You know, I have heard it said that St Bart’s day is one of the reasons for the revolution. They killed some of France’s best and they never recovered from it. Most of these protestants were artisans, thinkers, moral advocates and so on. With them gone, there was nothing to restrain the coming storm.
That’s true...
Many of the nobility and educated people and much of the middle class and artisans such as the silver smiths like the Reveres, gold smiths and the clock makers who fled to Switzerland were Huguenots..
At least 200,000 Huguenots left Franc for England, Ireland and the Low Countries of Holland, Belgium and Germany ..and from there to America...few went directly west from France because the French king had a blockade of his warships in the Atlantic coasts to stop them...
Even the 80 years between the Edict of Nantes in 1598 and the revocation by Louis XVI did little to stem the tide...
The Huguenots had their own standing army...strong enough to battle the French king’s own soldiers...
They had their own cities like La Rochelle, which Cardinal Richelieu lay siege to and finally took...
By the time the French Revolution started, Louis didn’t have enough Frenchmen left who might be interested in helping him...
and there was that backlash against the Catholic Church for all the years of slaughter, persecution, and misery...soldiers were quartered in the homes of Huguenots by the French king, where the families had to feed, clothe and give a good bed to at least one man who would also help himself to the wives and teenage daughters...the families were never compensated...
Wherever the Huguenots went around the world they greatly influenced the national governments...They were members of the English Parliament, they greatly influenced the writing of our Constitution such as the 4th Amendment, and the Boars in the Transvaal and Orange Free State in South Africa were often descendant from French Protestants who fled into the Netherlands...
If all those hard working loyal French people had not had to flee France for their lives, the French Revolution may not have been so drastically bloodthirsty and so lawless..
What was left was mostly rabble who had little stake in the interests of their own country...an uneducated rabble who enjoyed the Roman Circus atmosphere of the guillotine...