Memory and Identity: The Huguenots in France and the Atlantic Diaspora (review)

This is an uneven volume that is an outgrowth of a conference held at the College of Charleston in 1997. As in any symposium that attempts to focus on a specific group rather than a single topic, the papers range across a broad array of subjects and follows the French Huguenots from their homeland to parts of Europe, the American colonies, and into both Canada and the French West Indies. Topics range from cemeteries in France to the economics of trade in Carolina.

In general, and despite the lack of cohesion between subjects and any single theme, the papers are in themselves of varying quality. One of the most impressive is that of Willem Frijhooff (“Uncertain Brotherhood: The Huguenots in the Dutch Republic”). Frijhoff draws on a wide body of both primary and secondary accounts to provide an excellent synthesis of immigration in the Dutch Republic from France and the German and Scandinavian Provinces. His article is echoed in a shorter and less satisfactory contribution by Timothy Fehler’s “The French Congregation’s Struggle for Acceptance in Emden, Germany.” Here we find the Huguenots swallowed up by discussions of first the large Dutch Protestant migration, followed by French speaking Walloons who, in turn, seem to have trouble accepting the French Calvinists-a smaller body-who arrive in their midst.

The book is roughly organized by countries, beginning with France and includes an original analytical, if again short, piece by Keith P. Luria, “Cemeteries, Religious Difference, and the Creation of Cultural Boundaries in Seventeenth-Century French Communities.” Drawing on burial data, and the ritual analysis of David Nirenberg in another context, Luria argues that “religious harmony” existed early on between Protestant and Roman Catholic in that their dead were intertwined initially, but as tensions increased between the two groups, divisions were created and marked by “a sign, a wall, or perhaps a wall if the inhabitants could afford it.” (62)

Diane C. Margoff’s short essay on the Treaty of Nantes deals with the legal repercussions that followed before its revocation in 1685. There is little original in “Identity, Law and the Huguenots and Early Modern France” but the repeated references to memory as well as her own title, seems to have provided the otherwise misleading title to this volume.

Raymond Mentzer’s “Sociability and Culpability” discusses the interrelationships between sixteenth century Huguenots in France and draws heavily on archival data-providing a nice building block on preexisting literature. Unfortunately, the originality of this piece is more than offset by the highly derivative piece on the Huguenot “legacy” in South Africa. Philip Denis has leaned too heavily on the work of Randolph Vigne (who was present at the conference but not included in this collection for the obvious reason, Denis was chosen to present part of his work instead), and that of the coffee table book by Pieter Coertzen. When Denis goes beyond Vigne and Coertzen to move the Huguenots into the apartheid era, he finds himself caught in a bind between laying out monuments to the Huguenots and castigating the government that was pushing these memorials.

The Huguenot flood into Britain is partially but competently dealt with by Charles Littleton (“Acculturation and the French Church of London 1600-circa 1640”); and interestingly by John Miller on the Fortunes of Strangers in Norwich and Canterbury, 1565–1700.”

In the American colonies, Jon Butler’s conference keynote address is included. Joyce D. Goodfriend contributed “The Huguenots of Colonial New York City: A Demographic Profile” while R. C. Nash did a yeoman job of presenting some aspects of commercial enterprises undertaken by the Huguenots in Carolina, while failing altogether to bring these entrepreneurs into the slave trade even though his article is titled: “Huguenot Merchants and the Development of South Carolina’s Slavery-Plantation and Atlantic Trading Economy 1680–1775.” In fact, beyond failing to connect Africa to the Atlantic, Nash also deals with Henry Laurens but limits his trading...