Facing the Revocation: Huguenot Families, Faith, and the King's Will

ISBN-13: 9780190241315 / Angielski / Twarda / 2016 / 488 str.

Carolyn Chappell Lougee

Opis

The Edict of Nantes ended the civil wars of the Reformation in 1598 by making France a kingdom with two religions. Catholics could worship anywhere, while Protestants had specific locations where they were sanctioned to worship. Over the coming decades Protestants' religious freedom and civil privileges eroded until the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, issued under Louis XIV in 1685, criminalized their religion.

The Robillard de Champagne, a noble family, were among those facing the Revocation. They and their co-religionists confronted the difficult decision whether to obey this new law and convert, feign conversion and remain privately Protestant, or break the law and attempt to flee secretly in what was the first modern mass migration. In this sweeping family saga, Carolyn Chappell Lougee narrates how the Champagne family's persecution and Protestant devotion unsettled their economic advantages and social standing. The family provides a window onto the choices that individuals and their kin had to make in these trying circumstances, the agency of women within families, and the consequences of their choices. Lougee traces the lives of the family members who escaped; the kin and community members who decided to stay, both complying with and resisting the king's will; and those who resettled in Britain and Prussia, where they adapted culturally and became influential members of society. She challenges the narrative Huguenots told over subsequent generations about the deeper faith of those who opted for exile and the venal qualities of those who remained in France.

A masterful and moving account of the Hugenots, Facing the Revocation offers a deeply personal perspective on one of the greatest acts of religious intolerance in history.

Recenzje

The Champagné family are unusually well documented. This is partly the luck of survival, but finding this material and interpreting it required truly remarkable scholarship. Lougee's dissection of both Protestant and Catholic narratives is brilliant. Both technically and stylistically, this is superb historical writing...The story is wonderfully told, skillfully combining historical empathy with incisive, no-nonsense analysis of motives and of the consequences of individual decisions. Lougee challenges or nuances a number of myths that remain current in Huguenot memory and in some scholarly works: the emphasis on state persecution and on purely religious motivations for departure from France; the belief that the Protestant nobility massively abandoned the Reformed religion; and the idea that emigration marked a complete break with the past.

O autorze

Carolyn Chappell Lougee is Frances and Charles Field Professor in History Emerita at Stanford University.