Beyond Belief: Surviving the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in France by Christie Sample Wilson (review)

Abstract

Beyond Belief: Surviving the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in France. By Christie Sample Wilson. (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, co-published with Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MD. 2011. Pp. xii, 163. $60.00. ISBN 978-1-61146-077-3.)In the mid-seventeenth century, French Protestants and Catholics practiced their two faiths alongside one another wherever the Edict of Nantes (1598) had recognized Protestants' rights of worship. Loriol, in Dauphine along the Rhone between Avignon and Lyon, was one such biconfessional town. Three-quarters of its inhabitants were Protestants, its town administration was dominated by Protestants, and a temple with a resident pastor ministered to Protestant religious needs. Half a century later, as the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) criminalized Protestantism and mandated Catholic practice, the town administration was firmly in Catholic hands, and inhabitants looked to the Catholic parish for their sacraments and rites of passage. Yet in the years of transformation, Loriol experienced none of the violence from external or internal sources that racked other French localities in the era of the Revocation, few of the escapes from the kingdom that cost King Louis XIV perhaps 150,000 of his subjects, and none of the overt resistance from those expected by the Revocation to switch their beliefs. What accounts for the exceptional experience of Loriol? How and why did this one locality experience the Revocation so differently from other communities that included Protestants?This is the problem addressed by Christie Sample Wilson in Beyond Belief: Surviving the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in France. For answers, Wilson looks primarily to town council records and parish registers. In the former she finds indication (p. 18) of strife as the majority of offices shifted from Protestants to Catholics, as well as no evidence that the new Catholic majority used its power to harass or penalize Protestants by overtaxing them, enforcing royal orders ejecting them from a long list of professions, or reporting their noncompliance to authorities outside the town. In the latter source she finds that differences in practices such as the delay from birth to baptism, illegitimacies, and the seasonality of marriages were pronounced before 1680, but attenuated and disappeared as persons of both confessions conformed to the practices characteristic of Catholicism.This peaceful transformation she ascribes to a determination on the part of the townspeople to avoid interference from external royal or ecclesiastical authorities. …