Camisards Revisited

The Huguenots would have been horrified by the sports shirts and ice-cream stands--but they would have been gratified at the turnout of their spiritual descendants in the little village of Mas Soubeyran in southern France last week. About 15,000 French Protestants crowded the narrow roads with their cars and buses on a pilgrimage to the thick-walled, stone peasant cottage and the tiny museum next to it, which are crammed with relics of one of the most bitter religious wars Europe has known. They were marking the 400th anniversary of the founding of the Protestant Reformed Church in the Cevennes region, which saw so much of the historic struggle with Roman Catholicism, and the sooth anniversary of the death of Protestantism's great restorer, Antoine Court.

Rack or Galleys. They had brave days to remember. There are only 1,000,000 French Protestants in a nation of 43 million today, but in 1560 there were 4,000,-ooo of them in a population of 16 million. For nearly 40 years the two faiths were embroiled in bloody conflict, symbolized by the infamous St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of August 1572, during which perhaps as many as 10,000 Huguenots were murdered. The Edict of Nantes (1598) gave France's Protestants freedom of worship and academic and political rights, but by 1661 the Roman Catholic Church and the crown had made headway in whittling down Protestant liberty, and in 1685 the Edict was revoked. Within a few weeks 2,000 churches were razed to the ground, and thousands of Huguenots (French Reformed and Calvinist believers) were fleeing the country.

They were the lucky ones. When the government discovered that France was losing some of its most useful citizens, Huguenot emigration was promptly banned. Anyone caught reading the Bible, preaching or worshiping according to Protestant tenets was tortured on the rack, and hanged, or sent to the galleys. Hundreds of Protestant villages were burned to the ground. Peasants were rounded up by soldiers with small crosses on their muskets and forced to sign affidavits that they had become Roman Catholic.

Like Butterflies. Underground, the beleaguered Protestants struggled to keep the faith alive. Carrying slats of wood, groups would assemble by night in quarries and grottoes, and fit their boards together to make a pulpit. Other pulpits were made that could be instantly transformed into ladders at the approach of the authorities. Most Huguenot houses had hiding places built into the walls for fugitives like the young shepherd, Pierre Laporte, whose nom de guerre was "Roland."

Roland fought the kind of war for which the French Maquis were famed in World War II. Members of the Protestant resistance were known as camisards--probably from the white nightshirts (camisia) that they wore at night so they could identify one another in the dark. The nightshirts made them look like butterflies and gave them another nickname: parpaillot, from the word for butterfly (papillon).

Atrocities were not all on one side. The camisards terrorized the Catholic countryside. They rushed into battle singing psalms ("When those devils began singing their dreadful songs, we couldn't control our soldiers," complained an officer of the King). Roland kept their morale high by his Robin Hood exploits and hairbreadth escapes. In the end he was caught and executed, and finally the camisards were reduced to a remnant. But their struggle had crystallized public opinion against religious intolerance, and for 45 years (from 1715 to 1760) Calvinist Antoine Court labored to restore French Protestantism --organizing local and national synods, setting up a divinity school in Lausanne, Switzerland to supply pastors to the underground churches. Finally, two years before the French Revolution, King Louis XVI was forced to sign an edict of tolerance for Protestantism. The revolution-which in turn bitterly persecuted the Catholics--eventually turned that tolerance into equality.

The Hat Box. Today France's million Protestants, about equally divided between Calvinists and Lutherans, are a prestigious minority with a reputation for scrupulous honesty and rigid morals. Their thousand-odd pastors are said to be the worst-paid ministers in Europe; in rural areas they are paid in food and fuel (rural Roman Catholic priests are not much better off). They actively proselytize among atheists and anticlericals, and even claim some success among the Roman Catholic clergy--40 priests have become ministers since the end of the war, according to Pastor Pierre Bourguet, head of France's Reformed Church.

Protestants and Catholics, threatened by the common dangers of Marxist enmity and secular indifference, are in many places drawing closer and closer together in the modern world. At last week's pilgrimage to Roland's cottage, the bankers and farmers, miners, office workers and their wives, who are carrying on the faith of the embattled camisards, renewed their sense of what is now a faraway tradition, listening to a sermon out of doors from a collapsible pulpit, and studying such Huguenot relics as a clandestine pastor's flat hat that can fold into the shape of a box.

"These religious hatreds fortunately belong to the past," said Pastor Bourguet. "But our ancestors paid a great price for our faith and our freedom. We must never allow it to be forgotten."

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