The Huguenots of Paris and the Coming of Religious Freedom, 1685-1789, by David Garrioch

Abstract

David Garrioch has spent most of his scholarly career investigating the everyday lives of Parisians over the last century of the ancien régime. His work has been marked by a warm sympathy for the practices and problems of the ordinary people of the capital, and obvious respect for how they got along with one another. He approaches the pre-revolutionary city on its own terms rather than, like too many subsequent historians, through the lurid prism of revolutionaries anxious to depict what they had destroyed as a cruel and dysfunctional shambles. His writings have been a serial demolition of retrospective myths about eighteenth-century Paris, and his latest book punctures yet another inflated claim of the revolutionaries: that religious toleration was their achievement, and the final fulfilment of a philosophic crusade. It was true that, ever since the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, French Protestants had enjoyed no legal recognition, and were the target of a draconian range of penal laws designed to stamp them out. Only as late as 1787 did their civil disabilities begin to be relaxed. But Garrioch demonstrates that, even before Louis XIV died, the full rigour of anti-Huguenot laws was seldom deployed—in the capital at least. There were periodic crackdowns, especially after the conclusion of wars refocused governmental attention on domestic matters. But they never lasted long, and, from the start, administrators worried that excessive severity would drive useful subjects out of the country. They were genuinely surprised by how many tried to leave rather than renounce their beliefs. Over the subsequent century the number of Parisian Protestants grew again, and most of them discreetly prospered. Yet their numbers never rose far above 1 per cent of the city’s population, and they never came close to dominating even the areas in which they tended to live. In a series of statistically-based chapters, Garrioch counts them, maps them, tracks them, and analyses the distinctive cultural practices which held them together. Even so, they were easy to overlook, and, in any case, they kept their heads down. The nearest most of them came to flaunting their Protestantism was in attending services at the chapels of foreign ambassadors—particularly the Calvinist Dutch one. Most Parisians, Garrioch concludes, had probably never knowingly seen a Protestant, and only over-suspicious clergy gave much thought to their presence.