CHAPTER XII.

THE CHURCH IN THE DESERT, 1730-62—PAUL RABAUT.

The persecutions of the Huguenots increased at one time and relaxed at another. When France was at war, and the soldiers were fighting in Flanders or on the Rhine, the bishops became furious, and complained bitterly to the government of the toleration shown to the Protestants. The reason was that there were no regiments at liberty to pursue the Huguenots and disperse their meetings in the Desert. When the soldiers returned from the wars, persecution began again.

It usually began with the seizing and burning of books. The book-burning days were considered amongst the great days of fête.

One day in June, 1730, the Intendant of Languedoc visited Nismes, escorted by four battalions of troops. On arriving, the principal Catholics were selected, and placed as commissaries to watch the houses of the suspected Huguenots. At night, while the inhabitants slept, the troops turned out, and the commissaries pointed out the Huguenot houses to be searched. The inmates were knocked up, the soldiers entered, the houses were rummaged, and all the books that could be found were taken to the Hôtel de Ville.

A few days after a great auto-da-fé was held. The entire Catholic population turned out. There were the four battalions of troops, the gendarmes, the Catholic priests, and the chief dignitaries; and in their presence all the Huguenot books were destroyed. They were thrown into a pile on the usual place of execution, and the hangman set fire to this great mass of Bibles, psalm-books, catechisms, and sermons. The officers laughed, the priests sneered, the multitude cheered. These bonfires were of frequent occurrence in all the towns of Languedoc.

But if the priests hated the printed word, still more did they hate the spoken word. They did not like the Bible, but they hated the preachers. Fines, auto-da-fés, condemnation to the galleys, seizures of women and girls, and profanation of the dead, were tolerable punishments, but there was nothing like hanging a preacher. "Nothing," said Saint-Florentin to the commandant of La Devese, "can produce more impression than hanging a preacher; and it is very desirable that you should immediately take steps to arrest one of them."

The commandant obeyed orders, and apprehended Pierre Durand. He was on his way to baptize the child of one of his congregation, who lived on a farm in Viverais. An apparent peasant, who seemed to be waiting his approach, offered to conduct him to the farm. Durand followed him. The peasant proved to be a soldier in disguise. He led Durand directly into the midst of his troop. There he was bound and carried off to Montpellier.

Durand was executed at the old place—the Peyrou—the soldiers beating their drums to stifle his voice while he prayed. His corpse was laid beside that of Alexandre Roussel, under the rampart of the fortress of Montpellier. Durand was the last of the preachers in France who had attended the synod of 1715. They had all been executed, excepting only Antoine Court, who was safe in Switzerland.

The priests were not so successful with Claris, the preacher, who contrived to escape their clutches. Claris had just reached France on his return from the seminary at Lausanne. He had taken shelter for the night with a Protestant friend at Foissac, near Uzes. Scarcely had he fallen asleep, when the soldiers, informed by the spies, entered his chamber, bound him, and marched him off on foot by night, to Alais. He was thrown into gaol, and was afterwards judged and condemned to death. His friends in Alais, however, secretly contrived to get an iron chisel passed to him in prison. He raised the stone of a chamber which communicated with his dungeon, descended to the ground, and silently leapt the wall. He was saved.

Pastors and preachers continued to be tracked and hunted with renewed ardour in Saintonge, Poitou, Gascony, and Dauphiny. "The Chase," as it was called, was better organized than it had been for twenty years previously. The Catholic clergy, however, continued to complain. The chase, they said, was not productive enough! The hangings of pastors were too few. The curates of the Cevennes thus addressed the intendants: "You do not perform your duty: you are neither active enough nor pitiless enough;" and they requested the government to adopt more vigorous measures.

The intendants, who were thus accused, insisted that they had done their duty. They had hanged all the Huguenot preachers that the priests and their spies had discovered and brought to them. They had also offered increased rewards for the preachers' heads. If Protestantism counted so large a number of adherents, they were surely not to blame for that! Had the priests themselves done their duty? Thus the intendants and the curés reproached each other by turns.

And yet the pastors and preachers had not been spared. They had been hanged without mercy. They knew they were in the peril of constant death. "I have slept fifteen days in a meadow," wrote Cortez, the pastor, "and I write this under a tree." Morel, the preacher, when attending an assembly, was fired at by the soldiers and died of his wounds. Pierre Dortial was also taken prisoner when holding an assembly. The host with whom he lived was condemned to the galleys for life; the arrondissement in which the assembly had been held was compelled to pay a fine of three thousand livres; and Dortial himself was sentenced to be hanged. When the aged preacher was informed of his sentence he exclaimed: "What an honour for me, oh my God! to have been chosen from so many others to suffer death because of my constancy to the truth." He was executed at Nismes, and died with courage.

In 1742 France was at war, and the Huguenots enjoyed a certain amount of liberty. The edicts against them were by no means revoked; their execution was merely suspended. The provinces were stripped of troops, and the clergy could no longer call upon them to scatter the meetings in the Desert. Hence the assemblies increased. The people began to think that the commandants of the provinces had received orders to shut their eyes, and see nothing of the proceedings of the Huguenots.

At a meeting held in a valley between Calvisson and Langlade, in Languedoc, no fewer than ten thousand persons openly met for worship. No troops appeared. There was no alarm nor surprise. Everything passed in perfect quiet. In many other places, public worship was celebrated, the sacrament was administered, children were baptized, and marriages were celebrated in the open day.

The Catholics again urgently complained to the government of the increasing number of Huguenot meetings. The Bishop of Poitiers complained that in certain parishes of his diocese there was not now a single Catholic. Low Poitou contained thirty Protestant churches, divided into twelve arrondissements, and each arrondissement contained about seven thousand members. The Procureur-Général of Normandy said, "All this country is full of Huguenots." But the government had at present no troops to spare, and the Catholic bishops and clergy must necessarily wait until the war with the English and the Austrians had come to an end.

Antoine Court paid a short visit to Languedoc in 1744, to reconcile a difference which had arisen in the Church through the irregular conduct of Pastor Boyer. Court was received with great enthusiasm, and when Boyer was re-established in his position as pastor, after making his submission to the synod, a convocation of Huguenots was held near Sauzet, at which thousands of people were present. Court remained for about a month in France, preaching almost daily to immense audiences. At Nismes, he preached at the famous place for Huguenot meetings—in the old quarry, about three miles from the town. There were about twenty thousand persons present, ranged, as in an amphitheatre, along the sides of the quarry. It was a most impressive sight. Peasants and gentlemen mixed together. Even the "beau monde" of Nismes was present. Everybody thought that there was now an end of the persecution.

In the meantime the clergy continued to show signs of increasing irritation. They complained, denounced, and threatened. Various calumnies were invented respecting the Huguenots. The priests of Dauphiny gave out that Roger, the pastor, had read an edict purporting to be signed by Louis XV. granting complete toleration to the Huguenots! The report was entirely without foundation, and Roger indignantly denied that he had read any such edict. But the report reached the ears of the King, then before Ypres with his army; on which he issued a proclamation announcing that the rumour publicly circulated that it was his intention to tolerate the Huguenots was absolutely false.

No sooner had the war terminated, and the army returned to France, than the persecutions recommenced as hotly as ever. The citizens of Nismes, for having recently encouraged the Huguenots and attended Court's great meeting, were heavily fined. All the existing laws for the repression and destruction of Protestantism were enforced. Suspected persons were apprehended and imprisoned without trial. A new "hunt" was set on foot for preachers. There were now plenty of soldiers at liberty to suppress the meetings in the Desert, and they were ordered into the infested quarters. In a word, persecution was let loose all over France. Nor was it without the usual results. It was very hot in Dauphiny. There a detachment of horse police, accompanied by regular troops and a hangman, ran through the province early in 1745, spreading terror everywhere. One of their exploits was to seize a sick old Huguenot, drag him from his bed, and force him towards prison. He died upon the road.

In February, it was ascertained that the Huguenots met for worship in a certain cavern. The owner of the estate on which the cavern was situated, though unaware of the meetings, was fined a thousand crowns, and imprisoned for a year in the Castle of Cret.

Next month, Louis Ranc, a pastor, was seized at Livron while baptizing an infant, taken to Die, and hanged. He had scarcely breathed his last, when the hangman cut the cord, hewed off the head, and made a young Protestant draw the corpse along the streets of Die.

In the month of April, 1745, Jacques Roger, the old friend and coadjutor of Court—the apostle of Dauphiny as Court had been of Languedoc—was taken prisoner and conducted to Grenoble. Roger was then eighty years old, worn out with privation and hard work. He was condemned to death. He professed his joy at being still able to seal with his blood the truths he had so often proclaimed. On his way to the scaffold, he sang aloud the fifty-first Psalm. He was executed in the Place du Breuil. After he had hung for twenty-four hours, his body was taken down, dragged along the streets of Grenoble, and thrown into the Isère.

At Grenoble also, in the same year, seven persons were condemned to the galleys. A young woman was publicly whipped at the same place for attending a Huguenot meeting. Seven students and pastors who could not be found, were hanged in effigy. Four houses were demolished for having served as asylums for preachers. Fines were levied on all sides, and punishments of various kinds were awarded to many hundred persons. Thus persecution ran riot in Dauphiny in the years 1745 and 1746.

In Languedoc it was the same. The prisons and the galleys were always kept full. Dragoons were quartered in the Huguenot villages, and by this means the inhabitants were soon ruined. The soldiers pillaged the houses, destroyed the furniture, tore up the linen, drank all the wine, and, when they were in good humour, followed the cattle, swine, and fowl, and killed them off sword in hand. Montauban, an old Huguenot town, was thus ruined in the course of a very few months.

One day, in a Languedoc village, a soldier seized a young girl with a foul intention. She cried aloud, and the villagers came to her rescue. The dragoons turned out in a body, and fired upon the people. An old man was shot dead, a number of the villagers were taken prisoners, and, with their hands tied to the horses' tails, were conducted for punishment to Montauban.

All the towns and villages in Upper Languedoc were treated with the same cruelty. Nismes was fined over and over again. Viverais was treated with the usual severity. M. Désubas, the pastor, was taken prisoner there, and conducted to Vernoux. As the soldiers led him through the country to prison, the villagers came out in crowds to see him pass. Many followed the pastor, thinking they might be able to induce the magistrates of Vernoux to liberate him. The villagers were no sooner cooped up in a mass in the chief street of the town, than they were suddenly fired upon by the soldiers. Thirty persons were killed on the spot, more than two hundred were wounded, and many afterwards died of their wounds.

Désubas, the pastor, was conducted to Nismes, and from Nismes to Montpellier. While on his way to death at Montpellier, some of his peasant friends, who lived along the road, determined to rescue him. But when Paul Rabaut heard of the proposed attempt, he ran to the place where the people had assembled and held them back. He was opposed to all resistance to the governing power, and thought it possible, by patience and righteousness, to live down all this horrible persecution.

Désubas was judged, and, as usual, condemned to death. Though it was winter time, he was led to his punishment almost naked; his legs uncovered, and only in thin linen vest over his body. Arrived at the gallows, his books and papers were burnt before his eyes, and he was then delivered over to the executioner. A Jesuit presented a crucifix for him to kiss, but he turned his head to one side, raised his eyes upwards, and was then hanged.

The same persecution prevailed over the greater part of France. In Saintonge, Elie Vivien, the preacher, was taken prisoner, and hanged at La Rochelle. His body remained for twenty-four hours on the gallows. It was then placed upon a forked gibbet, where it hung until the bones were picked clean by the crows and bleached by the wind and the sun.

The same series of persecutions went on from one year to another. It was a miserable monotony of cruelty. There was hanging for the pastors; the galleys for men attending meetings in the Desert; the prisons and convents for women and children. Wherever it was found that persons had been married by the Huguenot pastors, they were haled before the magistrate, fined and imprisoned, and told that they had been merely living in concubinage, and that their children were illegitimate.

Sometimes it was thought that the persecutors would relent. France was again engaged in a disastrous war with England and Austria; and it was feared that England would endeavour to stir up a rebellion amongst the Huguenots. But the pastors met in a general synod, and passed resolutions assuring the government of their loyalty to the King, and of their devotion to the laws of France!

Their "loyalty" proved of no use. The towns of Languedoc were as heavily fined as before, for attending meetings in the Desert. Children were, as usual, taken away from their parents and placed in Jesuit convents. Le Nain apprehended Jean Desjours, and had him hanged at Montpellier, on the ground that he had accompanied the peasants who, as above recited, went into Vernoux after the martyr Désubas.

The Catholics would not even allow Protestant corpses to be buried in peace. At Levaur a well-known Huguenot died. Two of his friends went to dig a grave for him by night; they were observed by spies and informed against. By dint of money and entreaties, however, the friends succeeded in getting the dead man buried. The populace, stirred up by the White Penitents (monks), opened the grave, took out the corpse, sawed the head from the body, and prepared to commit further outrages, when the police interfered, and buried the body again, in consideration of the large sum that had been paid to the authorities for its interment.

The populace were always wild for an exhibition of cruelty. In Provence, a Protestant named Montague died, and was secretly interred. The Catholics having discovered the place where he was buried determined to disinter him. The grave was opened, and the corpse taken out. A cord was attached to the neck, and the body was hauled through the village to the music of a tambourine and flageolet. At every step it was kicked or mauled by the crowd who accompanied it. Under the kicks the corpse burst. The furious brutes then took out the entrails and attached them to poles, going through the village crying, "Who wants preachings? Who wants preachings?"

To such a pitch of brutality had the kings of France and their instigators, the Jesuits—who, since the Revocation of the Edict, had nearly the whole education of the country in their hands—reduced the people; from whom they were themselves, however, to suffer almost an equal amount of indignity.

In the midst of these hangings and cruelties, the bishops again complained bitterly of the tolerance granted to the Huguenots. M. de Montclus, Bishop of Alais, urged "that the true cause of all the evils that afflict the country was the relaxation of the laws against heresy by the magistrates, that they gave themselves no trouble to persecute the Protestants, and that their further emigration from the kingdom was no more to be feared than formerly." It was, they alleged, a great danger to the country that there should be in it two millions of men allowed to live without church and outside the law.

The afflicted Church at this time had many misfortunes to contend with. In 1748, the noble, self-denying, indefatigable Claris died—one of the few Protestant pastors who died in his bed. In 1750, the eloquent young preacher, François Benezet, was taken and hanged at Montpellier. Meetings in the Desert were more vigorously attacked and dispersed, and when surrounded by the soldiers, most persons were shot; the others were taken prisoners.

The Huguenot pastors repeatedly addressed Louis XV. and his ministers, appealing to them for protection as loyal subjects. In 1750 they addressed the King in a new memorial, respectfully representing that their meetings for public worship, sacraments, baptisms, and marriages, were matters of conscience. They added: "Your troops pursue us in the deserts as if we were wild beasts; our property is confiscated; our children are torn from us; we are condemned to the galleys; and although our ministers continually exhort us to discharge our duty as good citizens and faithful subjects, a price is set upon their heads, and when they are taken, they are cruelly executed." But Louis XV. and his ministers gave no greater heed to this petition than they had done to those which had preceded it.

After occasional relays the Catholic persecutions again broke out. In 1752 there was a considerable emigration in consequence of a new intendant having been appointed to Languedoc. The Catholics called upon him to put in force the powers of the law. New brooms sweep clean. The Intendant proceeded to carry out the law with such ferocity as to excite great terror throughout the province. Meetings were surrounded; prisoners taken and sent to the galleys; and all the gaols and convents were filled with women and children.

The emigration began again. Many hundred persons went to Holland; and a still larger number went to settle with their compatriots as silk and poplin weavers in Dublin. The Intendant of Languedoc tried to stop their flight. The roads were again watched as before. All the outlets from the kingdom were closed by the royalist troops. Many of the intending emigrants were made prisoners. They were spoiled of everything, robbed of their money, and thrown into gaol. Nevertheless, another large troop started, passed through Switzerland, and reached Ireland at the end of the year.

At the same time, emigration was going on from Normandy and Poitou, where persecution was compelling the people to fly from their own shores and take refuge in England. This religious emigration of 1752 was, however, almost the last which took place from France. Though the persecutions were drawing to an end, they had not yet come to a close.

In 1754, the young pastor Tessier (called Lafage), had just returned from Lausanne, where he had been pursuing his studies for three years. He had been tracked by a spy to a certain house, where he had spent the night. Next morning the house was surrounded by soldiers. Tessier tried to escape by getting out of a top window and running along the roofs of the adjoining houses. A soldier saw him escaping and shot at him. He was severely wounded in the arm. He was captured, taken before the Intendant of Languedoc, condemned, and hanged in the course of the same day.

Religious meetings also continued to be surrounded, and were treated in the usual brutal manner. For instance, an assembly was held in Lower Languedoc on the 8th of August, 1756, for the purpose of ordaining to the ministry three young men who had arrived from Lausanne, where they had been educated. A number of pastors were present, and as many as from ten to twelve thousand men, women, and children were there from the surrounding country. The congregation was singing a psalm, when a detachment of soldiers approached. The people saw them; the singing ceased; the pastors urging patience and submission. The soldiers fired; every shot told; and the crowd fled in all directions. The meeting was thus dispersed, leaving the murderers—in other words, the gallant soldiers—masters of the field; a long track of blood remaining to mark the site on which the prayer-meeting had been held.

It is not necessary to recount further cruelties and tortures. Assemblies surrounded and people shot; preachers seized and hanged; men sent to the galleys; women sent to the Tour de Constance; children carried off to the convents—such was the horrible ministry of torture in France. When Court heard of the re-inflictions of some old form of torture—"Alas," said he, "there is nothing new under the sun. In all times, the storm of persecution has cleansed the threshing-floor of the Lord."

And yet, notwithstanding all the bitterness of the persecution, the number of Protestants increased. It is difficult to determine their numbers. Their apologists said they amounted to three millions; their detractors that they did not amount to four hundred thousand. The number of itinerant pastors, however, steadily grew. In 1756 there were 48 pastors at work, with 22 probationary preachers and students. In 1763 there were 62 pastors, 35 preachers, and 15 students.

Then followed the death of Antoine Court himself in Switzerland—after watching over the education and training of preachers at the Lausanne Seminary. Feeling his powers beginning to fail, he had left Lausanne, and resided at Timonex. There, assisted by his son Court de Gébelin, Professor of Logic at the College, he conducted an immense correspondence with French Protestants at home and abroad.

Court's wife died in 1755, to his irreparable loss. His "Rachel," during his many years of peril, had been his constant friend and consoler. Unable, after her death, to live at Timonex, so full of cruel recollections, Court returned to Lausanne. He did not long survive his wife's death. While engaged in writing the history of the Reformed Church of France, he was taken ill. His history of the Camisards was sent to press, and he lived to revise the first proof-sheets. But he did not survive to see the book published. He died on the 15th June, 1760, in the sixty-fourth year of his age.

From the time of Court's death—indeed from the time that Court left France to settle at Lausanne—Paul Rabaut continued to be looked upon as the leader and director of the proscribed Huguenot Church. Rabaut originally belonged to Bedarieux in Languedoc. He was a great friend of Pradel's. Rabaut served the Church at Nismes, and Pradel at Uzes. Both spent two years at Lausanne in 1744-5. Court entertained the highest affection for Rabaut, and regarded him as his successor. And indeed he nobly continued the work which Court had begun.

Besides being zealous, studious, and pious, Rabaut was firm, active, shrewd, and gentle. He stood strongly upon moral force. Once, when the Huguenots had become more than usually provoked by the persecutions practised on them, they determined to appear armed at the assemblies. Rabaut peremptorily forbade it. If they persevered, he would forsake their meetings. He prevailed, and they came armed only with their Bibles.

The directness of Rabaut's character, the nobility of his sentiments, the austerity of his life, and his heroic courage, evidently destined him as the head of the work which Court had begun. Antoine Court! Paul Rabaut! The one restored Protestantism in France, the other rooted and established it.

Rabaut's enthusiasm may be gathered from the following extract of a letter which he wrote to a friend at Geneva: "When I fix my attention upon the divine fire with which, I will not say Jesus Christ and the Apostles, but the Reformed and their immediate successors, burned for the salvation of souls, it seems to me that, in comparison with them, we are ice. Their immense works astound me, and at the same time cover me with confusion. What would I not give to resemble them in everything laudable!"

Rabaut had the same privations, perils, and difficulties to undergo as the rest of the pastors in the Desert. He had to assume all sorts of names and disguises while he travelled through the country, in order to preach at the appointed places. He went by the names of M. Paul, M. Denis, M. Pastourel, and M. Theophile; and he travelled under the disguises of a common labourer, a trader, a journeyman, and a baker.

He was condemned to death, as a pastor who preached in defiance of the law; but his disguises were so well prepared, and the people for whom he ministered were so faithful to him, that the priests and other spies never succeeded in apprehending him. Singularly enough, he was in all other respects in favour of the recognition of legal authority, and strongly urged his brethren never to adopt any means whatever of forcibly resisting the King's orders.

Many of the military commanders were becoming disgusted with the despicable and cowardly business which the priests called upon them to do. Thus, on one occasion, a number of Protestants had assembled at the house of Paul Rabaut at Nismes, and, while they were on their knees, the door was suddenly burst open, when a man, muffled up, presented himself, and throwing open his cloak, discovered the military commandant of the town. "My friends," he said, "you have Paul Rabaut with you; in a quarter of an hour I shall be here with my soldiers, accompanied by Father —, who has just laid the information against you." When the soldiers arrived, headed by the commandant and the father, of course no Paul Rabaut was to be found.

"For more than thirty years," says one of Paul Rabaut's biographers, "caverns and huts, whence he was unearthed like a wild animal, were his only habitation. For a long time he dwelt in a safe hiding-place that one of his faithful guides had provided for him, under a pile of stones and thorn-bushes. It was discovered at length by a shepherd, and such was the wretchedness of his condition, that, when he was forced to abandon the place, he still regretted this retreat, which was more fit for savage beasts than men."

Yet this hut of piled stones was for some time the centre of Protestant affairs in France. All the faithful instinctively turned to Rabaut when assailed by fresh difficulties and persecutions, and acted on his advice. He obtained the respect even of the Catholics themselves, because it was known that he was a friend of peace, and opposed to all risings and rebellions amongst his people.

Once he had the courage to present a petition to the Marquis de Paulmy, Minister of War, when changing horses at a post-house between Nismes and Montpellier. Rabaut introduced himself by name, and the Marquis knew that it was the proscribed pastor who stood before him. He might have arrested and hanged Rabaut on the spot; but, impressed by the noble bearing of the pastor, he accepted the petition, and promised to lay it before the king.