brutal soldiery, free from all restraint, committed every conceivable excess. They scourged little children in the presence of their parents, that the shrieks of agony of the child might induce the parents to abjure their faith. They violated the modesty of women and girls, and mangled their bodies with the lash. They tortured, mutilated, disfigured. And when human nature in its extreme of agony yielded, the exhausted victim was compelled to sign a recantation of his faith, declaring that he did it of his own free will, without compulsion or persuasion. In their terror the Protestants fled in all directions, into the fields, the forests, to caves, and made desperate endeavors to escape from the kingdom. Multitudes died of exhaustion and famine by the way-side and on the sea-shore. Large tracts of country were thus nearly depopulated. Madame de Maintenon wrote to her brother, sending him a present of a large sum of money:
"I beseech you employ usefully the money you are to have. The lands in Poitou are sold for nothing. The distresses of the Protestants will bring more into market. You can easily establish yourself splendidly in Poitou."
The Protestant countries, England, Switzerland, Holland, and Denmark, issued proclamations to these persecuted Christians offering them an asylum. The court was alarmed, and interdicted their leaving the kingdom under penalty of condemnation to the galleys, confiscation of their property, and the annulling of all contracts they should have made for a year before their emigration.10
The condition of the Protestants was now miserable in the extreme. It was the determination of the court utterly to exterminate the reformed faith. The Archbishop of Paris made out a list of the works of four hundred authors who were considered as assailing Catholicism, and all the libraries, public and private, of the kingdom were searched that the condemned books might be burned.
There were between two and three millions of Protestants in France.11 The dragoons were sent in every direction through the kingdom, enjoined by the court, to secure, at whatever expense of torture, a return to Catholicism. One of the tortures which these merciless fanatics were fond of applying was to deprive their victim of sleep. They kept the sufferer standing, and relieved each other in their cruel work of pinching, pricking, twitching, pulling with ropes, burning, suffocating with offensive fumes, until after successive days and nights of torture the victim was driven to madness, and to promise any thing to escape from his tormentors. By these means, it was boasted that in the district of Bordeaux, where there were one hundred and fifty thousand Protestants, one hundred and forty thousand were converted in a fortnight. The Duke of Noailles wrote to the court that in the district to which he had been sent with his dragoons there had been two hundred and forty thousand Protestants, but he thought that by the end of the month none could be left.
In the year 1598 Henry IV., by the Edict of Nantes, had granted freedom of conscience and of worship to the Protestants. Louis XIV. now issued a decree revoking this edict. The revocation, which was signed the 18th of October, 1685, states in the preamble that "since the better and the greater part of our subjects of the pretended reformed religion have embraced the Catholic faith, the maintenance of the Edict of Nantes remains superfluous." It then declares that no more exercise of the reformed worship is to be tolerated in the realm. All the Protestant pastors were to leave the kingdom within fifteen days, and were forbidden to exercise their office under pain of the galleys. Parents were forbidden to instruct their children in the reformed faith, and were enjoined to send them to the Catholic church to be baptized and to be instructed in the Catholic schools and catechism, under penalty of a fine of five hundred livres. The Protestant laity were prohibited from emigrating under pain of the galleys for the men, and imprisonment for life for the women.
Notwithstanding the penalty, vast numbers escaped from the kingdom. No vigilance could guard such extended frontiers. In one year after the revocation, Vauban wrote that France had lost one hundred thousand inhabitants, twelve thousand disciplined soldiers, six hundred officers, and her most flourishing manufactures. The Duke of St. Simon records that "a fourth part of the kingdom was perceptibly depopulated."
These crimes perpetrated against religion filled the land with infidelity. There were even Catholics of noble name and note, as Fénélon and Massillon, who energetically remonstrated. Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Mirabeau, not distinguishing between Christianity and the Papal Church, uttered cries of indignation which thrilled upon the ear of Europe and undermined the foundations of Christianity itself.
The edict of revocation was executed with the utmost rigor. The pastors in Paris were not allowed even the fifteen days which the edict granted, but were ordered to leave in forty-eight hours. Those pastors who had children over seven years of age had those children taken from them. Fathers and mothers, thus robbed of their children, in poverty and heart-broken, were driven into exile. "Old men of eighty or ninety years were seen gathering up the last remains of their life to undertake distant journeys, and more than one died before reaching the asylum where he was to rest his weary foot and drooping head."12
The court became alarmed by the magnitude of emigration. Guards were posted at the gates of towns, at the fords of rivers, on the bridges, on the highways, and at all points of departure upon the frontiers. Still the fugitives, hiding in caverns by day and traveling by night through by-paths, in great numbers eluded their foes. Every conceivable disguise was adopted, as of shepherds, pilgrims, hunters, valets, merchants. Women of rank—for there were not a few such among the Protestants, who had been accustomed to all the delicacies and indulgences of life—traveled on foot, exposed to hunger and storms, two or three hundred miles. Girls of sixteen, of all ranks in life, incurred the same hardships and perils. They disfigured their faces, wore coarse and ragged garments, and trundled wheel-barrows filled with manure, or carried heavy burdens, to elude suspicion. Some assumed the disguise of men or boys and took the office of servants; others feigned insanity or to be deaf and dumb. In these ways large numbers escaped to Rotterdam.13
Those near the sea-shore concealed themselves in ships among bales of merchandise, and in hogsheads stowed away among the freight. There were children who passed whole weeks in such lurking places without uttering a cry. Some desperately pushed out to sea in open boats, trusting to winds and waves to bear them to a place of safety. Thousands perished of cold, exposure, and starvation. Thousands were seized, loaded with chains, and dragged through the realm in derision and contempt, and were then condemned to pass the remainder of their days as galley-slaves. The galleys of Marseilles were crowded with these victims, among whom were many of the noblest men who have ever dwelt on earth. The prisons were crowded with women arrested in their flight and doomed to life-long captivity.
It is estimated that five hundred thousand found a refuge in foreign lands. Thirteen hundred passed through the city of Geneva in one week. England formed eleven regiments out of the refugees. One of the faubourgs of London was entirely peopled by these exiles. M. de Sismondi estimates that as many perished in the attempt to escape as escaped. A hundred thousand in the Province of Languedoc died prematurely, and of these ten thousand perished by fire, the gallows, or the wheel.14 We can not but sympathize with the indignation of Michelet as he exclaims:
"Let the Revolutionary Reign of Terror beware of comparing herself with the Inquisition. Let her never boast of having, in her two or three years, paid back to the old system what it did for us for six hundred years! The Inquisition would have good cause to laugh. What are the twelve thousand men guillotined of the one, to the millions of men butchered, hung, broken on the wheel—to that pyramid of burning stakes—to those masses of burnt flesh which the other piled up to heaven. The single inquisition of one of the provinces of Spain states, in an authentic monument, that in sixteen years it burned twenty thousand men!
"History will inform us that in her most ferocious and implacable
