Camisards

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Kamisards (French Camisards ) was the name of the Huguenots in the Cevennes . They were not infrequently descendants of the Waldensians and had joined the Reformation in the 16th century . A first uprising of the camisards after the repeal of the Edict of Nantes issued by Henry IV in 1598 by the Edict of Fontainebleau issued by Louis XIV (1685) led to a latent war of partisans, which occurred during the War of the Spanish Succession in the so-called Cevennes War (1702 -1705) bloody discharged. In this unequal war, the Camisards were supported by the English with money and weapons, but ultimately they had no chance against the ten-fold royal superiority. The war ended with the depopulation of the Cevennes and caused a substantial part of the French national debt at the end of the War of Succession.

Nightly meeting of the Huguenots

The name Camisards actually means 'blouse men' (from camise or chemise = 'shirt' or 'blouse'; the French word camisade = 'nocturnal attack') is derived from this .

Historical background

When Louis XIV withdrew the Edict of Nantes in the Edict of Fontainebleau in 1685 , the Camisards rose up in the Cevennes, one of the poorest regions in France. The sending of soldiers and monks to their forcible conversion and the terror of the notorious dragons only fueled the resistance. The anger of the common peasants and artisans was also directed against the tax collectors, who were often murdered and their houses torn down.

This first outrage of the camisards was suppressed by the police and military as early as 1689. The Abbé du Chaila tracked down the places of refuge for the camisards, had them attacked during worship; some were hanged and others imprisoned. Because of these acts of violence, the Abbé and his police force were slain in 1702. The mountainous nature of the country made partisan war easier. The warfare was all the more difficult as Louis XIV was simultaneously occupied by the War of the Spanish Succession and his opponents did everything to strengthen the Camisards in their resistance. Several royal armies were defeated and partly destroyed, so that in 1702 the king sent the military commanders of Languedoc, Victor-Maurice, comte de Broglie to put down the uprising. After this could show little success, he was replaced in 1703 by Marshal Montrevel . This was finally able to take action against the camisards with 60,000 men. Montrevel, a former Huguenot, waged a scorched earth war . The people were executed en masse and the land turned into a desert ( désert ); 466 villages were destroyed. The camisards also proceeded with extreme violence, in the diocese of Nîmes alone they strangled 84 priests and burned around 200 churches.

At the head of the camisards were Pierre Roland Laporte , Abraham Mazel and above all Jean Cavalier , a 20-year-old baker boy from the village of Ribaute near Anduze . After great initial success, Cavalier planned to unite his approximately 3,000 troops in the Dauphiné with those of the Duke of Savoy . The inhabitants of Nîmes , Montpellier , Orange , Uzès etc. supported the camisards with everything they needed; so were z. B. cast the bells of the destroyed churches into cannons.

In April 1704, Louis XIV replaced Montrevel with Marshal Villars . This proclaimed an amnesty for all who would lay down their arms, and released prisoners who swore allegiance. On the other hand, he had anyone caught with weapons killed immediately and organized mobile columns that operated in all directions. As a result of this procedure, one parish after the other accepted the amnesty conditions and Cavalier himself concluded a settlement with Villars on May 10, 1704 at Nîmes and entered the service of the king as a colonel.

Some camisards continued the fight anyway, were repeatedly defeated and subjected until the end of 1704. The acts of violence committed by the Duke of Berwick , who at the beginning of 1705 received the supreme command as successor to Villars, provoked a new uprising, especially since the Camisards were supported by the English and Dutch with money and weapons. But in April 1705 this was also over and the last rebels in Nîmes were executed. In all wars around 30,000 people were killed, hundreds of villages in the Cevennes were burned and the whole area was meanwhile depopulated and deserted. Some of the camisards entered English service under Cavalier, who regretted his apostasy and left the service of Louis XIV. They fought on the side of the allies in Catalonia , where most were killed in the battle of Almansa on April 25, 1707. Cavalier went to Holland, England and Ireland and died as governor of Jersey in 1740.

In 1709 Abraham Mazel gathered an armed force again in Vivarais and in 1710 made another and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to revive the uprising in the Cevennes and Languedoc. From 1715 the reformed pastor Antoine Court began the non-violent construction of the Church of the Desert by convening a first synod in Montèzes .

The life of the Huguenots in the Cevennes

The House

At that time, the simple houses in the Cevennes were mostly made of clay or stone and covered with straw. The furniture was limited to a minimum: table, bench, a few stools or chairs as well as a chest and double bed; the children often slept on the thatched mud floor. This furniture was mostly made of chestnut - as well as mulberry - and cherry wood . In addition, there had to be enough hiding places in the house - there were houses that had double walls in which one or two people could hide; other houses had hollowed-out floors or underground escape routes. In any case, there was a need for space to hide the Bible and other scriptures. For the possession of a Bible or of scriptures, the content of which was the Reformed religion, was forbidden. If royal troops found such items, they were considered evidence and their owners could expect to be charged.

The religious life

The members of the Huguenots were to be found in all walks of life. Everyday professional life could also be completely different. But there was always something in common, because none of them could practice their faith openly. This not only affected the building of the house, but began with the wedding. Because officially they were not allowed to be married as a Protestant, and yet hardly anyone could agree with his conscience to be married as a Catholic. However, some had their children baptized as Catholics and entered the church toboggan to meet the appearance of the outside world. After the Edict of Nantes, however, most of them left this as well. Since services were forbidden under the Edict of Fontainebleau, meetings could only take place in secret. After the Protestant upper class fled, lay preachers had to be appointed pastors, who were seen as appointed by God through prophetic visions and ecstatic ecstasy. One always had to be on guard, as the king's troops had no mercy on those who were heretics in their eyes. Services were often held at night and outdoors. Rocky gorges, valleys and forests gave the Huguenots protection and, in the event of an attack by the troops, also allowed them to escape. To get to these services, the faithful took long, arduous walks. At that time the Huguenots also called themselves the Church of the Desert. This time is still remembered today as Le désert .

The pastors

These services were held by preachers who later teamed up with trained pastors in order to obtain a regular education. The training consisted of For example, if the student listened to the pastor's sermons and memorized them in order to acquire the structure of a sermon. The wages of an ordained minister were 53 sou (one sou = 5 centimes), but the full wage was rarely paid out. But that did not matter to the pastors. They also got through without money because they were cared for by their parishioners. They kept a meticulous record of every baptism and marriage, so that nearly every congregation member appeared in their records. These records had to be well hidden. Should a pastor be caught with his records, all of his parishioners would get into great trouble. A funeral was rarely performed by the desert pastors as it could take weeks to get to the site. The dead were buried outside the cemetery because the camisards refused to accept the sacraments of the Catholic Church.

The punishments

The type of punishment was very diverse and just as arbitrary. Depending on the severity of the judge, death by hanging or beheading was possible . Others expected a life as a galley convict ; In research of the 19th century one went from 2,000 to 5,000 condemned to the galleys (cf. Pierre Jurieu or Élie Benoît ). However, this number needs to be revised downwards. The registers of the galleys list 1,550 men who came to the galleys because of their Protestant beliefs. In these lists it is always noted with the abbreviation RPR (religion prétendue réformée - allegedly Reformed religion). Among these 1,550 there are also around 60 Catholics who tried as escape helpers or smugglers to lead the Protestants out of the French kingdom. Many women and men were also sent to prison. The prison was mostly an underground dungeon in which people were kept tightly confined. Her bed was straw mats, and the food consisted of 1.5 pounds of bread a day and water . The most famous fate of a prisoner is probably that of Marie Durand . At the age of 15, she was imprisoned in the Tower de la Constance in Aigues-Mortes on the Mediterranean Sea and was pardoned and released 38 years later. The reasons for this punishment were that her brother was a pastor in the desert and she had married outside the Catholic Church. A release could normally only be made on condition that one renounced one's Reformed faith. But like Marie Durand, very few did that.

aftermath

The flight of many Huguenot preachers from the Cevennes to the Protestant neighboring countries of France led to the establishment of the French Prophets' congregation in London and contributed to the emergence of the so-called inspiration congregations in Germany . Many Germans inspired emigrated to the USA in the 19th century , where their descendants now live in the Amana Colonies .

The subject of the Cevennes War was taken up several times in 19th century German literature. Thus Isaac Sinclair wrote a trilogy about dramas and Ludwig Tieck , the amendment comes Insurgency in the Cevennes . Eugène Sue wrote the novel The Fanatics or the War of Religion in the Cevennes in 14 volumes.

The Maquis also partly followed up on the tradition of the camisards.

literature

  • Friedrich Schulz: History of the Camisards , (1790-1795).
  • Therese Huber: History of the Cevennes War , (1834).
  • Heino Schwarz: The camisard revolt in German literature of the 19th century. A source investigation , Düsseldorf 1911.
  • Chrystel Bernat (ed.): The camisards. A collection of essays on the history of the war in the Cevennes (1702–1710) , with a foreword by Philippe Joutard. Translated from the French by Eckart Birnstiel. German Huguenot Society, Bad Karlshafen 2003, ISBN 978-3-930481-16-3 .
  • Christian Mühling: The European Debate on the War of Religion (1679-1714). Confessional memoria and international politics in the age of Ludwig XIV. (Publications of the Institute for European History Mainz, 250) Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2018, ISBN 978-3-525310540 .
  • André Zysberg: Les galériens. Vies et destins de 60,000 forcats sur les galères de France (1680-1748) . Éditions du Seuil, Paris 1987, ISBN 2-02-009753-2 .

Novel:

  • Ludwig Tieck: The uproar in the Cevennes . Editions La Colombe, Bergisch Gladbach 2001, ISBN 3-929351-13-7
  • Jean-Pierre Chabrol (1963): The gates of God . Friedrich Bahn, Constance.

French literature:

  • Henri Bosc: La Guerre des Cévennes . 6 volumes, 1985–1992
  • Philippe Joutard: Les Camisards . 1994
  • Philippe Joutard: La légende des Camisards . 1985
  • Pierre Rolland: Dictionnaire des Camisards . 1995
  • Jean-Pierre Chabrol: Les Fous de Dieu . Gallimard, Paris 1961

Web links

Commons : Camisards  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The Camisards , Musée virtuel du protestantisme
  2. ^ Sophie Bazalgette: The rising of the camisards . In: Chrystel Bernat (ed.): The camisards. A collection of essays on the history of the war in the Cevennes (1702–1710) . German Huguenot Society, Bad Karlshafen 2003, ISBN 3-930481-16-2 , pp. 69-92.
  3. ↑ Eberhard Gresch: The Huguenots. History, Belief and Impact. 4th, revised edition. Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, Leipzig 2009, ISBN 978-3-374-02260-1 , pp. 75 to 77
  4. ^ The Camisards War , website camisards.net
  5. ↑ André Zysberg: Les galériens . Éditions du Seuil, Paris 1987, pp. 102-110 (chapter Les galériens “pour la foi” ).