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Updated: June 15, 2025
The exile of numerous families, who had already been driven out by the dragonnades, was now followed by the expulsion of the entire Huguenot body, of all at least who refused to conform to the Catholic faith.
It was through his influence that the king had been instigated to revoke the Edict of Nantes, to order the dragonnades, and to authorize those atrocities of persecution which must ever expose the name of Louis XIV. to the execrations of humanity. It was Louvois who, from merely contemptible caprice, plunged France into war with Germany.
These Dragonnades were carried on with great brutality, shameful carousals being held in homes once distinguished for elegance and refinement. Nuns had instructions to convert the novices under their rule by any means they liked to employ. Some did not hesitate to obtain followers of the Catholic Church by the use of the scourge, and fasting and imprisonment in noisome dungeons.
With this decree the days of terror had reached their deepest gloom; with this decree began the wild, bloody hunting down of aristocrats and ci-devants; then began suspicions, accusations which needed no evidence to bring the accused to the guillotine; then were renewed the dragonnades of the days of Louis XIV., only that now, instead of Protestants, the nobles were hunted down, and hunted down to death.
The service that he did in forcibly suppressing the Della Cruscan nuisance is even yet admitted, and there has been plentiful occasion, not always taken, for similar literary dragonnades since. And his work as an editor of English classics was, blemishes of manner and temper excepted, in the main very good work.
Still harsher measures were adopted; and the climax came in 1685 with the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, following on the "dragonnades" in Alsace. Protestantism was proscribed. The effect was not the forcible conversion of the Calvinists. but their wholesale emigration; the transfer to foreign states of an admirable industrial and military population.
He learnt it as he listened to the shrieks of the San Bartholomew; he learnt it as he watched the dragonnades, the tortures, the massacres of the Netherlands, and fought manfully under Norris in behalf of those victims of 'the Pope and Spain. He preached it in far stronger and wiser words than I can express it for him, in that noble tract of 1591, on Sir Richard Grenville's death at the Azores a Tyrtaean trumpet-blast such as has seldom rung in human ears; he discussed it like a cool statesman in his pamphlet of 1596, on 'A War with Spain. He sacrificed for it the last hopes of his old age, the wreck of his fortunes, his just recovered liberty; and he died with the old God's battle-cry upon his lips, when it awoke no response from the hearts of a coward, profligate, and unbelieving generation.
It is an odd chance therefore that has led him into that part of France where Protestants have been least bien vus. This is the country of the dragonnades of Louis XIV. and of the pastors of the desert. From the garden of the Peyrou, at Montpellier, you may see the hills of the Cévennes, to which they of the religion fled for safety and out of which they were hunted and harried.
Barthelemi it is stained with his blood it has been handed on, from one to the other it was all that Jacques Durant rescued when he fled from the Dragonnades it was given to me by my own dear father on his death-bed, with a charge to keep it from my grandmother, and not to speak of it but to guard it as my greatest treasure.
The Irish Protestants saw with alarm that amongst the soldiers who came from France to aid King James were some who had taken an active part in the dragonnades organized by Louis XIV in order to carry out his edict.
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