Le Refuge huguenot: Assimilation et culture (review)

The 15 articles, published between 1981 and 1998 and reprinted in this volume, are organized around five themes arising out of the psycho-social and religious adaptation of the refugees to their receiving cultures, with a particular emphasis on the German Refuge. The volume includes one of Yardeni's finest essays analysing the shifts of political fidelity, dependence, clientage and identity that adapting to the different receiving cultures imposed on the refugees. Overall, the essays illustrate and confirm the argument that rates and patterns of assimilation varied enormously from one centre of Refuge to another, the settlements in Germany, whether urban or rural, being slower to adapt. Indeed, the article on illegitimate births in the French Protestant community in Berlin suggests that the refugees remained frozen in patterns of morality that were more strict than those that had prevailed in France, or were the norm in Germany at that time. Yardeni's brief consideration of the widespread resistance to the new translation of the Psalms, which Geneva proposed for adoption by all French Churches in 1700, reveals similarly fossilized religious attitudes. Throughout the different centres of Refuge, many Huguenots remained nostalgically attached to patterns of worship that enabled them to retain in the present the culture that exile would eventually make a part of their past. In London, however, where assimilation to the receiving culture was comparatively rapid, pastors fought a losing battle with congregations, whose standards of conduct they denounced as worldly. There is some objective evidence that this is more than a rhetorical commonplace of Protestant sermons in this period. Many Huguenots converted to Roman Catholicism, whether temporarily or permanently, either to escape persecution or to buy time while they planned their escape from France. Most of those who made it to the safety of the Refuge were traumatized by what they regarded as a sinful compromise. Yet Yardeni reveals that others, who returned to France temporarily to attend to family or business matters, felt no compunction about converting to Roman Catholicism while there, and no apparent shame about seeking the forgiveness of their churches when they returned to the Refuge. This self-interested pragmatism is matched on the intellectual level by the presumably disinterested adoption of Enlightenment themes by many of the pastors in their sermons, which Yardeni considers briefly. In the final analysis, these essays provoke the question that dogs all of us who study Huguenot refugees. Is it possible to draw general conclusions about culture from what are for the most part normative, clerical, elite or printed sources (consistory records, sermons, journalism, etc.) in which ordinary Huguenots —if such a category is not artificial —are constructed through the language and gaze of those who can read and write? This conundrum may be insoluble, given the paucity of the extant evidence, but an experienced historian like Yardeni would have been uniquely equipped to address it by way of introduction to a volume whose impressive breadth of reading and research will linger instructively in the minds of readers, prompting new insights and further research.