Editors' Note: The editors regret that the publication of this review, which was submitted by Professor Butler in July 2014, was delayed until the present issue.
Scholarship by two of academia's most distinguished practitioners in the 1960s and 1970s bore the potential to lift France's early protestants—Huguenots—out of church history's back bays into interdisciplinary streams. Michael Walzer's brilliant Revolution of the Saints (1965) argued for the significance of French Calvinist congregational discipline in the rise of modern radicalism. Natalie Zemon Davis's bracing essays on protestant-Catholic violence in France, on the body and the sacred, and on women lifted France's protestants out of relative obscurity. Davis's presence and Walzer's absence offer a clue to the strengths and peculiarities of Geoffrey Treasure's The Huguenots.
Treasure has written on early modern European politics, including biographies of Mazarin and Louis XIV. The Huguenots runs to nearly 400 pages of closely printed text and mines extensive published histories in a broad-scaled account of France's protestant movement down to the brutally executed 1685 revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1598) that ended even grudging toleration of French protestants for a century. Treasure writes with verve and generally even-handed judgment, and he focuses principally on the politics surrounding the protestant struggle to survive. The Huguenots is, in short, history from the top down, not from the bottom up. As Treasure puts it in chapter 27, “The future of Protestantism in France will come to depend ultimately on the attitude and policies of the crown” (301).
Indeed, The Huguenots offers a superb account of interaction between France's developing protestant movement and the monarchical authorities that opposed or occasionally supported it. The Huguenots is especially good at describing and explaining the complexities of monarchical policy, action, and inaction. These include particularly fine accounts of the murderous politics surrounding the French monarchy, of the gruesome St. Bartholomew's Day massacres (far more than one), of Henry IV, the abjuring Huguenot infamous for saying, allegedly, “Paris is well worth a Mass,” and of Louis XIV's shifting thinking about protestants that ran from apparent disinterest to ruthless opposition. Some international machinations get confusing, but the basic outlines make clear how closely religious combatants tracked each other's movements, neither ever accepting the legitimacy of the other.
Ironically, The Huguenots provides less attention to the men and women of its title. The first 100 pages introduce France, the monarchy, the Protestant Reformation, Luther, and Calvin, and subsequent chapters frequently emphasize the shifts in royal policy, internal French politics, and broad Huguenot reactions. The chapters describing the texture and context of France's evolving protestant movement rest on first-rate, subtle scholarship by historians who will be known to anyone with early modern European interests. These not only include Davis but Emile Léonard's still stunning Huguenot histories of the 1950s and the terrific local and regional studies of the past thirty from Philip Benedict, Pierre Bolle, Bernard Cottret, Martin Dinges, Janine Garrison, Keith Luria, Raymond Mentzer, and Menna Prestwich, among others. The finest chapter in this vein, “The Eye of the Storm: Huguenot Lives and Conditions,” offers a supple account of mid-seventeenth century French protestantism that nicely accounts for critically important regional, urban, and rural differences. Walzer is absent, a consequence perhaps of the focus on national developments rather than local congregational discipline. Still, Treasure synthesizes so well in “The Eye of the Storm,” offering trenchant generalizations without smooshing everything into a bland whole, that many readers will wish The Huguenots had given more attention to Huguenots on the ground.
There are oddities. Peasants are twice described as “animists,” which without explanation emerges as a kind of epithet but with a subtle explanation might have contextualized the protestants' inability to win followers among the monarchy's poorest subjects (54, 115). The Huguenots ends peculiarly with a three-page discussion of prominent post-Revocation Huguenot families but without an account of the movement's success in winning toleration in 1787 or of its character across the next centuries, perhaps even down to Lionel Jospin's seemingly anomalous Socialist party candidacies for French president in 1995 and 2002. Jospin's protestantism interested neither supporters nor opponents.
The Huguenots turns more indulgent as the Revocation approaches and passes. Treasure agrees that the “Revocation was the prelude to a tragedy on both sides of the divide” (362). But he also suggests that Louis XIV failed to wipe out French protestantism altogether, that the refugees in England “represent the sterling character of Huguenot life,” and that “Huguenotism recover[ed] its soul” during the Cévennes war of the 1690s, in the spiritual radicalism in some survivors, and in the eighteenth-century “Church of the Desert” (376).
These judgments mask large-scale disaster. Huge numbers of protestants abjured under force, and if brave remnants remained, Louis XIV succeeded in permanently eliminating protestantism as a significant political force in France. Some refugees indeed made distinguished intellectual, economic, and cultural contributions in England, the Netherlands, the German principalities, and Britain's American colonies. But many remained pathetically poor. Charity campaigns to help Huguenots in England raised bitter resentments, and funds sending London refugees to New York and South Carolina also conveniently removed them, even if their condition exemplified Catholic cruelty. In short, it is hard to find much Huguenot moral triumph over a calamitous Revocation that Huguenots successfully escaped for a century, their previous maneuvering and that of the monarchy documented skillfully and with subtle judgment throughout much of The Huguenots.
