Huguenot Refugees Research Articles

The Crucible of Family, Money, and Conversion

Abstract This article examines the evolution of the French government’s policy concerning Huguenot mobility by analyzing legal petitions, primarily passport requests, submitted by nouveaux convertis (new converts) and rémigrés (returning Huguenot refugees) from the Revocation period to the Regency of the duke of Orléans. While the French state closely scrutinized the passport applications of nouveaux convertis and rémigrés, local officials increasingly recognized the practicality of easing harsh restrictions on Huguenot mobility to curb their emigration to Protestant countries and their resistance to conversion efforts. Huguenot families also carefully crafted their petitions, strategically considering familial connections, financial concerns, and the necessity of conversion for obtaining passports. The intersection of family, money, and conversion, as manifested through these passport narratives, shows us how interactions between state actors and passport petitioners nudged the government toward a moderation of the severe Revocation policy.

Versailles in England: Culture, Commerce and Diplomacy, from Charles II to Louis XVI

The English fascination for Versailles and the French court was reflected not only in numerous visits to the palace in France, but also in gardens, architecture, decoration and manners in England. Diplomats, such as Ralph Montagu, later Master of the Great Wardrobe in England, craftsmen such as Daniel Marot, a Huguenot refugee who had worked for Louis XIV, and travellers brought their direct experience of Versailles to England. Particularly in its use of frescoes with monarchical themes and in the prominence and furnishings of the King’s Bedchamber, Versailles was one of the models (although not the only one) for Hampton Court Palace, Boughton and Chatsworth, among other houses. Recent work by Anna Keay, Simon Thurley and others confirms that some rituals and fashions followed at Versailles also influenced the English court: especially under Charles II, the first English king to have a lever and a coucher; William III, who planned his own Trianon beside Hampton Court; and the future George IV, who filled Carlton House with furniture like that at Versailles. The influence of Versailles in England shows the power of court culture to outweigh wars and national rivalries.

Adriaen Collaert, Jan Brueghel and Leguat’s “géant’ – the ongoing longevity of a seventeenth-century avian chimera across science, art and literature

ABSTRACT A Collaert image, a propagandist’s misnomer and a traveller’s description combined to create the ‘géant’, a chimera that developed a life of its own that has persisted even after the real bird seen by Huguenot refugee François Leguat was shown to have been a flamingo, and Collaert’s image a rather etiolated purple swamphen (Porphyrio porphyrio). The recent resurrection of the ‘géant’ in separate publications about Adriaen Collaert and Jan Brueghel (in 2010 and 2011, respectively) is discussed in the context of the curious backstory and parallel narratives of this ornithological and literary invention, and highlights the need for greater cross-disciplinary study when a subject crosses scientific, literary and artistic boundaries.

Imaginary Controversists: Abraham Gómez Silveyra and the Theologians of the Huguenot Exile

In the Huguenot refugee community in The Netherlands, known as a hotbed of the early Enlightenment, literary interest in Judaism was ubiquitous, yet actual Dutch Jews were relegated to a marginal position in the exchange of ideas. It is this paradoxical experience of cultural participation and social exclusion that a major unpublished source allows to depict. The ex-converso Abraham Gómez Silveyra (1651–1741), a merchant endowed with rabbinic education and proficiency in French, composed eight manuscript volumes of theological reflections in Spanish literary prose and poetry. This huge clandestine series, which survives in three copies, shows the author’s insatiable curiosity for Christian thought. While rebutting Isaac Jacquelot’s missionary activity, he fraternizes with Pierre Jurieu’s millenarianism, Jacques Basnage’s historiography, and Pierre Bayle’s plea for religious freedom. Gómez Silveyra, however, being painfully aware of his voicelessness in the public sphere, enacts Bayle’s utopian project as a closed performance for a Jewish audience.

“Enemies Surround Us and Besiege Us”

Abstract This article uses unpublished exile sermons exhumed from the Leiden manuscripts, theological dissertations, and synodal sources to explore the interfaith relationships of exiled societies in the Dutch Republic, in particular the links between Huguenot refugees and their multi-confessional host society. It examines how ministers viewed the exiles’ relationships with the other, as well as the theological motives for stigmatising such ties. By studying confessional interactions of competition and mutual attraction within the Refuge, this essay highlights the porous nature of religious boundaries, despite the Huguenot community’s isolate claimed by the ministers. It also reveals latent conflicts between diasporic societies: the United Provinces were not a peaceful asylum for the Reformed faith of refugees, but rather the scene of a counter-Catholic struggle that stretched even into the Spanish Netherlands. Finally, this survey shows that exile revived proselytist projects aimed at French-speaking Jews and supported extraterritorial religious struggles in the eighteenth century.

The French Church of Maastricht

Abstract The French Reformed church of Maastricht, founded in 1632 following the Dutch takeover of the city, was a geographically isolated institution within the Dutch Republic. This isolation was reinforced by the city’s unique status, which allowed the public exercise of Catholicism. Within this context, and situated next to the hostile Principality of Liège, the French church had to develop survival strategies and establish relations not only with the States-General and the Walloon synod, but also with the urban authorities and the Dutch Reformed church, in order to withstand the influence of Catholicism. Yet even though Maastricht was on the confessional and military front line—a place of passage for merchants, refugees, and Catholic clergymen—the French Protestant community survived the French occupation of 1673–1678 and managed to absorb the massive influx of Huguenot refugees from 1686 onwards.

Constructing ‘Englishness’ and promoting ‘politeness’ through a ‘Francophobic’ bestseller: Télémaque in England (1699–1745)

ABSTRACT This article draws attention to the reception that François Fénelon's Télémaque (1699) received in England in the first half of the eighteenth century. It overturns the historiographical assumption that the Jacobites were the leading disseminators of this continental bestseller on the other side of the Channel. Even though in the English intellectual context Télémaque's framework was unorthodox, many staunch supporters of the Glorious Revolution were fascinated by the book's portrayal of a virtuous king who respects laws, rights and liberties, and sacrifices himself to improve the wellbeing of his subjects. Moderate Whigs - who included several Huguenot refugees - capitalised on the poem's esprit du roi in order both to celebrate the English kings and to construct the ‘Myth of Louis XIV' as an example of how a sovereign should not rule. The study of the book's reception thus presents a somewhat emblematic case study from which to view the genesis of ‘Englishness', that of an ideological discourse largely based on a process of overturning. In addition, the Télémaque responded to the thirst for ‘useful Knowledge' that distinguished the advocates of ‘politeness' and, not least, its mild pedagogical approach rendered it a precious resource for the ‘moderation’ of the youth.

Consoling the Huguenot Refugees in Late Sixteenth-Century Geneva

Consoling the Huguenot Refugees in Late Sixteenth-Century Geneva

Un réfugié au service de l’Empire : la vie et l’expérience de Paul Mascarene

The life of Paul Mascarene demonstrates the importance of religious diasporas in building the British imperial state. A Huguenot refugee who became a military officer in Nova Scotia, he attempted to make the empire a force for international Protestantism, even trying to settle some of his fellow Huguenots in the colony. When that plan failed, he became an ambassador to Acadian Catholics, using his French experience to try to build a Protestant empire that tolerated some degree of diversity. He did not succeed in saving the Acadians from expulsion but he showed a path forward for future imperial leaders.

The Fight for a New England Turpentine Trade: Empire, Markets, and the Colonial Landscape at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century

Imperial wars and Atlantic markets drove a boom in turpentine production in turn-of-the-eighteenth-century New England. English Colonists used techniques learned from Huguenot refugees to exploit local pines in a quest for profits that threatened woodlands and, in at least one dramatic example, led to violent competition between colonial neighbors.

Experiencing Exile: Huguenot Refugees in the Dutch Republic, 1680–1700, by David van der Linden

Experiencing Exile: Huguenot Refugees in the Dutch Republic, 1680–1700, by David van der Linden

Huguenot Refugees and the Meaning of Charity in Early New England

Huguenot suffering inspired fast days, prayer meetings, and collections among Congregationalists in Massachusetts and Plymouth in the 1680s. Ministers used a variety of frameworks to motivate compassion for the French refugees. Some preachers considered the French plight to be the result of an Antichristian attack, one that might soon spread to New England. Others assumed Huguenot suffering generally was a result of their sinful neglect of the Sabbath, and that compassion and honor should extend to those who suffered cheerfully while upholding disciplined purity. As suspicions mounted that there were French Catholic spies within the refugee communities and local harassment increased, the prominent Huguenot minister Ezekiel Carré advocated an alternate framework for Christian charity. In his remarkable sermon,The Charitable Samaritan, Carré shifted the meaning of charity from an apocalyptic framework to one centered on active mercy for the wounded regardless of sect or nationality. A friend of Carré’s and Huguenot supporter, Cotton Mather incorporated Carré’s interpretation of the Samaritan story into his magisterial Bible commentary. Though always contested, Huguenot practices and rhetoric broadened the conversation over the meaning of charity in early New England.

JEWS AND OTHER RELIGIOUS CONFESSIONS AS SEEN IN THE FRENCH LANGUAGE PERIODICALS PUBLISHED BY THE HUGUENOTS IN THE UNITED PROVINCES (1680-1715)

Huguenots and Jews were both minorities in the United Provinces of the Netherlands. When the majority of the Huguenots arrived to the country, Jews had already resided there and had become part of Dutch society. The French newcomers, contrary to the Dutch, had little contact with the Jews and it was probably their first encounter with them. The majority of the Huguenots arrived there after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Among the Huguenot refugees we find a certain number of intellectuals who established gazettes and journals. Those periodicals, published in French, open us a window in the perception that the Huguenots and the local Dutchmen had on the Jewish community and individual Jews, as well as on the Jewish nation as such. While journals refer to more scientific periodicals, the gazettes were collections of news and gossip both from the United Provinces and from other parts of Europe. The article focuses on the distinction between the different categories of Jews that appear in these periodicals and places them in the appropriate historical and scientific context.

“Confined unto a Low Chair”: Reading the Particulars of Disability in Cotton Mather’s Miracle Narratives

“Confined unto a Low Chair”Reading the Particulars of Disability in Cotton Mather’s Miracle Narratives Nicholas Junkerman (bio) In his Election Day sermon to the General Assembly of Massachusetts Bay on May 27, 1696, Cotton Mather prophesied the imminent arrival of the kingdom of God: “The Tidings which I bring unto you, are, That there is a REVOLUTION and a REFORMATION at the very Door, which will be vastly more Wonderful, than any of the Deliverances, yet seen by the Church of God” (Things 33−34). The evidence for this vision was drawn in part from scriptural calculation of the promised end of the Roman church, but Mather also saw prelusive glimmers of the millennium in recent wonderful events. Now that the “Antichristian Apostasy” was plainly doomed, he had reason to believe God’s miraculous power was returning to the world: “For there seems as if there were an Age of Miracles now Dawning upon us” (36). As in the last great age of miracles, in the days of the early church, these wonderful works were making themselves known in the very bodies of the faithful: Persons who have had their Limbs miserably disjointed, Persons that have had Inveterate Palseyes, Incurable Fistula’s, Desperate Leprosies; These Persons, as they have been Reading the Ancient Miracles of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Spirit of Christ hath wonderfully given them, the Faith of His doing the like for them; and Behold, they have … been by the like Miracles, perfectly and presently recovered out of all their Maladies. (36) Mather was at pains to avoid the appearance of “meer Conjecture” (35) in his prophecy, and these miraculous healings offered immediate, visible evidence to bolster millennial hopes. Just as the “Ancient Miracles” had sealed and certified Christ’s divinity in his days on earth, so now they presaged his return. The passage above attempts to reproduce the wonder of viewing [End Page 53] the miracle, and so to evoke in the reader a sense of harmony and divine simplification: “Behold, they have … been by the like Miracles, perfectly and presently recovered.” In Mather’s account these afflicted bodies, with all their bewildering array of disjointed limbs, palsies, fistulas, and leprosies, are resolved by miraculous power into the singularity of perfect and present recovery. Yet there is a difference between witnessing a miracle and experiencing it in narrative form. In the moment of its action the supernatural event itself entirely effaces the human physical particulars that went before. Palsies, fistulas, and the like vanish without a trace in the perfection of recovery. This power of annihilation is beyond the reach of narrative re-creation. The impaired bodies that were transformed by miracle, in their arresting variety and particularity, have left a distinctive trace—what I will call the particulars of disability. These particulars remain in the text, available for our continuing consideration. In this essay, I read such archival traces as contributing to, and helping to construct, an important early American discourse of disability, rooted in the exercise of Protestant piety. Close attention to these particulars of disability in Mather’s miracle narratives has two central benefits. First, it reveals how Mather framed disability as a theological and spiritual category, rooted in humanity’s collective responsibility for original sin. Second, it makes it clear that Mather’s interpretive strategies can obstruct and narrow our reading of early American disability, even as they provide the material for it. The response that I propose to these obstructions is a turn back to those same particulars of impairment, using the analytical perspective provided by contemporary disability studies to read them against and outside Mather’s exhortations. Mather’s sermon appeared in print later in 1696, under the title Things for a Distress’d People to Think Upon. In that text he expanded on these wondrous events by appending seven narratives of recent miraculous cures of Protestants in France and England. Perhaps the most famous account in Mather’s appendix of miracles was the story of a French girl named Mary Maillard, whose instantaneous healing had been chronicled in a number of English publications in the preceding years.1 Maillard was the daughter of Huguenot refugees who had...

Experiencing Exile: Huguenot Refugees in the Dutch Republic, 1680–1700

Experiencing Exile: Huguenot Refugees in the Dutch Republic, 1680–1700

Experiencing Exile: Huguenot Refugees in the Dutch Republic, 1680–1700

Could exile ever be anything other than unsettling? At first glance the final lines of this book's conclusion (that ‘exile was a thoroughly unsettling experience, not a clear-cut quest for religious freedom’, p. 230) might seem obvious to the reader. However, set against the background of a long tradition of scholarship, which has tended to paint too bright and possibly too heroic a picture of Huguenot exile, the urgency of David van der Linden's enquiry becomes increasingly clear. Divided into three parts, the work focuses on various aspects of exile as experienced by Huguenot refugees in the Dutch Republic at the time of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685). Its first part, on the socioeconomic experience of exile, argues that exile was determined by socioeconomic opportunities, not ‘just’ religious courage and devotion. Refugees made carefully deliberated decisions based on their own practical prospects and connections — and even so, many struggled to make ends meet in their new country. Through an in-depth analysis of a wide range of source material and a wealth of individual stories, Van der Linden convincingly exposes the bleak and truly unsettling reality of exile. The second part, on the religious experience of the refugees, studies a variety of Huguenot sermons from the perspective of ministers as well as their audience, and argues that such sermons served a multifaceted purpose: they were meant to comfort the refugees, but also to convince those Protestants left in France (nouveaux convertis) to join the Refuge, and, after the Peace of Rijswijk (1697), to dissuade disillusioned Huguenots from returning to France as converts. The third part, on the historical consciousness of refugees, argues that the latter shaped their individual and collective memories to fashion and sustain their Huguenot identity — and in an excellent section on Élie Benoist's Histoire de l'Édit de Nantes (Delft: Adriaan Beman, 1693–95) sketches how such stories were inscribed into Protestant history. Together, these sections create a subtle and intelligent attempt to capture the experience of exile and challenge scholarship to date. Unavoidably, in an exercise of this magnitude, some gaps remain, the most conspicuous of which is probably the near-absence of Bayle. This may seem unfair to mention, since incorporating Bayle's corpus would require a project in itself, and, furthermore, the author specifically seeks to compensate earlier scholars' focus on ‘the intellectual achievements of refugee savants’ by looking at ‘ordinary people’ and ministers (pp. 8–9). However, Bayle's absence is of the sort that causes other absences: for instance, the political debate in the Refuge on whether to stay loyal to Louis XIV or support the Glorious Revolution; the widespread discomfort with Pierre Jurieu's prophetic tendencies; the heated theological debates among the refugee ministers (for instance on reason and tolerance); and lay authors' narratives of exile. But far from harming this highly impressive work, its occasional gaps suggest fruitful further lines of enquiry. Van der Linden has produced an exquisite piece of scholarship that will speak to a wide range of scholars and will remain relevant to historians of the Refuge and beyond for a long time to come.

Experiencing Exile: Huguenot Refugees in the Dutch Republic, 1680–1700, written by David van der Linden

Experiencing Exile: Huguenot Refugees in the Dutch Republic, 1680–1700, written by David van der Linden

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Review of 'Experiencing Exile: Huguenot Refugees in the Dutch Republic, 1680–1700'

Review of 'Experiencing Exile: Huguenot Refugees in the Dutch Republic, 1680–1700'

Avi Lifschitz. Language and Enlightenment: The Berlin Debates of the Eighteenth Century.

At the opening of his study on language debates in the German Enlightenment, Avi Lifschitz invokes a comment by Johann Gottfried Herder that language, “the grand assistant of man,” had “enabled human beings to forge their entire material culture, as well as their intellectual endeavors” (p. 1). Lifschitz's study seeks to explore the context for Herder's remark. His account is framed by two prize contests sponsored by the Berlin Academy of Sciences: the 1759 essay contest organized around the question, “What is the reciprocal influence of the Opinions of a People on the language, and of the Language on Opinion?”; and the 1771 contest on the origins of language. In between the two contests the author discusses everything from ancient Epicurean views on language to ideas about symbolic cognition in the eighteenth century, the philosophy of Gottfried Leibniz, Christian Wolff, Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the foundation of the Berlin Academy, and the cultural position of Huguenot refugees in Berlin. The result is a somewhat uneven book, which places its often insightful and informative readings of key interventions in the language debate in an unfocused narrative that darts back and forth in time.