The Camisards fought to defend and to reclaim their religious rights obtained under the Edict of Nantes in 1598. They fought above all for the liberty of conscience to freely worship the God of their religion. The war was triggered by the desire of Louis XIV to impose one law and one faith which tore apart the Cévennes from 1702 to 1705. Thousands of men were imprisoned, deported, sent to the galleys, tortured, and more than five hundred villages suffered the great burning [le grand brûlement].118 The power of the Church and the exclusion and exile of hundreds of thousands of Protestants would harden antagonisms for the next century. Yet, according to Montclos, the idea of tolerance was born.119
One of the ironies of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV is found in the defeat of the French almost two centuries later in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 which will be discussed later. Thousands of Protestant Huguenots, who refused to convert to the king’s religion, fled the waves of persecution for places where they could practice their religion unmolested. In 1870, the descendants of persecuted Huguenots from the previous century were counted among Prussia’s military forces. France was soundly defeated at one of the most devastating battles in French military history at Sedan, a center of French Protestantism until the persecution following the Revocation. The humiliating defeat resulted in the capture of Emperor Napoleon III and his army and ended the Second Empire.120
War of Ideas
Changes in the world of ideas preceded radical change in Europe. According to Fix, “Few transformations of worldview have been as decisive and influential as that which changed the religious worldview of traditional Europe into the rational and secular worldview of modern Europe.”121 The sixteenth century experienced what Jean-Michel Ducomte calls a “laïcisation de la pensée” with the influences of diverse Renaissance thinkers like Erasmus (1466–1536), Francois Rabelais, and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola.122 Erasmus and Luther were contemporaries with some shared criticism of the Church and criticisms of each other. As Stumpf explains it,
Erasmus criticized scholastic jargon not only because of its lack of elegance but even more because it obscured the true teachings of the Gospels. . . . He sensed a deep incongruity between the simple teachings of Christ and the opulence and arrogance of the Papal Court. . . . But he was neither a religious skeptic nor did he become a Lutheran. His was a lover’s quarrel with the church. He wished to harmonize the church’s teaching with the new humanistic learning.123
Erasmus and Luther have been compared in this way: “If Erasmus looked back to antiquity for the treasure of the classics, the Reformers, particularly Luther, looked back to the primitive community of Christians for the original spirit of Christianity. In this way the Renaissance and the Reformation both epitomized a revival of the past.”124 Walker asserts, “The Renaissance was far from being a revival of paganism” and the humanists “perceived no fundamental contradiction between classical and Christian ethics. . . . Renaissance culture, in short, though primarily ‘secular’ and ‘laic,’ was not intrinsically ‘irreligious’ or ‘anticlerical.’”125 However, faith and reason became recognized as two distinct modes of knowledge. Free will won the day against blind religious devotion and the political arena ceased to be considered as the fulfillment of a divine project. Scientific and technical progress in both the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries associated with Ambroise Paré, Copernicus, Kepler or Galileo, contributed to demonstrate that human reason was equipped with the capacity of investigation. There were no longer absolute truths. There were only convictions or hypotheses, all necessarily relative. With Descartes (1596–1650) arrived methodological doubt leading to a new orientation with man thrown into history and seeking to change its course.126
The seventeenth century likewise left its mark on the world of ideas. Fix writes,
It has long been accepted that the great discoveries of the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century played a major role in the gradual displacement of the traditional European religious worldview by an outlook based on reason and secularism. . . . The demonstrated power of human reason to discover the fundamental natural laws governing the operation of the physical universe awakened in people a great confidence in the ability of reason to provide humankind with knowledge of other vital aspects of human experience as well.127
The eighteenth century was marked by the Enlightenment (le siècle des Lumières), known also as the Age of Reason. This period extends from the death of Louis XIV in 1714 to the French Revolution in 1789. The laicization of the State in France finds its origins in the philosophy of Enlightenment thinkers in opposition to religion and the power of the Catholic Church.128 Enlightenment philosophy created the conditions for the recognition of laïcité as a principle of a society open to freedoms and philosophical thinking, some agnostic, some atheistic, yet detached from religion.129 Many of these great thinkers were deists and not opposed to religion as such. They were hostile toward an intolerant religion which became humanly and politically unacceptable.130 Kärkkäinen provides the following caution:
With regard to a more tolerant attitude toward other religions, we should not ignore the radical transformation of intellectual climate brought about by the Enlightenment. Before the Enlightenment and the rise of classical liberalism that followed, most people took it for granted that an exclusive claim to the superiority of Christianity needed no extensive justification. The Enlightenment eradicated major pillars of orthodoxy, however, and left theology and the church to rethink major doctrines and convictions.131
In Davis’s view, “The spirit of the age may be summed up in four words—Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Encylclopæedists. In them, were to lie almost all the Revolutionary law and the prophets.”132 Whether theists like Voltaire or Rousseau, or atheists like Diderot, the philosophers shared the idea of the necessity of separation between the Church and State. Montesquieu advanced a theory on the separation of powers; Voltaire advocated for an enlightened monarchy; Rousseau chose the Republic, but they all condemned the obscurantism of the Church, symbolized by the affairs of Calas, Sirven, and Chevalier de la Barre.133
The Enlightenment cried out for the autonomy of the individual, equality, and tolerance. Luc Ferry remarks concerning the Enlightenment thinkers, that with their critique of superstition, many have considered the birth of a democratic universe as the effect of a rupture with religion.134 The publication of l’Encyclopédie (1751–1780) with 150 scholars, philosophers and specialists from a multitude of disciplines pushed the quest for knowledge and was condemned by the Church. Gaillard describes the times as a “blast of knowledge in constant movement shaking things up, like a steady tide against the cliffs of dogma. And when the insatiable thirst of change met the aspirations of the enlightened nobility, of the dynamic bourgeoisie, and of the miserable commoners, the result was the Revolution.”135
Each of the above-mentioned philosophers and others merit more attention than can be given here. Stumpf sees them as “dissident voices who challenged the traditional modes of thought concerning religion, government, and morality. Believing that human reason provides the most reliable guide to man’s destiny, they held that ‘Reason is to the philosophe what grace is to the Christian.’”136 Among these men, Barzun considers Voltaire “the Enlightenment personified and the supreme master in all genres.”137 Voltaire, born François-Marie Arouet (1694–1778), did not live to see the French Revolution. Yet he is representative of Enlightenment personages who were influential in their advocacy of freedom of and freedom from religion. French was considered the diplomatic language of the eighteenth century and Voltaire’s writings were read throughout Europe. He was no friend to religion, at least as he knew it in France. As a Deist, he mercilessly attacked the established Church in France. For him the Church represented “all the traditionalism, mediævalism, intolerance, and political absolutism as it then existed in France.”138 He became the idol of free thinkers and the reference for an enlightened bourgeoisie. He considered Catholicism harmful to the nations and Christianity as the principal cause of injustice in the world.139 History records the example of Voltaire’s defense of the chevalier, Jean-François de la Barre, who was condemned to death in 1766 for refusing to remove his hat at the passing of a religious procession. The defense was in vain and the nineteen-year-old chevalier was executed, decapitated, his body burned,
