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11 Chapter One Crisis in the Cévennes I will pour out My Spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men will see visions . . . I will show wonders in the heavens and on the earth. —Joel 2:28–30 (New International Version) A letter dated June 30, 1705, paints a portrait of Camisard piety. Written by Commandant Bâville of the dragoons, a Catholic, it recounts how the king’s troops surprised some Camisards along the bank of a river: “The day before yesterday, we came upon ten or twelve men assembled together. One was reading the Bible and several were washing in the stream. Our men shot at them from a bit too far away . . . wounding two of them, [including the] one holding the Bible; they ran off and escaped into the woods.”1 The Camisard military leader and, later, pastor Jacques Bonbonnoux, described walking at night for miles in the snow to reach the mountaintop designated for worship, singing psalms with over a thousand believers, the words of the spirit-filled preacher shouted over the wind; Bonbonnoux recalled seeing a man nearby who remained in ecstasy for four hours on his knees, beseeching a star to fall into one outstretched palm, praying for a dove to alight on the other.2 The Camisard story is the stuff of legend. And yet at least some of the legend is rooted in reality. The Protestant community in France resisted all assaults— those coming from Versailles and those of the provincial delegates. Even if the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) put the Protestants in peril, it was not able to eliminate them or their beliefs. Louis XIV, intending to wipe out with one stroke of his pen this irritating religious anomaly in his kingdom, succeeded only in creating serious internal and external political problems.3 An Overview of the Camisards The Revocation arose from Louis XIV’s determination to extirpate Protestantism from France forever (“il n’y aura qu’une seule religion en son royaume”) and particularly to eradicate the Huguenot remnant clinging to its creed in rural outposts against all odds, even after systematic persecution in the early years of the seventeenth century. The Revocation, though shattering to 12 • Chapter One Protestants in France, on the Continent, and elsewhere, especially devastated a small, persecuted, and marginalized community in the mountainous southeastern region of France called the Cévennes. Repression of the Camisards led to years of strife, destruction, and horror—“through the depredations of the dragoons, their churches had been burned or demolished, martyrs hanged or thrown into the fire”—resulting in an “enormous gap, a lack in their religious system, the deprivation of identity of an entire people for whom Protestantism was culture, ethnic identity, social and political organization . . . All this constituted a . . . trauma that truncated their history.”4 Moreover, the crisis in the Cévennes raised questions of confessional allegiance, issues that were to influence the Western world in developing the concept of the freedom of the individual conscience before God, the right to uncoerced worship, and the notion that limits might be set on royal or state power when it impinged on religious observance.5 In the “Avertissement pastoral à ceux de la religion prétendue réform ée, pour les porter à se convertir et se réconcilier avec l’Eglise” (July 1, 1682), Louis XIV and his ministers declared that French Protestants, formerly treated as heretics, were now to be regarded as “schismatics.” As such, they became enemies of the state.6 The Camisards were seventeenth-century French Protestants. They were Huguenots , but their location and unique historical circumstances set them apart from their confrères in southwest France. Initially identical doctrinally and ecclesiastically to Huguenots in their Reformed emphases, the Camisards formed a distinct confessional subculture because of particular constraints and specific experiences of persecution. Consequently, they developed forms of worship and expressions of belief that were more enthusiastic and ecstatic than those of their Huguenot coreligionists, yet were, in tenor and vocabulary, much like those of other persecuted Protestant sects: the Camisards relied on a sort of inspired prophecy to inform their everyday activities in the midst of crisis and chaos. Camisard prophecy was ardent preaching initiated by a formulaic preface (“I say to you, my children”)7 and apocalyptic in tone; it was always based on a biblical passage that inspired its auditors to action (they were “sent” on their...

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