Beyond Belief: Surviving the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in France by Christie Sample Wilson (review)

In the mid-seventeenth century, French Protestants and Catholics practiced their two faiths alongside one another wherever the Edict of Nantes (1598) had recognized Protestants’ rights of worship. Loriol, in Dauphiné along the Rhone between Avignon and Lyon, was one such biconfessional town. Three-quarters of its inhabitants were Protestants, its town administration was dominated by Protestants, and a temple with a resident pastor ministered to Protestant religious needs. Half a century later, as the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) criminalized Protestantism and mandated Catholic practice, the town administration was firmly in Catholic hands, and inhabitants looked to the Catholic parish for their sacraments and rites of passage. Yet in the years of transformation, Loriol experienced none of the violence from external or internal sources that racked other French localities in the era of the Revocation, few of the escapes from the kingdom that cost King Louis XIV perhaps 150,000 of his subjects, and none of the overt resistance from those expected by the Revocation to switch their beliefs. What accounts for the exceptional experience of Loriol? How and why did this one locality experience the Revocation so differently from other communities that included Protestants?

This is the problem addressed by Christie Sample Wilson in Beyond Belief: Surviving the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in France. For answers, Wilson looks primarily to town council records and parish registers. In the former she finds “no indication” (p. 18) of strife as the majority of offices shifted from Protestants to Catholics, as well as no evidence that the new Catholic majority used its power to harass or penalize Protestants by overtaxing them, enforcing royal orders ejecting them from a long list of professions, or reporting their noncompliance to authorities outside the town. In the latter source she finds that differences in practices such as the delay from birth to baptism, illegitimacies, and the seasonality of marriages were pronounced before 1680, but attenuated and disappeared as persons of both confessions conformed to the practices characteristic of Catholicism. This peaceful transformation she ascribes to a determination on the part of the townspeople to avoid interference from external royal or ecclesiastical authorities. Loriol escaped violence because locals were willing to compromise and accommodate to their new situation, even at the cost of losing their church.

Wilson’s analysis from the council minutes is fairly unconvincing due to the lack of information on inhabitants’ wealth and a lack of clarity in the presentation of this part of the argument. The analysis from parish registers is more effective. After a lucid presentation of the two confessions’ beliefs underlying the rites of baptism and marriage, she shows that Protestants conformed their behavior to Catholic expectations in ways that did not violate their own persisting beliefs. Overt confessionalization mutated into confessionalization of belief masked by conformity of outward behavior.

Wilson’s larger argument—that the Loriol case shows the degree to which Louis XIV’s absolutism was limited by the need for cooperation from regional and local partners—is more tenuous. True, the religious conversion Louis sought through his Revocation did not take root fully in Loriol, where Protestantism reappeared as soon as Louis died in 1715. But in the 1680s and 1690s Louis got exactly what he wanted: unification of religious practice and eradication of competing religious institutions with a minimum of disruption.

The big question raised by Wilson’s analysis of Loriol is one to which she assumes an answer from the start—how exceptional was Loriol? Throughout, Wilson contrasts Loriol’s peaceful, community-based transition to the violence, coercion, and resistance highlighted in the conventional story of the Revocation. Yet research in recent years has found enough of such “exceptions” to force a reversal of the story. The mutation of Loriol, peaceful but incomplete as it was, may...