Society and Culture in the Huguenot World, 1559-1685 (review)

What did it mean to be a Protestant in sixteenth and seventeenth- century France? What distinguished the Huguenots—a religious minority comprising at most 15 percent of the population—from their compatriots? How did French Protestants conceive of themselves, their relationship with the state, and their place in society? Finally, how did their culture, institutions, and practices change as they evolved from a rapidly expanding evangelical movement to an established community enjoying legal rights and social legitimacy following the Edict of Nantes (1598)? This collection of essays provides a useful introduction to the diverse, yet intersecting, ways that a number of leading historians and promising young scholars address these questions. It also demonstrates that the study of the Huguenots has important ramifications for our understanding of such topics as the history of tolerance, European state formation, and the relationship between institutions and practices on the one hand and beliefs and identity on the other.

The strength of this volume is the ability of its twelve essays to construct a compelling image of the "complex and contradictory character" of the homme protestant (8). Essays by Timothy Watson on sixteenth- century Lyon, Luc Racaut on religious polemic and identity, Penny Roberts on petitioning, and Spicer on the meanings of Huguenot temples all call attention to the fact that Huguenot identity was never stable. It reflected tensions and ambiguities not only within the movement itself, but also in its relationship with the Crown, Catholic society, and the European Reformed movement. Clear trends do emerge, however. Originally open, aggressive, and internationalist in outlook, the Huguenots increasingly adopted a closed, conservative, and parochial mind-set during the period covered herein.

The emergence of this stoic and defensive mentality, several essays suggest, was partly the result of the social structures, communal institutions, and cultural practices of the Huguenots' "society within a society." Karen Maag and Martin Dinges show how Huguenots developed educational and charitable systems to provide crucial social services free of the taint of Catholicism. These formal networks, as well as the informal ones studied by Mark Greengrass, were a source of considerable unity and strength, establishing boundaries between Huguenots and non- Huguenots, fostering cross-class solidarities within communities, and promoting cooperation among diverse, distant congregations. Essays by Mentzer on bipartisan royal institutions, Amanda Eurich on royal officeholders, and Alan James on Huguenot militancy demonstrate how theFrench Calvinists' inability to resolve conflicting commitments to Crown and faith ultimately fractured this unity and allowed the monarchy to accomplish gradually in the seventeenth century what it had failed to do militarily in the sixteenth.

To be a Huguenot, was to be both French and Protestant, and to negotiate daily the tensions inherent in this double identity. Official toleration, as Philip Benedict shows in his essay on "confessionalization," did not to lead to assimilation and the reduction of religious tensions but to a hardening of boundaries between Catholic and Reformed. The result was an increased sense of isolation and persecution among Protestants who considered themselves loyal Frenchmen and women, but, as Mentzer shows, who saw their legal rights progressively undermined despite their loyalty. The merit of this volume ultimately resides in its many insights into how a minority society and culture endured persistent hostility and persecution, as well as its own conflicting identities and values.