David Garrioch. The Huguenots of Paris and the Coming of Religious Freedom, 1685–1789.

Abstract

As the global resurgence of religious violence and the difficult adjustment to the presence of new faiths in the West have bestowed urgency on understanding confessional conflict and coexistence, Europeanists have fruitfully rethought what used to be called the “rise of toleration.” Recent work has shown that making sense of the volatile and often changing mix of tension and cooperation that marked medieval and early modern situations of religious pluralism requires more than a history of ideas about toleration. Everyday patterns of interaction between those of different faiths, the images they hold of one another, and the pertinent laws and their enforcement must all be reconstructed. “Religious liberty” must be parsed into its component parts: freedom of conscience, freedom of worship, and the civil rights accorded members of different religions. David Garrioch has absorbed these methodological lessons, and his wide-ranging study of the Huguenots of Paris from the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes to 1789 adds substantially to our understanding of inter-confessional relations in early modern Europe. Both halves of this book's title receive attention. The work examines the social profile, networks, and religious practices of the roughly 4,000–7,000 Reformed Protestants who lived in France's capital at any given moment in this period. It also traces and seeks to explain the growing margin of religious freedom afforded them over time. By religious freedom Garrioch means de facto toleration of abstention from Catholic rites or attendance at Protestant services, easier everyday relations with Catholic neighbors, and the opening up of access to previously closed trades or honors. De jure rights of worship and legal equality only came with the Revolution.