The Huguenots Under the Edict of Nantes and in Diaspora

The era of the Edict of Nantes has rarely attracted much attention from historians of French Protestantism, whose focus has always been on two periods: the era of the faith’s rise, spread, establishment and survival amid the extreme violence of the Wars of Religion, and the era of renewed persecution and resistance following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Insofar as historians of the subject focused on the years from 1598 to 1685, they long occupied themselves chiefly with the political story of the fluctuating intensity of enforcement of the Edict and the considerations and actions that led up to Louis XIV’s decision to annul it. A small but distinguished body of historical literature also explored the history of seventeenth-century French Reformed theology.

My dissertation and first book, Rouen during the Wars of Religion, examined the sequence of conflicts touched off in a major provincial city by the sudden emergence around 1560 of an important Protestant minority. After completing that book, I decided to next focus my archival research on seeking to understand the longer-term consequences of attachment to the Reformed faith for the smaller, more chastened minority that emerged from the crucible of the civil wars. What was the hold of the French Reformed faith on those who held it? How profoundly and in what ways did it shape their behavior and differentiate them from their Catholic neighbors? Could differences be discerned between the two groups in demographic or economic behavior? In cultural practices? Did subsequent generations after 1598 remain true to the faith of their ancestors, or did they fall away from the faith? How much intermarriage was there?

These questions soon drew me into relatively unexplored territory at the intersection of the social, cultural, and religious history of seventeenth-century French Protestantism. In the early phases of this work, my research hypotheses were largely framed with reference to Max Weber’s classic essay on Protestantism and the spirit of capitalism. This led me not only to seek to compare patterns of wealth accumulation and inter-generational mobility between Catholics and Protestants of comparable status; it also led me to ask if Weber’s picture of Calvinist religiosity dominated by anxiety about predestination characterized the inner life of French Huguenots. This required identifying the books that particularly shaped Huguenot religious culture. Soon I was investigating the history of Huguenot piety. The question of fidelity to the faith gave rise to a nationwide investigation of Protestant numbers that revealed regional variations within the overall slow decline in the size of the Huguenot population from c. 1605 to c. 1675. These variations in turn demanded explanation. The demographic statistics accumulated about matters such as the seasonality of marriage also brought to light the unsuspected extent to which the Reformed shared certain folk beliefs with their Catholic neighbors whom they were otherwise quick to brand as “superstitious.” With time, themes of confessionalization and toleration also began to attract my attention and shape my questions.

To properly answer many of the questions I was asking, the quantitative techniques of the then-new “new social history” and the Annales school appeared essential. Finding localities with important Reformed minorities whose archives contained ample numbers of the types of documents needed for such methods required considerable archival prospecting. The discovery of an extensive genealogical register of Alençon’s Protestants facilitated a demographic study of that community using the methods of family reconstitution. Metz’s numerous inventories after death turned out to contain exceptionally complete listings of the books and paintings owned by the deceased that enabled the comparative investigation of book-ownership, reading patterns and the market for art among Catholics and Protestants there. The vast number of marriage contracts in Montpellier’s notarial archives permitted the tracking of changes in the wealth and occupational structure of the two religious communities in that city that shifted from Protestant-majority at the beginning of the century to Catholic-majority by 1675. Some attempted investigations did not pan out. I especially regretted my inability to complete, for want of time, patience, and a sufficiently large sample of documents, a comparative study of patterns of consumption and investment among the Protestants and Catholics of Amiens using that city’s famously rich inventories after death. But in the end my research on these topics between 1980 and 2000 yielded not merely a vastly different agenda of questions from those that historians of French Protestantism had previously asked about this period, but also answers to many of them. The questions, I realized while writing my general history of Calvinism, were ones that could fruitfully be asked about post-Reformation confessional minorities in any portion of Europe. In 2001 I brought together the most important article- and monograph-length studies of these topics in The Faith and Fortunes of France’s Huguenots, 1600-85 (St Andrews Studies in Reformation History, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001),

This volume also had a methodological agenda. The decades of the 1980s and 1990s during which I worked on these topics witnessed the linguistic turn among historians. A purely text-based cultural history rose in prestige. The quantitative methods that were so important in many of my studies fell from favor. As the decades advanced, some of my own studies also began to draw upon the close reading of a small number of texts. In publishing these studies within the same covers as the heavily quantitative ones, I hoped to demonstrate, not how one approached had superseded the other, but the complementarity of methods of statistical analysis and careful reading, too often cast in opposition to each other. I still consider the turn against serial and quantitative methods among historians a serious loss for the profession. Where appropriate, these methods bring to light patterns of collective behavior diagnosable in no other way, demonstrate what is the norm and what is the exception, and add precision to statements about trends or the relative weight of multiple causes.

The Faith and Fortunes of France’s Huguenots is now out of print but accessible here. Users who open this file as a PDF, e.g. in Adobe Acrobat or other PDF reader, should open the bookmark tab to navigate most easily within the book.

Some simple methodological lessons drawn from this phase of my research career are summarized in “Thinking About Religion and Society in the 17th and 18th Century: Confessionalization, the History of Toleration, and Beyond,” Schweizerische Zeitschrift fur Religions- und Kulturgeschichte 101 (2007), 247-256.

Related Publications

“Les transformations sociales d’une communauté réformée: Alençon 1620-1685” in B. Chevalier and R. Sauzet, eds. Les Réformes: Enracinement socio-culturel (Paris: Editions de la Maisnie, 1985), p. 95-110, reprinted in The Faith and Fortune of France’s Huguenots.

“Bibliothèques protestantes et catholiques à Metz au XVIIe siècle,” Annales: Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations, 1985, no. 2, 343-370, English version in The Faith and Fortune of France’s Huguenots.

“Towards the Comparative Study of the Popular Market for Art: The Ownership of Paintings in Seventeenth-Century Metz,” Past & Present, 109 (1985), 100-117, reprinted in The Faith and Fortune of France’s Huguenots.

“La pratique religieuse huguenote: quelques aperçus messins et comparatifs” in F.-Y. Le Moigne and G. Michaux, eds. Protestants messins et mosellans XVIe-XXe siècle (Metz: Société d’Histoire et d’Archéologie de la Lorraine, 1988), p. 93-106.

The Huguenot Population of France, 1600-1685: The Demographic Fate and Customs of a Religious Minority, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society Vol. 81, Part 5 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1991). The text of this monograph is reprinted in The Faith and Fortune of France’s Huguenots. The American Philosophical Society volume also includes an extensive statistical appendix that provides the year-by-year movement of baptisms in 118 Reformed churches in both tabular and graphic formats.

“Print and the Experience of Ritual: Huguenot Books of Preparation for the Lord’s Supper” in H. E. Bödeker, G. Chaix and P. Veit, eds. Le livre religieux et ses pratiques/Der umgang mit dem religiösen Buch (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1991), p. 110-130, reprinted in The Faith and Fortune of France’s Huguenots.

“Faith, Fortune and Social Structure in Seventeenth-Century Montpellier,” Past & Present 152 (1996), 46-78, reprinted in The Faith and Fortune of France’s Huguenots.

“Un roi, une loi, deux fois: Parameters for the History of Catholic-Reformed Coexistence in France, 1555-1685” in O. P. Grell and B. Scribner, eds. Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 65-93, reprinted in The Faith and Fortune of France’s Huguenots.

“La Chouette de Minerve au crépuscule. Philippe Le Noir de Crevain, pasteur sous Louis XIV, historien des Eglises réformées du XVIe siècle,” Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Français 146 (2000), 335-366, English version published in The Faith and Fortune of France’s Huguenots.

“Some Uses of Autobiographical Documents in the Reformed Tradition” in K. von Greyerz, H. Medick and P. Veit eds., Von der dargestellten Person zum erinnerten Ich: Europäische Selbstzeugnisse als historische Quellen (1500-1850) (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2001), p. 355-368.

“Confessionalization in France? Critical Reflections and New Evidence” in R. Mentzer and A. Spicer, eds. Society and Culture in the Huguenot World, 1559-1665 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 44-61, reprinted in The Faith and Fortune of France’s Huguenots.

“Thinking About Religion and Society in the 17th and 18th Century: Confessionalization, the History of Toleration, and Beyond,” Schweizerische Zeitschrift fur Religions- und Kulturgeschichte 101 (2007), 247-256.

“Divided Memories? Historical Calendars, Commemorative Processions, and the Recollection of the Wars of Religion during the Ancien Régime,” French History 22 (2008), 381-405.

(Co-authored with Pierre-Olivier Léchot), “The Library of Elie Bouhéreau: The Intellectual Universe of a Huguenot Refugee and His Family” in Marsh’s Library: A Mirror on the World. Law, Learning and Libraries, 1650-1750 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2009), p. 165-184.