Prior to the significant work of scholars like Jon Butler and Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, the lives of Huguenots were rarely featured in the history of religion in early modern North America. In From a Far Country, Catharine Randall attempts to enhance the transatlantic narrative of French Protestantism by linking the Camisard experiences of persecution, piety, and prophecy in France with Huguenot experiences of immigration, adaptation, and survival in New England. By tracking how French Protestants translated Old World forms of theology and worship to New World circumstances during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Randall wishes to shed light on “a significant and formerly unrecognized French connection between Continental and American Protestantism” (10). She makes her case for the close association of French and British Protestants, and specifically Huguenots and Puritans, in a mere 116 pages, resulting in a concise account of religious diversity and cooperation in colonial America.
Randall begins From a Far Country by situating her analysis of Camisards and Huguenots within the historiography of early modern French and American Protestantism. Her argument includes three basic claims. First, Randall challenges the “rapid assimilation” thesis proposed by Butler in his book The Huguenots in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), indicating “that the French immigrants underwent a lengthy period of adaptation without assimilation, characterized by both a clinging to distinctive religious traits and an overt intention to conform to, and not to contest, the prevailing mind-set of the Puritan New World” (1). Second, she shows “how the Huguenots used the paradigm of Camisard experience” (114) to make sense of their movement away from Europe and their settlement in North America. Third, she stresses the influence of Camisard and Huguenot piety and theology on New England Puritanism, taking special note of Cotton Mather's congenial relationship with various French Protestant émigrés. Because of the introduction's emphasis on historiography and absence of historical context, readers unfamiliar with Huguenot history should refer to the conclusion in advance of the rest of the book, as it is a decidedly neater characterization of Randall's overall intention to demonstrate how Huguenots retained their French Protestant identities in the New World.
The first three chapters of From a Far Country describe the experiences of Camisards and Huguenots in continental Europe. Relying on limited sources, Randall provides an overview of the Camisard's “distinct confessional subculture” (12) that developed in the Cévennes region of France during the seventeenth century. In response to severe persecution at the hands of Louis XIV, the Camisards relied upon Reformed Protestant forms of piety and theology that stressed millennialism, prophecy, primitivism, mysticism, anti-Catholicism, and spiritual warfare. Out of this Camisard community of France came the so-called French Prophets of London. Randall focuses on the émigré prophets Elie Marion, Durand Fage, and Jean Cavalier de Sauve in her analysis of French Protestant testimonials, their deployment of Enlightenment rationalism, and their plea for freedom of conscience.
The last four chapters recount French Protestant experiences in New England. Again pushing against an assimilation model, Randall insists that “Huguenots pursued a strategy of protective coloration designed to prevent a repeat of the Camisard experience” (63), which allowed for the persistence of “a unified core of ideologies and modes of operating in the world, a French Protestant mentalité derived from Huguenot and Camisard experience” (68). She tries to support this claim in three case studies detailing the adaptation of the Frenchmen Gabriel Bernon, Ezéchial Carré, and Elie Neau to life in the British colonies. With each individual, Randall is convinced that the demonstration of “reasoned, practical, and chosen conformity” (71) to the political, social, and economic systems of colonial America did not amount to a compromise of Huguenot faith. Never mind that Bernon “appears to have been a communicant in good standing in the Anglican Church” (69) who aided in the establishment of several Anglican churches, for, according to Randall, “his attendance at an Anglican rather than a French Reformed church was in no way an assimilation process that diluted his faith, but rather a reasoned selection of a benign alternative that enabled him to maintain intact his essential core beliefs” (79). Underlying Randall's chapter on the Huguenot leader Carré is her belief that “Camisard piety was not dissimilar from Cotton Mather's piety” (80). In fact, based on Mather's relationship with Carré and sponsorship of French Protestant churches, the similarities “are undeniable” (81). And lastly, highlighting the “Camisard sympathies” (107) of a former galley slave, Randall shows how Neau's refugee piety, again with the support of Mather, influenced Huguenot communities throughout the British colonies. Though admittedly, Huguenot “ardor” for Neau “cooled when he began to attend Anglican services” in order “to secure the financial assistance and moral support of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, an Anglican body” (109–10).
From a Far Country is a book about an understudied topic in American religious history. Randall's account of French Protestantism is at its strongest when examining the theological similarities between Camisards, Huguenots, Puritans, and Anglicans in the American colonies. Indeed, her depiction of the role of Cotton Mather in the perpetuation of French Protestant identity reinforces narratives of early America that accentuate religious diversity. Randall's argument is at its weakest when forcing such a clear distinction between assimilation and adaptation. If anything, her case studies demonstrate just how difficult it is to speak definitively about a subject that, in the estimation of many historians, remains mysterious because of the lack of Huguenot sources and the apparent ability of Huguenots to adapt to their surroundings. Moreover, by quoting Butler at the very end of From a Far Country, Randall underlines her alliance with general trends in the historiography of French Protestantism in colonial America.
