established communities in New York City (where they joined a few Walloons, French-speaking Protestants from the southern Netherlands), Staten Island, New Rochelle, and in New Paltz, also a Walloon-Huguenot settlement. In Virginia, they founded the community of Manakintown near Richmond, and in South Carolina, they settled in Charleston, Orange Quarter, and Santee.

Roughly 800 refugees settled in New York, 700 in Virginia, 500 in South Carolina, and 300 in New England. The rest dispersed between New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina.

Once settled, Huguenot families strove to blend in with their new communities. Their identification with the remnant of Israel quickly faded.

Most of the refugees’ children abandoned Calvinism and the use of the French language. Except in the cases of Charleston and New York City, where the refugees managed to keep their congregations active through most of the eighteenth century, most Huguenot churches remained Calvinist only through the 1720s. In Manakintown, Virginia, the colony was founded with the stipulation that all settlers would immediately join the Church of England.

In New York Huguenots joined the Dutch Reformed and the Anglican churches. In New England a few became Congregationalists and Presbyterians. In South Carolina nearly all refugees, except those in Charleston, became Anglicans.

The new Americans also proved eager to participate in local politics and the economy. They obtained large amounts of land, abandoned their traditional occupations to take up agriculture, and intermarried with British and Dutch settlers. They even Anglicized their names.

In every country of le Refuge, however, including America, Huguenot identity re-emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century. This new identity, best conveyed by the Huguenot Societies founded in New York, South Carolina, Great Britain, and Germany between 1883 and 1890, represents a durable legacy. Two hundred years after the French king revoked their freedoms and took their property, Huguenots came out of hiding and began to search for what they had lost.

Bertrand van Ruymbeke is an associate professor at the University of Toulouse, France.

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History magazine. Click here for reprint information on Christian History.

History

Getting Serious About Sin

No misdeed went unpunished in Calvin’s Geneva.

Madame Pyaget wasn’t the only resident of Geneva called to testify before the consistory on March 31, 1542. The city fathers, led by Lord Egrege Porralis and including John Calvin and Pierre Viret, heard all sorts of cases, as reported in these excerpts from the daily register:

Jaques Emyn

Summoned to render an account of his faith. He responded that he had made a little progress and said the Pater, “Our Father, etc.,” and a few words of the creed. The Consistory advise [sic], having given him proper admonitions, that he find a teacher who will instruct him in the faith and explain what the words mean and make him understand what concerns God.

Jaquemaz, widow of Claude Camparet

Asked about frequenting of sermons, etc., and about the child her son has had by her maid. Answers that she has put the child out to nurse. Asked about her faith, she says the Pater in the new Reformed manner, but does not know the Credo. And that she has nursed her husband six years in illness and that her son [incomplete sentence]. And that she was at the sermon Sunday morning and that she believes it was Monsieur Calvin. And that she does not know about her son.

Master Tyvent Laurent, called Echaquet, citizen

Asked about the wizard he had in his house and why. Answers he never had one, except a man from Challex who attended his wife who was sick, and he said he would cure her. And that he often came to his house and would give him herbs to dissolve in wine, which was not done at his house. And that the man owed him money and that he came for no other reason.

Donne Jane Pertennaz

sked about her faith and why she has not received Holy Communion and whether she has heard and gone to Mass every year. And she said her faith and that she believes in one God and wants to live in God and the holy church and has no other faith. …

Asked why she is not satisfied with the Communion celebrated in this city but goes elsewhere. Answers that she goes where it seems good to her. And that there is talk of princes who are not in accord in what they do openly, but they must be obeyed. And that Our Lord will not come here well-clothed or shod [reference to Matt. 11:708 or Luke 7:24-25] and that where His Word is, His body is. … Remanded as outside the faith and to appear day by day. And she did not want to renounce the Mass.

Mermeta Jappaz

Said she is pregnant by the son of Berthelomier Fouson, named Bezanson, and she already felt the child at Christmas, and this was at the said Fouson’s house. And she did not say her Pater well, and she goes to sermons on Monday and other days not. And she wants to give it to its father, and her mother knows nothing, and she has had another child. And the other child was put to nurse and died. Remanded to [incomplete sentence]. The Consistory advises that she abstain from taking Communion because of her serious fornication. Remanded to Thursday.

From Registers of the Consistory of Geneva in the Time of Calvin, Vol. 1: 1542-1544.

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History magazine. Click here for reprint information on Christian History.

History

Slaughter, Mayhem, & Providence

Alan D. Savage

How one of France’s greatest poets made sense of the Huguenot tragedies.

Traveling through Amboise on their way to Paris in 1560, Jean d’Aubigné and his 8-year-old son, Agrippa, came upon a horrible spectacle: the hanging bodies of decapitated Protestant conspirators who had attempted to steal the young King Francis II away from the Catholic dukes of Guise. The father made his son swear to defend the faith for which the men had died, and Agrippa d’Aubigné did indeed spend his life fighting for what become known as La Cause.

D’Aubigné waged his battle for the Huguenot faith on two fronts: the battlefield and paper. He first took up arms at age 12, when he climbed out of his bedroom window and ran off to join the Protestant troops defending the beseiged city of Orléans. He eventually became a key player in the Wars of Religion that devastated France in the second half of the sixteenth century.

Starting in 1573, he served as equerry, adviser, and friend to Henri of Navarre (the future Henri IV) until the latter finally rejected the Reformed faith in 1593. Eventually exiled from France, d’Aubigné spent the last decade of his life in Geneva, where he served on the city’s war council.

While brave and forceful as a military man, d’Aubigné is mainly known because of his second weapon, his pen. With the exception of his first collection of poems, Printemps (Springtime), which he later rejected because it deals with worldly rather than divine love, d’Aubigné’s works all revolve around his faith and the parti protestant.

Although d’Aubigné has never ranked as highly as the sixteenth-century literary giants François Rabelais, Pierre de Ronsard, and Michel de Montaigne, he is nonetheless considered one of France’s greatest authors, due almost solely to his work Les Tragiques. He began the work in the trenches of Casteljaloux in 1577 and, although he had probably finished most of it by 1583, he continued to rework it until he finally decided to publish it—anonymously, clandestinely, and at his own expense—in 1616.

Composed of approximately 10,000 verses, the poem received a cold reception when it appeared because of both its content and style. It was not until two centuries later that the famous literary critic Sainte-Beuve called attention to the greatness of Les Tragiques, and twentieth-century literary critics, for whom the work is “the epic of Huguenot faith,” have compared it to the Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost.

Poetic polemic

Les Tragiques (the title refers to the extraordinarily tragic events of the times) is a poetic, and highly polemic, account of the Wars of Religion. It depicts the horrors of the conflicts that ravaged France—with biting satire reserved for those considered responsible, mainly the king, princes, and the Roman Catholic Church—in a way that highlights God’s control over history and emphasizes the eventual, sure triumph of the true (Protestant) church.

The epic is divided into seven books. The first, Misères, recounts, as the title suggests, the pain resulting from the civil strife, with chilling details of cruel deaths. The second book, Les Princes, lays the blame for France’s problems squarely on the shoulders of those in charge and the Catholic church they upheld. Henri III appears as the “woman King or Queen man,” and Catherine de Médicis is none other than Jezebel.

Book three, La Chambre Dorée (Parlement of Paris), indicts the courts for their mishandling of justice. Les Feux (Fires) comes next, largely influenced by Jean Crespin’s L’Acte des Martyrs, with vivid portrayals of those burned at the stake for their faith.

The fifth book, Les Fers (Arms), recounts the Huguenots’ armed struggle for recognition, and the sixth, Vengeances, focuses on God’s past and present punishments for those opposed to the “true church.” Jugement, the last book, moves the reader into the end times, when all wrongs will be righted in God’s newly established kingdom.

As the titles indicate, the poem progresses from a horizontal level (Misères, Princes, Chambre Dorée, Feux, Fers) to a vertical level (Vengeances, Jugement). This observation is only partly valid, however, for although the format gives a certain chronological structure to the work—moving from the present to the future, and from a human perspective to a divine perspective—the presence of God throughout the work makes the realities of Jugement already active in the present.

D’Aubigné articulates this viewpoint in the preface, where he claims that “Dieu-même en a donné l’argument” (“God himself has told the story”). In other words, the author is merely a scribe, a prophet explaining how God sees things from his eternal perspective. Thus, for example, in the passage in Fers where Admiral Coligny dies, the reader sees Coligny himself in heaven watching over the whole scene. God’s control of history and his work on behalf of the Huguenots despite apparent failure are never questioned by d’Aubigné.

The most often cited passage from Les Tragiques comes from the first book, in which d’Aubigné gives a haunting depiction of war-torn France (only the first four lines are given in French; the translation goes on to complete the passage):

Je veux peindre la France une mère affligée,
Qui est, entre ses bras, de deux enfants chargée.
Le plus fort, orgueilleux, empoigne les deux bouts
Des tetins nourriciers; puis à force de coups …

I see France as a wounded mother
Holding in her lap her two children.
The strongest one, proud, grabs both ends
Of her nourishing breasts; then, with blows of
Nails, fists, and feet, he takes the share
That nature gave to his twin.
This stubborn thief, this damned Esau
Ruins the sweet milk meant to nourish the two,
So much so that, in order to take his brother’s life,
He ends up despising his own, no longer desiring it.
But his Jacob, hungry from having fasted,
Having long held his pain in his heart,
In the end defends himself, and his righteous anger
Renders to the other a battle whose field is the mother.

The personification of France as a mother reveals the deep tenderness that Frenchmen, both Protestant and Catholic, felt for their country. The outbreak of hostilities was certainly not a surprise—tensions between the parti catholique and parti protestant had grown steadily since early in the sixteenth century—but no one was prepared for the devastation of civil war. (Before d’Aubigné wrote his piece, Catholic poet Ronsard had written Discours Sur Les Misères de ce temps, in which he also laments what was happening to the country, blaming, of course, the Protestants.)

In this passage d’Aubigné uses violent vocabulary and shocking images to accomplish his unabashedly partisan goal of stirring up the emotions of his coreligionists in order to incite them to keep fighting for La Cause.

The violence he portrays illustrates what one well-known sixteenth-century scholar, Jean Céard, calls “le monde à l’envers” (“the world upside down”). The violence and pain of the religious struggles left most everyone feeling that the world had gone topsy-turvy, that the natural had given way to the unnatural. The feuding twins and the mother ravaged by her own children exemplify this phenomenon: war between different countries could be understood, but not matricide, not fratricide.

Nonetheless, this passage is not devoid of God’s presence and the conviction of eventual triumph for the Huguenots, for here d’Aubigné depicts the Catholics as Esau and his own parti as Jacob. Although the French Protestants, in their typological reading of the Old Testament, most often compared themselves to the Israelites coming out of Egypt, their reading of the story of Esau and Jacob was also highly important, because Jacob represented God’s mysterious election—of them, the Huguenots.

Speaking of Jacob’s “righteous anger,” d’Aubigné does not miss the chance to justify the rebellion of the Huguenots. The Protestants heeded Calvin’s call to endure persecution patiently until the tenets of the first edict of religious freedom, the édit de janvier, were violated by the Catholics at the massacre of Vassy, which led to the first religious war.

More important, when d’Aubigné depicts the Huguenots as Jacob, he immediately changes the story from one seen on a purely human level to one being told within the overall narrative of God’s kingdom and his work on behalf of the elect.

No matter how horrid and difficult their sufferings, the Huguenots were sure of one thing: as Jacob, they were God’s chosen, while the Catholics were rejected. They firmly believed that, although God might be chastening them, he loved them and was already establishing his kingdom in the manner described in Les Tragiques.

Alan D. Savage is associate professor of French at Wheaton College.

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History magazine. Click here for reprint information on Christian History.

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