Since the nineteenth century much has been – and continues to be – written about the war of the Cévennes. In July 1702, after years of mounting state persecution in the region, a group of Calvinist rebels – the Camisards – murdered l’abbé du Chayla and took up arms to restore the Edict of Nantes, which Louis xiv had revoked nearly two decades earlier. The revolt escalated until 1704, but continued intermittently until 1710, and is regarded by historians as the last French War of Religion. Part of what makes this conflict so unique is its somewhat anachronistic character: a gruesome Protestant guerrilla war against Catholic forces in the eighteenth century, at a time when the Dutch Republic, England and several German territories had embraced religious tolerance.

Stephen Davis’s engaging book is one of the latest contributions on this tragic episode in French history, and one of the few written in English. Although very short, it consists of thirteen chapters designed to frame its subject matter into a very broad chronological framework, spanning from the Reformation all the way to the 1905 French law on the separation of Church and State. As Davis rightly explains (p. 44), the War of the Cévennes is generally divided into four distinct phases, corresponding to the four French military officers mandated locally: (1). Early Camisard victories over Lieutenant-General La Broglie’s forces (July 1702– February 1703); (2). Ruthless repression under Marshal de Montrevel (February 1703–March 1704); (3). Peace negotiations and partial Camisard surrenders under Marshal de Villars (April–December 1704); (4). Sporadic resistance against Marshal de Berwick (1705–10). While the book’s title suggests a focus on the first three phases of the conflict, only chapters seven to eleven are dedicated to them. Instead, most of the book focuses on the long-term causes of the Camisard rebellion, starting from the early Reformation (chapter ii), moving through the French Wars of Religion (chapter iii) and the slow erosion of the Edict of Nantes (1598) under Louis xiii and Louis xiv (chapter iv), and the aftermath of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) (chapters v–vi).

In many ways Davis’s book is more about the significance and legacy of the Camisards in France’s long and tumultuous religious history, than about the conflict itself. There is nothing wrong with that, but historians will learn little new from his account of the war of the Cévennes. It is almost entirely based on French classics from the 1970s to the 1990s (Joutard, Crété, Bosc, Ducasse) and regrettably does not incorporate scholarship of the past two decades (Bernat, Borello, Cabanel, Glozier, McCullough, Rolland, Thomas, Utt and Strayer), chief among which is the first extensive English-language account by Greg Monahan, Let God arise (Oxford 2014). As a result, Davis reproduces a rather insular vision of the Cévennes as a Calvinist ‘island’ in the heart of France and misses out on more recent findings and transnational connections.

For all its remoteness from the main trading routes, the Cévennes was far from isolated. Recent scholarship has shown how southern France, where most Huguenots lived, maintained active connections with Protestant countries in northern Europe. Exiled theologians like Pierre Jurieu in Rotterdam and the Puritan minister Cotton Mather in New England had already reported on the emergence of prophetism in Dauphiné in the late 1680s. The Camisards themselves appealed directly to the Anglo-Dutch coalition for help during the war of the Spanish Succession (1701–13); pamphlets were published in London, Amsterdam and Berlin to plead their cause abroad; and attempts were made to send military and financial relief both via the Alps and to the coast of Languedoc (Glozier, Laborie, de Boer). The Camisards were seen as part of a ‘Protestant International’, a fact of which Louis xiv and his intendant in Languedoc were fully aware. This awareness influenced the French response to the rebellion, including the decision to send one of France’s highest-ranking officers, Marshal de Villars, to Languedoc. Villars’s sudden offer of amnesty in 1704 (pp. 68–73) was intended to preempt imminent foreign intervention. These transnational ties persisted throughout the eighteenth century, as Antoine Court and his itinerant ministers worked to rebuild a clandestine French Protestant Church.

When it comes to the Camisards’ legacy and their role in the survival of French Protestantism, Davis does not take sides in the debate, nor does he excuse their use of violence (pp. 86–7). Instead, he rightly points to Louis xiv’s responsibility in rekindling religious tensions in his kingdom and warns – with relevance to the present – against the consequences of state encroachment upon religious freedom: ‘When the state killed the preachers, it created the prophets. When it killed the prophets, it created the Camisards’ (p. 87). Could the last French war of religion have been avoided? Definitely. Did the Camisards ensure the survival of French Protestantism until the French Revolution? That is more debatable. They kept their faith alive with their clandestine assemblies after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes until Louis xiv’s death in 1715. But Huguenots overwhelmingly condemned their claims to prophecy and use of violence. Antoine Court and his ministers did everything they could to eradicate the last remnants of the Camisards’ unorthodox praxis (chapter xii). The Edict of Versailles (1787), often misnamed the ‘edict of tolerance’ (p. 82), had nothing to do with religious freedom – the word ‘tolérance’ does not even appear in the text – but merely created a civil register and restored property and succession rights for non-Catholics, including Jews. By then the clandestine Huguenot population had grown so much that the French state could no longer ignore its existence.

Although Camisards paid the heaviest price in the post-Revocation persecution, their spiritual legacy survived essentially outside of France, via the French Prophets in London and, to a lesser extent, the Shakers and the Inspirationists in America. Davis’s book does not explore this transnational legacy, but his long-term approach and accessible style offer the general reader a welcome introduction to a little-known chapter in European religious history and the costs of intolerance in an age of Enlightenment.