The Huguenots in France Part 8

After this event persecution was redoubled throughout the Cevennes.

The militia ran night and day after the meetings in the Desert. All persons found attending them, who could be captured, were either killed on the spot or hanged. Two companies of militia were quartered in Pont-de-Montvert at the expense of the inhabitants; and they acted under the direction of the archpriest Du Chayla. This priest, who was a native of the district, had been for some time settled as a missionary in Siam engaged in the conversion of Buddhists, and on his return to France he was appointed to undertake the conversion of the people of the Cevennes to the faith of Rome.

The village of Pont-de-Montvert is situated in the hollow of a deep valley formed by the mountain of Lozere on the north, and of Bouges on the south, at the point at which two streams, descending from their respective summits, flow into the Tarn. The village is separated by these streams into three little hamlets, which are joined together by the bridge which gives its name to the place. The addition of "Mont Vert," however, is a misnomer; for though seated at the foot of a steep mountain, it is not green, but sterile, rocky, and verdureless.

The village is best reached from Florac, from which it is about twenty miles distant. The valley runs east and west, and is traversed by a tolerably good road, which at the lower part follows the windings of the Tarn, and higher up runs in and out along the mountain ledges, at every turn presenting new views of the bold, grand, and picturesque scenery which characterizes the wilder parts of the Cevennes. Along this route the old mule-road is still discernible in some places--a difficult, rugged, mountain path, which must have kept the district sealed up during the greater part of the year, until Baville constructed the new road for the purpose of opening up the country for the easier pa.s.sage of troops and munitions of war.

A few poor hamlets occur at intervals along the road, sometimes perched on apparently inaccessible rocks, and at the lower part of the valley an occasional chateau is to be seen, as at Miral, picturesquely situated on a height. But the country is too poor by nature--the breadth of land in the bottom of the ravine being too narrow and that on the mountain ledges too stony and sterile--ever to have enabled it to maintain a considerable population. On all sides little is to be seen but rocky mountain sides, stony and precipitous, with bold mountain peaks extending beyond them far away in the distance.

Pont-de-Montvert is the centre of a series of hamlets, the inhabitants of which were in former times almost exclusively Protestant, as they are now; and where meetings in the Desert were of the most frequent occurrence. Strong detachments of troops were accordingly stationed there and at Florac for the purpose of preventing the meetings and overawing the population. Besides soldiers, the authorities also established missions throughout the Cevennes, and the princ.i.p.al inspector of these missions was the archpriest Chayla. The house in which he resided at Pont-de-Montvert is still pointed out. It is situated near the north end of the bridge over the Tarn; but though the lower part of the building remains as it was in his time, the upper portion has been for the most part rebuilt.

Chayla was a man of great force of character--zealous, laborious, and indefatigable--but pitiless, relentless, and cruel. He had no bowels of compa.s.sion. He was deaf to all appeals for mercy. With him the penalty of non-belief in the faith of Rome was imprisonment, torture, death. Eight young priests lived with him, whose labours he directed; and great was his annoyance to find that the people would not attend his ministrations, but continued to flock after their own prophet-preachers in the Desert.

Moral means having failed, he next tried physical. He converted the arched cellars of his dwelling into dungeons, where he shut up those guilty of contumacy; and day by day he put them to torture. It seems like a satire on religion to say that, in his attempt to convert souls, this vehement missionary made it one of his princ.i.p.al studies to find out what amount of agony the bodies of those who differed from him would bear short of actual death. He put hot coals into their hands, which they were then made to clench; wrapped round their fingers cotton steeped in oil, which was then set on fire; besides practising upon them the more ordinary and commonplace tortures. No wonder that the archpriest came to be detested by the inhabitants of Pont-de-Montvert.

At length, a number of people in the district, in order to get beyond reach of Chayla's cruelty, determined to emigrate from France and take refuge in Geneva. They a.s.sembled one morning secretly, a cavalcade of men and women, and set out under the direction of a guide who knew the mountain paths towards the east. When they had travelled a few hours, they fell into an ambuscade of militia, and were marched back to the archpriest's quarters at Pont-de-Montvert. The women were sent to Mende to be immured in convents, and the men were imprisoned in the archpriest's dungeons. The parents of some of the captives ran to throw themselves at his feet, and implored mercy for their sons; but Chayla was inexorable. He declared harshly that the prisoners must suffer according to the law--that the fugitives must go the galleys, and their guide to the gibbet.

On the following Sunday, the 23rd of July, 1702, one of the preaching prophets, Pierre Seguier of Magistavols, a hamlet lying to the south of Pont-de-Montvert, preached to an a.s.sembly on the neighbouring mountain of Bouges; and there he declared that the Lord had ordered him to take up arms to deliver the captives and exterminate the archpriest of Moloch. Another and another preacher followed in the same strain, the excited a.s.sembly encouraging them by their cries, and calling upon them to execute G.o.d's vengeance on the persecutors of G.o.d's people.

That same night Seguier and his companions went round amongst the neighbouring hamlets to summon an a.s.semblage of their sworn followers for the evening of the following day. They met punctually in the Altef.a.ge Wood, and under the shadow of three gigantic beech trees, the trunks of which were standing but a few years ago, they solemnly swore to deliver their companions and destroy the archpriest.

When night fell, a band of fifty determined men marched down the mountain towards the bridge, led by Seguier. Twenty of them were armed with guns and pistols. The rest carried scythes and hatchets. As they approached the village, they sang Marot's version of the seventy-fourth Psalm. The archpriest heard the unwonted sound as they came marching along. Thinking it was a nocturnal a.s.sembly, he cried to his soldiers, "Run and see what this means." But the doors of the house were already invested by the mountaineers, who shouted out for "The prisoners! the prisoners!" "Back, Huguenot canaille!" cried Chayla from the window. But they only shouted the louder for "The prisoners!"

The archpriest then directed the militia to fire, and one of the peasants fell dead. Infuriated, they seized the trunk of a tree, and using it as a battering-ram, at once broke in the door. They next proceeded to force the entrance to the dungeon, in which they succeeded, and called upon the prisoners to come forth. But some of them were so crippled by the tortures to which they had been subjected, that they could not stand. At sight of their sufferings the fury of the a.s.sailants increased, and, running up the staircase, they called out for the archpriest. "Burn the priest and the satellites of Baal!" cried their leader; and heaping together the soldiers' straw beds, the chairs, and other combustibles, they set the whole on fire.

Chayla, in the hope of escaping, jumped from a window into the garden, and in the fall broke his leg. The peasants discovered him by the light of the blazing dwelling. He called for mercy. "No," said Seguier, "only such mercy as you have shown to others;" and he struck him the first blow.

The others followed. "This for my father," said the next, "whom you racked to death!"

"This for my brother," said another, "whom you sent to the galleys!"

"This for my mother, who died of grief!"

This for my sister, my relatives, my friends, in exile, in prison, in misery!

And thus blow followed blow, fifty-two in all, half of which would probably have been mortal, and the detested Chayla lay a bleeding ma.s.s at their feet!

[Ill.u.s.tration: Map of the Country of the Cevennes.]

CHAPTER VI.

INSURRECTION OF THE CAMISARDS.

The poor peasants, wool-carders, and neatherds of the Cevennes, formed only a small and insignificant section of the great body of men who were about the same time engaged in different countries of Europe in vindicating the cause of civil and religious liberty. For this cause, a comparative handful of people in the Low Countries, occupying the Dutch United Provinces, had banded themselves together to resist the armies of Spain, then the most powerful monarchy in the world. The struggle had also for some time been in progress in England and Scotland, where it culminated in the Revolution of 1688; and it was still raging in the Vaudois valleys of Piedmont.

The object contended for in all these cases was the same. It was the vindication of human freedom against royal and sacerdotal despotism.

It could only have been the direst necessity that drove a poor, scattered, unarmed peasantry, such as the people of the Cevennes, to take up arms against so powerful a sovereign as Louis XIV. Their pa.s.sive resistance had lasted for fifteen long years, during which many of them had seen their kindred racked, hanged, or sent to the galleys; and at length their patience was exhausted, and the inevitable outburst took place. Yet they were at any moment ready to lay down their arms and return to their allegiance, provided only a reasonable degree of liberty of wors.h.i.+p were a.s.sured to them. This, however, their misguided and bigoted monarch, would not tolerate; for he had sworn that no persons were to be suffered in his dominions save those who were of "the King's religion."

The circ.u.mstances accompanying the outbreak of the Protestant peasantry in the Cevennes in many respects resembled those which attended the rising of the Scotch Covenanters in 1679. Both were occasioned by the persistent attempts of men in power to enforce a particular form of religion at the point of the sword. The resisters of the policy were in both cases Calvinists;[37] and they were alike indomitable and obstinate in their a.s.sertion of the rights of conscience. They held that religion was a matter between man and his G.o.d, and not between man and his sovereign or the Pope. The peasantry in both cases persevered in their own form of wors.h.i.+p. In Languedoc, the mountaineers of the Cevennes held their a.s.semblies in "The Desert;" and in Scotland, the "hill-folk" of the West held their meetings on the muirs. In the one country as in the other, the monarchy sent out soldiers as their missionaries--Louis XIV. employing the dragoons of Louvois and Baville, and Charles II. those of Claverhouse and Dalzell. These failing, new instruments of torture were invented for their "conversion." But the people, in both cases, continued alike stubborn in their adherence to their own simple and, as some thought, uncouth form of faith.

[Footnote 37: Whether it be that Calvinism is eclectic as regards races and individuals, or that it has (as is most probably the case) a powerful formative influence upon individual character, certain it is that the Calvinists of all countries have presented the strongest possible resemblance to each other--the Calvinists of Geneva and Holland, the Huguenots of France, the Covenanters of Scotland, and the Puritans of Old and New England, seeming, as it were, to be but members of the same family. It is curious to speculate on the influence which the religion of Calvin--himself a Frenchman--might have exercised on the history of France, as well as on the individual character of Frenchmen, had the balance of forces carried the nation bodily over to Protestantism (as was very nearly the case) towards the end of the sixteenth century. Heinrich Heine has expressed the opinion that the western races contain a large proportion of men for whom the moral principle of Judaism has a strong elective affinity; and in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Old Testament certainly seems to have exercised a much more powerful influence on the minds of religious reformers than the New. "The Jews," says Heine, "were the Germans of the East, and nowadays the Protestants in German countries (England, Scotland, America, Germany, Holland) are nothing more nor less than ancient Oriental Jews."]

The French Calvinist peasantry, like the Scotch, were great in their preachers and their prophets. Both devoted themselves with enthusiasm to psalmody, insomuch that "psalm-singers" was their nickname in both countries. The one had their Clement Marot by heart, the other their Sternhold and Hopkins. Huguenot prisoners in chains sang psalms in their dungeons, galley slaves sang them as they plied at the oar, fugitives in the halting-places of their flight, the condemned as they marched to the gallows, and the Camisards as they rushed into battle.

It was said of the Covenanters that "they lived praying and preaching, and they died praying and fighting;" and the same might have been said of the Huguenot peasantry of the Cevennes.

The immediate cause of the outbreak of the insurrection in both countries was also similar. In the one case, it was the cruelty of the archpriest Chayla, the inventor of a new machine of torture called "the Squeezers,"[38] and in the other the cruelty of Archbishop Sharpe, the inventor of that horrible instrument called "the Iron Boot," that excited the fury of the people; and the murder of the one by Seguier and his band at Pont-de-Montvert, as of the other by Balfour of Burley and his companions on Magus Muir, proved the signal for a general insurrection of the peasantry in both countries. Both acts were of like atrocity; but they corresponded in character with the cruelties which had provoked them. Insurrections, like revolutions, are not made of rose-water. In such cases, action and reaction are equal; the violence of the oppressors usually finding its counterpart in the violence of the oppressed.

[Footnote 38: The instrument is thus described by Cavalier, in his "Memoirs of the Wars of the Cevennes," London, 1726: "This inhuman man had invented a rack (more cruel, if it be possible, than that usually made use of) to torment these poor unfortunate gentlemen and ladies; which was a beam he caused to be split in two, with vices at each end. Every morning he would send for these poor people, in order to examine them, and if they refused to confess what he desired, he caused their legs to be put in the slit of the beam, and there squeezed them till the bones cracked," &c., &c. (p.

35).]

The insurrection of the French peasantry proved by far the most determined and protracted of the two; arising probably from the more difficult character of the mountain districts which they occupied and the quicker military instincts of the people, as well as because several of their early leaders and organizers were veteran soldiers who had served in many campaigns. The Scotch insurgents were suppressed by the English army under the Duke of Monmouth in less than two months after the original outbreak, though their cause eventually triumphed in the Revolution of 1688; whereas the peasantry of the Cevennes, though deprived of all extraneous help, continued to maintain a heroic struggle for several years, but were under the necessity of at last succ.u.mbing to the overpowering military force of Louis XIV., after which the Huguenots of France continued to be stamped out of sight, and apparently out of existence, for nearly a century.

In the preceding chapter, we left the archpriest Chayla a corpse at the feet of his murderers. Several of the soldiers found in the chateau were also killed, as well as the cook and house-steward, who had helped to torture the prisoners. But one of the domestics, and a soldier, who had treated them with kindness, were, at their intercession, pardoned and set at liberty. The corpses were brought together in the garden, and Seguier and his companions, kneeling round them--a grim and ghastly sight--sang psalms until daybreak, the uncouth harmony mingling with the crackling of the flames of the dwelling overhead, and the sullen roar of the river rus.h.i.+ng under the neighbouring bridge.

When the grey of morning appeared, the men rose from their knees, emerged from the garden, crossed the bridge, and marched up the main street of the village. The inhabitants had barricaded themselves in their houses, being in a state of great fear lest they should be implicated in the murder of the archpriest. But Seguier and his followers made no further halt in Pont-de-Montvert, but pa.s.sed along, still singing psalms, towards the hamlet of Frugeres, a little further up the valley of the Tarn.

Seguier has been characterised as "the Danton of the Cevennes." This fierce and iron-willed man was of great stature--bony and dark-visaged, without upper teeth, his hair hanging loose over his shoulders--and of a wild and mystic appearance, occasioned probably by the fits of ecstasy to which he was subject, and the wandering life he had for so many years led as a prophet-preacher in the Desert. This terrible man had resolved upon a general ma.s.sacre of the priests, and he now threw himself upon Frugeres for the purpose of carrying out the enterprise begun by him at Pont-de-Montvert. The cure of the hamlet, who had already heard of Chayla's murder, fled from his house at sound of the approaching psalm-singers, and took refuge in an adjoining rye-field. He was speedily tracked thither, and brought down by a musket-ball; and a list of twenty of his paris.h.i.+oners, whom he had denounced to the archpriest, was found under his ca.s.sock.

From Frugeres the prophet and his band marched on to St. Maurice de Ventalong, so called because of the winds which at certain seasons blow so furiously along the narrow valley in which it is situated; but the prior of the convent, having been warned of the outbreak, had already mounted his horse and taken to flight. Here Seguier was informed of the approach of a body of militia who were on his trail; but he avoided them by taking refuge on a neighbouring mountain-side, where he spent the night with his companions in a thicket.

Next morning, at daybreak, he descended the mountain, crossed the track of his pursuers, and directed himself upon St. Andre de Lanceze.

The whole country was by this time in a state of alarm; and the cure of the place, being on the outlook, mounted the clock-tower and rang the tocsin. But his paris.h.i.+oners having joined the insurgents, the cure was pursued, captured in the belfry, and thrown from its highest window. The insurgents then proceeded to gut the church, pull down the crosses, and destroy all the emblems of Romanism on which they could lay their hands.

Seguier and his band next hurried across the mountains towards the south, having learnt that the cures of the neighbourhood had a.s.sembled at St. Germain to a.s.sist at the obsequies of the archpriest Chayla, whose body had been brought thither from Pont-de-Montvert on the morning after his murder. When Seguier was informed that the town and country militia were in force in the place, he turned aside and went in another direction. The cures, however, having heard that Seguier was in the neighbourhood, fled panic-stricken, some to the chateau of Portes, others to St. Andre, while a number of them did not halt until they had found shelter within the walls of Alais, some twenty miles distant.

Thus four days pa.s.sed. On the fifth night Seguier appeared before the chateau of Ladeveze, and demanded the arms which had been deposited there at the time of the disarmament of the peasantry. The owner replied by a volley of musketry, which killed and wounded several of the insurgents, at the same time ringing the alarm-bell. Seguier, furious at this resistance, at once burst open the gates, and ordered a general ma.s.sacre of the household. This accomplished, he ransacked the place of its arms and ammunition, and before leaving set the castle on fire, the flames throwing a lurid glare over the surrounding country. Seguier's band then descended the mountain on which the chateau is situated, and made for the north in the direction of Ca.s.sagnas, arriving at the elevated plateau of Font-Morte a little before daybreak.

In the meantime, Baville, the intendant of the province, was hastening to Pont-de-Montvert to put down the insurrection and avenge the death of the archpriest. The whole country was roused. Troops were dispatched in hot haste from Alais; the militia were a.s.sembled from all quarters and marched upon the disturbed district. The force was placed under the orders of Captain Poul, an old soldier of fortune, who had distinguished himself in the German wars, and in the recent crusade against the Italian Vaudois. It was because of the individual prowess which Captain Poul had displayed in his last campaign, that, at the peace of Ryswick, Baville requested that he should be attached to the army of Languedoc, and employed in putting down the insurgents of the Cevennes.

Captain Poul was hastening with his troops to Florac when, having been informed of the direction in which Seguier and his band had gone, he turned aside at Barre, and after about an hour's march eastward, he came up with them at Font-Morte. They suddenly started up from amongst the broom where they had lain down to sleep, and, firing off their guns upon the advancing host, without offering any further resistance, fled in all directions. Poul and his men spurred after them, cutting down the fugitives. Coming up with Seguier, who was vainly trying to rally his men, Poul took him prisoner with several others, and they were forthwith chained and marched to Florac. As they proceeded along the road, Poul said to Seguier, "Well, wretch! now I have got you, how do you expect to be treated after the crimes you have committed?" "As I would myself have treated you, had I taken you prisoner," was the reply.

Seguier stood before his judges calm and fearless. "What is your name?" he was asked. "Pierre Seguier." "Why do they call you Esprit?"

"Because the Spirit of G.o.d is in me." "Your abode?" "In the Desert, and shortly in heaven." "Ask pardon of the King!" "We have no other King but the Eternal." "Have you no feeling of remorse for your crimes?" "My soul is as a garden full of shady groves and of peaceful fountains."

Seguier was condemned to have his hands cut off at the wrist, and he burnt alive at Pont-de-Montvert. Nouvel, another of the prisoners, was broken alive at Ladeveze, and Bonnet, a third, was hanged at St.

Andre. They all suffered without flinching. Seguier's last words, spoken amidst the flames, were, "Brethren, wait, and hope in the Eternal. The desolate Carmel shall yet revive, and the solitary Lebanon shall blossom as the rose!" Thus perished the grim, unflinching prophet of Magistavols, the terrible avenger of the cruelties of Chayla, the earliest leader in the insurrection of the Camisards!

It is not exactly known how or when the insurgents were first called Camisards. They called themselves by no other name than "The Children of G.o.d" (_Enfants de Dieu_); but their enemies variously nicknamed them "The Barbets," "The Vagabonds," "The a.s.semblers," "The Psalm-singers,"

"The Fanatics," and lastly, "The Camisards." This name is said to have been given them because of the common blouse or camisole which they wore--their only uniform. Others say that it arose from their wearing a white s.h.i.+rt, or camise, over their dress, to enable them to distinguish each other in their night attacks; and that this was not the case, is partly countenanced by the fact that in the course of the insurrection a body of peasant royalists took the field, who designated themselves the "_White_ Camisards," in contradistinction from the others. Others say the word is derived from _camis_, signifying a roadrunner. But whatever the origin of the word may be, the Camisards was the name most commonly applied to the insurgents, and by which they continue to be known in local history.