Huguenot Contributions to English Pan-Protestantism, 1685-1700

Following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, hundreds of thousands of French refugees sought shelter in Protestant states like the United Provinces and England. In England, the influx of Huguenots contributed significantly towards the argument for greater pan-Protestant engagement with the European continent. Huguenot-authored pamphlets advertised Catholic barbarity, deepening pre-existing anti-Catholic sentiments and imbibing those sentiments with other anti-French concerns, such as Louis XIV’s supposed immorality and his striving for universal monarchy. Further, key Huguenot authors reinterpreted the Glorious Revolution as one synchronizing the country with its Protestant brethren. In so doing, the Huguenots supported William III’s commitment to the Nine Years’ War and increased the quantitative and qualitative arguments to carry out an expensive religious-ideological foreign policy, often against domestic criticisms in England that the outcomes of the war did not match the expense.

Was François Fénelon a Political Philosopher?

During the reign of Louis XIV, few courtiers led careers as full and consequential as that of François Fénelon. Born in 1651 to a nobleman from an ancient line but with little wealth, Fénelon was well schooled through scholarships, rising as a young priest, scholar, teacher, and administrator through the Church hierarchy. The 1685 Revocation of the Edict of Nantes gave Fénelon the opportunity to distinguish himself as an educator at a school for girls who had recently converted from Calvinism to Catholicism. A rising star in King Louis XIV's court, he was mentored by the Crown's leading theologian and political theorist, Jacques Bénigne Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux, and rubbed shoulders with notables like the Duc de Saint-Simon. These associations led to his appointment as special tutor for Louis XIV's three grandsons, one of whom eventually became Philip V, king of Spain. Fénelon's own ambitions were rewarded in 1695, when he was appointed Archbishop of Cambrai. Over the course of his decorated career, Fénelon wrote theology, mysticism, and pedagogy, as well as more lighthearted fictional literature. He died in 1715, a few months before Louis XIV's own death.

The Huguenots in America

The Protestant Reformation took root in France in the middle of the 16th century under the distant leadership of Jean (John) Calvin who settled in Geneva in 1541. In the 1560s, France was devastated by a series of religious and civil wars. These wars ended in 1598 when Henry IV, a former Huguenot who converted to Catholicism to access the throne, signed the Edict of Nantes. This edict protected the Huguenots. In the 17th century, however, its provisions were abrogated one by one. Daily life for the Huguenots was more and more limited and many Huguenots, especially in Northern France, converted to Catholicism. After a decade or so of legal harassment, and at times military violence, Louis XIV, whose objective was to achieve a religious reunification of his kingdom, revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Huguenots could then either convert or resist. Resistance led to imprisonment and being sent to the galleys and, for women, to convents. At least 150,000—of a population of nearly 800,000—left France, forming what has been labeled by French historians as the Refuge. Huguenots fled first to neighboring countries, the Netherlands, the Swiss cantons, England, and some German states, and a few thousand of them farther away to Russia, Scandinavia, British North America, and the Dutch Cape colony in southern Africa. About 2,000 Huguenots settled in New York, South Carolina, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island in the mid-1680s and in 1700 in Virginia. They settled in port cities, Charleston, New York, and Boston, or founded rural communities (New Paltz and New Rochelle, New York, Orange Quarter and French Santee, South Carolina, and Manakintown, Virginia). The Huguenots originally attempted to live together and founded French Reformed churches. But with time they married English settlers, were naturalized, were elected to colonial assemblies and to political offices, and joined other churches, especially the Church of England. In South Carolina and New York, they acquired slaves, a sign of their economic prosperity. By the 1720s and 1730s most Huguenots were fully integrated into colonial societies while maintaining for a decade or so the use of the French language in the private sphere and keeping ties to their original French church. In the 18th century, a new wave of Huguenot refugees mixed with French- and German-speaking Swiss formed rural communities in South Carolina (Purrysburgh, New Bordeaux) under the leadership of a colonial entrepreneur or a pastor. These communities quickly disappeared as Huguenots gradually acquired land elsewhere or moved to Savannah and Charleston. In the 1880s, Huguenot Societies were formed to commemorate the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in England, Germany, New York, and South Carolina. The memory of the Huguenot diaspora was maintained by these genealogical, historical, and patriotic societies until professional historians started to study the Refuge a century later.

The Scars of Religious War in Histories of French Cities (1600–1750)

This article explores the memory of France’s Wars of Religion in urban histories published during the century and a half that followed the restoration of peace with the Edict of Nantes in 1598. It asks why, despite explicit prohibitions against reviving memories of injuries suffered during the wars, local historians persisted in demonizing former opponents in histories that remained overtly confessional in their representation of the troubles. The article focuses on Catholic authors, who wrote fifty-six of the fifty-eight works examined. Protestants had little incentive to memorialize the towns in which they had a limited and declining position. Catholics, by contrast, mobilized memory to reaffirm a local identity rooted in Catholic practice and belief. Retelling the suffering local populations endured and recounting the city’s ritual responses to the religious schism, they pushed Protestants to the margins of a civic culture represented as inherently Catholic even in a bi-confessional state.

“Die van de religie”: protestanten op Grand Tour in Frankrijk in de zeventiende eeuw

The French Loire valley was one of the main attractions on the Dutch Grand Tour in the 17th century. It had prestigious academies, private tutors of aristocratic skills such as fencing and formal dancing, and religious communities of Huguenots. This article examines how Protestant Dutch elite travellers expressed their interest, empathy, and connection to these groups of like-minded individuals. Travellers reflected both on past events of the 16th-century French Wars of Religion and on current difficulties. Focusing on the years leading up to the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which drastically changed France’s religious situation in 1685, this article discusses how travellers presented the Huguenots’ troubles.

Reformed Scholastic Philosophy in the Seventeenth-Century Scottish Universities

The Reformation influenced most aspects of Scottish culture, including philosophy. The Scottish regents produced an original synthesis of scholastic philosophy (especially Scotism) and Reformed views. The synthesis is centred on the relevance of the doctrine of the Fall in epistemology, a ‘Calvinist’ division of science (chiefly, of theology from philosophy), and a reductionist (meta)physics of the Eucharist developed against transubstantiation. Scottish Reformed philosophy was influential abroad via the intellectual network of the Scots working in the Protestant Academies in France, until the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685), and in the universities in the United Provinces. The history of Scottish Reformed scholastic philosophy is about its place within the European Reformation, late scholasticism, and the arrival of the ‘new’ philosophies.

The Global Refuge

Huguenot refugees were everywhere in the early modern world. Exiles fleeing French persecution, they scattered around Europe and beyond following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, settling in North America, the Caribbean, South Africa, and even remote islands in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. This book offers the first global history of the Huguenot diaspora, explaining how and why these refugees became such ubiquitous characters in the history of imperialism. The story starts with dreams of Eden, as beleaguered religious migrants sought suitable retreats to build perfect societies far from the political storms of Europe. In order to create these communities, however, the Huguenots needed patrons, and they thus ran headlong into the world of politics. The refugees promoted themselves as the chosen people of empire, religious heroes who also possessed key skills that would strengthen the British and Dutch states. As a result, French Protestants settled around the world—they tried to make silk in South Carolina; they planted vines in South Africa; and they peopled vulnerable frontiers from New England to Suriname. Of course, this embrace of empire led to a gradual abandonment of the Huguenots’ earlier utopian ambitions. They realized that only by blending in, and by mastering foreign institutions, could they prosper in a quickly changing world. Nonetheless, they managed to maintain a key role in the early modern world well into the eighteenth century, before the coming of Revolution upended the ancien régime.

The Edict of Fontainebleau or the Revocation (1685)

The article deals with the edict of Fontainebleau, signed by Louis XIV on October 17, 1685 and registered five days later by the Paris Parliament, which drew a line under the policy of religious tolerance in France at that time. The text of the edict is published in Russian for the first time (Annex № 1). Thanks to Henry IV and his edict of Nantes (1598), France became the only country that legally recognized religious dissociation, which allowed to complete the religious war that exhausted the state. The edict of Nantes was called "eternal" and "irrevocable". Edict Fontainebleau, who abolished it, initiated a gradual transfer of leadership from France to the UK and, more broadly, to the Anglo-Saxon world. This transition was accompanied by a change in the model of governance in France: the decline of the absolute monarchy and attempts to establish a constitutional monarchy.

Early Modern French and Dutch Connections

This chapter traces the development of early modern Scottish Reformed theology vis-à-vis its exchanges with contemporaneous variants of the same tradition in France and the Netherlands. It charts these developments against the backdrop of Muller’s view of early modern Reformed theology as having developed in three phases: (i) early orthodoxy (c.1565 to c.1640), (ii) high orthodoxy (c.1640 to 1725), and (iii) late orthodoxy (1725 to c.1780). This essay locates the Franco-Scottish Reformed relationship as most fruitful in the period of early orthodoxy, which was facilitated by a brief, fragile period of French religious toleration under the Edict of Nantes. In comparison, Dutch–Scottish Reformed connections spanned the entirety of the period and beyond, with theological influence moving from Scotland to the Netherlands, and vice versa. This chapter aims to explain why early modern Scottish Reformed theology’s relationships to its closest continental neighbours developed so differently.