Posted on 06/19/2009 3:54:08 PM PDT by alpha-8-25-02
Who were the Huguenots?
John Calvin (1509 - 1564), religious reformer. The Huguenots were French Protestants who were members of the Reformed Church which was established in 1550 by John Calvin. The origin of the name Huguenot is uncertain, but dates from approximately 1550 when it was used in court cases against "heretics" (dissenters from the Roman Catholic Church). There is a theory that it is derived from the personal name of Besançon Hugues, the leader of the "Confederate Party" in Geneva, in combination with a Frankish corruption of the German word for conspirator or confederate: eidgenosse. Thus, Hugues plus eidgenot becomes Huguenot, with the intention of associating the Protestant cause with some very unpopular politics. O.I.A. Roche, in his book The Days of the Upright, a History of the Huguenots, writes that "Huguenot" is "a combination of a Flemish and a German word. In the Flemish corner of France, Bible students who gathered in each other's houses to study secretly were called Huisgenooten, or "house fellows," while on the Swiss and German borders they were termed Eidgenossen, or "oath fellows," that is, persons bound to each other by an oath. Gallicized into "Huguenot," often used deprecatingly, the word became, during two and a half centuries of terror and triumph, a badge of enduring honor and courage." As nickname and even abusive name it's use was banned in the regulations of the Edict of Nantes which Henry IV (Henry of Navarre, who himself earlier was a Huguenot) issued in 1598. The French Protestants themselves preferred to refer to themselves as "réformees" (reformers) rather than "Huguenots". It was much later that the name "Huguenot" became an honorary one of which their descendants are proud
A general edict which encouraged the extermination of the Huguenots was issued on January 29th, 1536 in France. On March 1st, 1562 some 1200 Huguenots were slain at Vassy, France. This ignited the the Wars of Religion which would rip apart, devastate, and bankrupt France for the next three decades.
St. Batholomew massacre, 1572 Click on image above for an enlarged view
During the infamous St Bartholomew Massacre of the night of 23/24 August, 1572 more than 8 000 Huguenots, including Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, Governor of Picardy and leader and spokesman of the Huguenots, were murdered in Paris. It happened during the wedding of Henry of Navarre, a Huguenot, to Marguerite de Valois (daughter of Catherine de Medici), when thousands of Huguenots converged on Paris for the wedding celebrations. Catherine de Medici It was Catherine de Medici who persuaded her weakling son Charles IX to order the mass murder, which lasted three days and spread to the countryside. On Sunday morning August 24th, 1572 she personally walked through the streets of Paris to inspect the carnage. Henry of Navarre's life was spared when he pretended to support the Roman Catholic faith. In 1593 he made his "perilous leap"and abjured his faith in July 1593, and 5 years later he was the undisputed monarch as King Henry IV (le bon Henri, the good Henry) of France. When the first rumours of the massacre reached the Vatican in Rome on 2 September 1572, pope Gregory XIII was jubilant and wanted bonfires to be lit in Rome. He was persuaded to wait for the official communication. The very morning of the day that he received the confirmed news, the pope held a consistory and announced that "God had been pleased to be merciful". Then with all the cardinals he repaired to the Church of St. Mark for the Te Deum, and prayed and ordered prayers that the Most Christian King might rid and purge his entire kingdom (of France) of the Huguenot plague. Pope Gregory XIII
On 8 September 1572 a procession of thanksgiving took place in Rome, and the pope, in a prayer after mass, thanked God for having "granted the Catholic people a glorious triumph over a perfidious race" (gloriosam de perfidis gentibus populo catholico loetitiam tribuisti).
Gregory XIII engaged Vasari to paint scenes in one of the Vatican apartments of the triumph of the Most Christian King over the Huguenots. He had a medal struck representing an exterminating angel smiting the Huguenots with his sword, the inscription reading: Hugonottorium strages (Huguenot conspirators). In France itself, the French magistracy ordered the admiral to be burned in effigy and prayers and processions of thanksgiving on each recurring 24th August, out of gratitude to God for the victory over the Huguenots.
Henry IV, himself a former Huguenot (as Henry of Navarre) The Edict of Nantes was signed by Henry IV on April 13th, 1598, which brought an end to the Wars of Religion. The Huguenots were allowed to practice their faith in 20 specified French "free" cities. France became united and a decade of peace followed. After Henry IV was murdered in 1610, however, the persecution of the "dissenters" resumed in all earnestness under the guidance of Cardinal Richelieu, whose favourite project was the extermination of the Huguenots.
Richelieu, who relentlessly persecuted the Huguenots. Henry IV's weakling sun, Louis the Thirteenth, refused them the privileges which had been granted to them by the Edict of Nantes; and, when reminded of the claims they had, if the promises of Henry the Third and Henry the Fourth were to be regarded, he answered that "the first-named monarch feared them, and the latter loved them; but I neither fear nor love them." The Huguenot free cities were lost one after the other after they were conquered by the forces of Cardinal Richelieu, and the last and most important stronghold, La Rochelle, fell in 1629 after a siege lasting a month.
Louis XIV Louis XIV (the Sun King, 1643-1715) began to apply his motto l'état c'est moi ("I am the state") and introduced the infamous Dragonnades - the billeting of dragoons in Huguenot households. He began with a policy of une foi, un loi, un roi (one faith, one law, one king) and revoked the Edict of Nantes on 22 October 1685. The large scale persecution of the Huguenots resumed. Protestant churches and the houses of "obstinates" were burned and destroyed, and their bibles and hymn books burned. Emigration was declared illegal. Many Huguenots were burned at the stake. Many Huguenots who did not find their death in local prisons or execution on the wheel of torture, were shipped to sea to serve their sentences as galley slaves, either on French galley ships, or sold to Turkey as galley slaves. A vivid account of the life of galley-slaves in France is given in Jean Marteilhes's Memoirs of a Protestant, translated by Oliver Goldsmith, which describes the experiences of one of the Huguenots who suffered after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
Every Huguenot place of worship was to be destroyed; every minister who refused to conform was to be sent to the Hôpitaux de Forçats at Marseilles and at Valance. If he had been noted for his zeal he was to be considered "obstinate," and sent to slavery for life in such of the West-Indian islands as belonged to the French. The children of Huguenot parents were to be taken from them by force, and educated by the Roman Catholic monks or nuns.
Scenes like these were common during the persecution of the Huguenots in France during the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Click on picture above for enlargement. At least 250 000 French Huguenots fled to countries such as Switzerland, Germany, England, America, the Netherlands, Poland and South Africa, where they could enjoy religious freedom. As many were killed in France itself. Between 1618 and 1725 between 5 000 and 7 000 Huguenots reached the shores of America. Those who came from the French speaking south of Belgium, an area known as Wallonia, are generally known as Walloons (as opposed to Huguenots) in the United States.
The organised large scale emigration of Hugenots to the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa occurred during 1688 - 1689. However, even before this large sscale emigration individual Huguenots such as François Villion (1671) and the brothers François and Guillaume du Toit (1686) fled to the Cape of Good Hope. In 1692 a total of 201 French Huguenots had settled at the Cape of Good Hope. Most of them settled in an area now known as Franschhoek ("French Corner"), some 70 km outside Cape Town, where many farms still bear their original French names.
A century later the promulgation of the Edict of Toleration on 28 November 1787 partially restored the civil and religious rights of the Huguenots in France.
Louis XIV didn’t necessarily represent the Catholic Church. He had his own agenda. And Cardinal Richelieu, who was his chief minister, was more of an ambitious politician than a servant of the Church.
There were plenty of injustices on both sides. While Catholics were killing Protestants in France, Calvin was burning heretics in Geneva. The schism in Christianity was bad all around. Perhaps the worst of it was the 30 Years War in the German States, which involved plentiful atrocities by both sides.
I have read numerous novels about the Huguenots, including one written by my great uncle back around 1895. I enjoyed them, but I never imagined that one side was all good and the other was all evil.
For a while, it was doubtful whether France would have a Catholic or a Protestant king. But whichever won was pretty certain to do what he felt necessary to consolidate his power.
King Philip “the Fair” and Pope Clement V did something similar in France beginning on Friday October 13, 1307. There are those who still remember those outrages.
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HUH ???????
For a while, it was doubtful whether France would have a Catholic or a Protestant king.
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Actually by law the king had to be catholic...
That’s why Henri IV had to become a Catholic..
click on my name.
Are you trying to say my post is barbarity? Or are you trying to say that my post indicates barbarity(of the catholics)?
If it is the second, then I concur. If it is the first, then you are a clown.
The fundamental issue in France was simple politics ~ who would be second to the king. They tested the process with newly developed lightweight personal firearms.
Very quickly the French found that an awful lot of people of all ranks and stations could end up dead with these items, and fired up with a little bit of ideological ferver, even more folks could end up dead.
That was stage one. Stage two was an uneasy peace under the Edict of Nantes. Stage three was a resumption of state persection of Huguenots.
Well over 150,000 well to do Huguenots are known to have emigrated from France during that period, and up to 1.5 million others probably emigrated. Civil records were not good during that period.
Our family castle was finally dismantled and scattered about as a "lesson to us" ~ so many of the remaining family members fled to Sweden where one of their number became the third ranking noble in the Vasa King's new nobility. He eventually conquered most of Europe, even brought the French in as allies (all was not well in the top ranks of French government at any time), founded Nieuwe Sweden, and scattered descendants all over the globe in every country. I think some of them still live in Scandinavia, and almost unbelievably, some of them managed to creep back to France.
The carnage in the royal family and noble ranks was so bad that it creates many difficult to handle genealogical blocks ~ just impossible to tell who had which kids, when, where and how.
It is fitting to celebrate Calvin’s birth with memories of human cruelty.
If you don’t want to get into it, then don’t make posts like you did in number 3.
Welcome nOOb...
Got any proof about King Henry VIII of England ???
There was bad deeds on both sides...
The huguenots had their own standing army...
as did the Catholics...
They had their own walled cities...
an uneasy type of tolerance was the rule for the cities of both sides...
However long before the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, Catholic soldiers were demanding to be “quartered” in Huguenot homes, etc...
This lead to the 2nd Amendment of the COTUS..many of the Patriots were descendants of Huguenots...
Paul Revere for one...George Washington...
Ironically, here in central Virginia (place of Huguenot landing), a secular private school built to shelter white kids during segregation called Huguenot Academy was bought by the Catholic diocese of Richmond. It’s now called Blessed Sacrament Huguenot Catholic Academy. Every time I see the name I think someone must be rolling in their grave somewhere.
Sorry not the 2nd...
The 3rd Amendment
The Albigensian Crusade or Cathar Crusade (1209–1229) was a 20-year military campaign initiated by the Roman Catholic Church to eliminate the Cathar heresy in Languedoc. The Crusade was prosecuted primarily by the French and promptly took on a political flavour, resulting in not only a significant reduction in the number of practicing Cathars but also a realignment of Occitania, bringing it into the sphere of the French crown and diminishing the distinct regional culture and high level of Aragonese influence. When Innocent III's diplomatic attempts to roll back Catharism[1] met with little success and after the papal legate Pierre de Castelnau was murdered (allegedly by an agent serving the Cathar count of Toulouse), Innocent III declared a crusade against Languedoc, offering the lands of the schismatics to any French nobleman willing to take up arms. The violence led to France's acquisition of lands with closer cultural and linguistic ties to Catalonia (see Occitan). An estimated 200,000 to 1,000,000 people were massacred during the crusade.[2][3]
Source: Ouiquipedie , L’encyclopédie libre
No wonder France is such a perennial mess. They killed or drove out all the independent-minded people.
Well, the law was changeable. And in fact the agreement that the various factions arrived at after the 30 Years’ War was “Cuius regio, eius religio.” I.e., whatever the king’s religion, that shall be the religion of the people.
But Henri IV did indeed choose the expedient course. It was what his key supporters wanted. As he said, “Paris vaut bien une messe.”
In a lighter vein, Charlie Chaplin, silent film star, was a descendant of French Huguenots. Confusingly, he was buried in a Jewish cemetery, which often led to many saying he was Jewish. As Charlie once said in one of his films, ________________.
I’d say there have been zealots on all sides who have gone too far and done evil in the name of their religion. The important thing is not to repeat their mistakes. All Christians are brothers in Christ and children of God. In that, we can take joy.
“This stuff was hundreds of years ago in old Europe. We’re Americans and should be above that.”
Agreed. Even the trolls and elves found a way to work together for the good of the Fellowship. ;o]
The Church sold EXACTLY what?
If you mean indulgences, please post your evidence for that. Got any?
relics, indulgences, whatever.
The pope did not persecute the Templars. The papacy eventually exhonerated the knights when the truth came out. Unfortunately by that time the order was disbanded and a number of knights had been executed. Read Frale’s book. She’s the one who uncovered the evidence.
It doesn’t matter how long it would have taken to colonize the Americas. It was happening no matter who came here, and we would know the difference because we couldn’t compare it to an “other” version.
Also, if the Protestant Revolution had never happened, Washington would never have had to warn anyone about entanglements with Europe. And Washington would have probably been an unknown English guy. Read Turtledove and make it up on your own.
You wrote:
“relics, indulgences, whatever.”
The Church never sold indulgences. Some individuals violated canon law and did so, but the Church never sanctioned the sale of indulgences. I also know offhand of no case of the Church ever selling relics and they were not believed by the English peasantry to have anything to do with salvation anyway.
Ever heard of martin luther?
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