My life was a tissue of tribulations. — Marie Durand, 1772

In 1730, French authorities arrested nineteen-year-old Marie Durand, shaved her head, and imprisoned her without trial for her Protestant faith in a medieval fortress, the Tour de Constance on the Mediterranean Sea. She was to be locked up there until she agreed to abjure her Protestant faith and convert to Roman Catholicism; or, until she died.

Durand refused to convert and remained in her dungeon for thirty-eight years. She was finally released in 1768 at the age of fifty-seven, when public opinion turned against the oppression of Protestants and the Tour de Constance was closed. She died in her home eight years later.

Scratched into the limestone floor of the Tour de Constance is the graffito “RESISTER”, Resist! Though no one knows who inscribed the word, it has been closely associated with Marie Durand for over two centuries. She is seen as the woman who bravely resisted the tyranny of the French King and the powerful Roman Catholic church, and their combined two-century harsh repression of Protestants.

Visit the central south of France today and you may find yourself driving on a Rue Marie Durand (there are at least eight of them) or driving past an École Marie Durand (of which there are two). In 1968 the French national postal service released a stamp with her picture, and there are numerous books, plays, major artworks, and even television features devoted to her story.

Marie Durand is quite well known in France, and a number of different causes have taken her as a figurehead.

During the nineteenth century, theologically liberal French Protestants held Marie Durand up as a heroine of freedom of conscience. They portrayed her as the woman who spent decades in prison for a cause being fought out by the French Enlightenment, by such great minds as d’Alembert, Diderot, Rousseau, and Voltaire. Liberal Protestants observed that, while the philosophes fought for freedom of conscience on the intellectual level, Durand’s decades of physical suffering made a powerful social-conscience contribution to the cause.

Conservative French Protestants, fiercely loyal to their religious and cultural roots, viewed Marie Durand as a heroic Huguenot, the ultimate example of a faithful Calvinist holding fast to her sixteenth-century Reformation heritage.

Evangelical Protestants in general have presented Durand as an example of steadfast faith in Christ under severe persecution. For them, Durand exemplifies the faithful Christian martyr, “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:10). Simonetta Carr, for example, has written a beautifully illustrated biography of Marie Durand as an inspiring example for Christian children and teens.

During World War II, leaders of the French resistance used Marie Durand’s name and story to inspire the French people to resist Nazi tyranny. And in 2016 actress and author Ysabelle Lacamp portrayed Marie Durand as a heroine of religious freedom in a series of books dealing with all kinds of social justice matters.

In short, many have held up Marie Durand as an inspiring heroine for their own causes. Few, however, have examined her life. Fewer again have examined her remarkable forty-eight surviving letters, forty-one of which were written from her dungeon.

Marie Durand was born in 1711 in a remote southern French village called Bouchet-de-Pranles. It remains to this day a delightful region of chestnut groves, undulating streams, green hills, and ancient stone farmhouses. You can still visit her home, which is now a museum devoted to her church and family, the Musée du Vivarais Protestant.

On the lintel above the family hearth Marie’s father etched, in exquisite uncials, these words of praise:

GOD BE PRAISED, 1696, É[tienne] D[urand].

Marie’s parents, Étienne and Claudine, were devoted descendants of the Huguenots, French Protestants who were converted in large numbers from Catholicism in the middle of the sixteenth century. Marie had one surviving sibling, her brother Pierre, who was eleven years her senior and who in his twenties served as a Huguenot pastor. The lives of all four family members would be engulfed by tragedy.

In his 1685 Edict of Fontainebleau, Louis XIV, the Le Roi soleil, formally revoked his Grandfather Henri IV’s 1598 Edict of Nantes, which had granted religious freedom to Protestants. Louis’ Revocation made it illegal to be a Protestant in France and an estimated two-hundred thousand Huguenots fled France to begin new lives in Switzerland, Germany, and Holland, and overseas in the British Isles, North America, and South Africa. Of those who stayed behind, tens of thousands converted to Roman Catholicism. Many, though, continued to practice their Protestant faith underground. Sometimes they were caught: Protestant men were condemned to be galley slaves for life; Protestant women were imprisoned for life in dungeons and prison-like convents; Protestant pastors were hanged, or worse.