The memory of those rivers of blood…makes nature tremble. — Antoine Court, 1756

A boulder toppling into a stream may alter and direct its course ever after. In the same way, certain historical events have changed and channelled the culture and mindset of entire peoples for many centuries. You cannot understand the English apart from 1066, Gloriana, Waterloo, and the Blitz. You cannot understand an American apart from the Pilgrim Fathers, the War of Independence, Gettysburg, and Pearl Harbor. You cannot understand an Australian apart from the Endeavour, Burke and Wills, the Ashes, and Gallipoli.

Marie Durand’s eighteenth-century church community cannot be understood apart from the sixteenth-century French Religious Wars, the Saint Bartholomew’s Massacre of 1572, the Edict of Nantes in 1598, the Dragonnades, the Revocation in 1685, and the Camisard Rebellion of 1702–1704.

The “French Religious Wars” describes a series of eight civil wars fought out between 1562 and 1598. An estimated three million people perished, fifteen percent of the French population. Although the antagonists wore their inherited religious labels of “Protestant” or “Catholic,” social and political struggles were the true causes of these wars. A right devotion to the religion of the Bible—which brings reconciliation with God and our enemies—would have extinguished the flames of war.

French Protestants saw these wars as the necessary armed defense of their property and lives from Catholic aggression, of their right to live and worship as Protestants. French Protestant scholars agonized over God’s purposes in these violent struggles and what form resistance should take: whether to passively and patiently suffer persecution, whether to take up arms against tyranny, or whether to flee. This practical-theological struggle continued well into the eighteenth century and is manifest in a number of Marie Durand’s letters and the dreadful decisions that she was required to make.

The Fourth Religious War erupted from the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, which commenced on August 24, 1572. This tragedy needs special mention because of the deep mark it left on both the Huguenot psyche and Catholic-Protestant relations for many generations. Certainly, its reverberations were felt by Marie Durand’s community in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Antoine Court, for example, the leader of the restoration of the Protestant church in France from 1715, wrote in 1756 about “the memory of those rivers of blood […] of that Saint Bartholomew’s Day, the thought alone of which makes nature tremble.” Louis Bourgeon, a specialist on the Massacre, wrote in 1987 how its scale and ferocity had left its mark well beyond the eighteenth century: “The history of Saint Bartholomew’s continues to this day to be the cause of a spirit of passion, conscious or not.”[1]

In August 1572, thousands of Protestants assembled in Paris for the marriage of Marguerite de Valois to the Protestant Henri III of Navarre. On August 22, Gaspard de Coligny (1519–1572), prominent Huguenot nobleman and Admiral of the French navy, was shot and wounded by a pro-Guise assassin. Coligny refused to leave Paris, putting Catherine and Charles in a bind. A Huguenot army stood to the north, and Protestants within the city threatened retaliation. Catholic Parisians, long antipathetic to the Huguenots, and perhaps fearing for the life of the King and the royal family, took up arms. Catherine and Charles agreed to a pre-emptive strike against Coligny and twenty to thirty Huguenot leaders.

The killing spiralled out of control, and some three thousand Huguenots were slain in Paris and tens of thousands in the provinces, including a thousand in Lyons, the so-called Vêpres lyonnaises. It was said that “the Seine ran red with blood”: the blood of murdered Protestant men, women, and children.

Pope Gregory XIII celebrated the butchery by having a special medal cast with the motto, Ugonottorum strages, “Slaughter of the Huguenots.” Many came to think that King Charles had personally joined in with the killing, shooting Huguenots from a first-floor window. Such memories, some real and some possibly not, have scarred the Huguenot mindset to this day.

The Saint Bartholomew’s massacre, decades of civil war, and deep cultural and religious aversion constituted the brittle context within which the throne descended upon the Protestant Henri Bourbon, King of Navarre from 1572, and sponsor of the Edict of Nantes.

The Edict of Nantes, so critical to Huguenot and European history, will be described in Part 4.

Marie Durand Letter 6 — to Anne Durand

[Written to her orphaned niece Anne, born 1729, after twenty-one years of imprisonment. It describes clothes that Marie had made for Anne and instructions about some complicated family finances. She assures Anne of her love.]

To Monsieur Chiron, at the Taconnerie, in Geneva,
to pass on, please, to Mademoiselle Durand,
in Onex, Geneva, with a package

The Tour de Constance, June 22, 1751

You are no doubt surprised, my darling daughter, that I have been so slow to reply to you. I wanted to sew you six blouses, and this was the cause of the delay. Be assured that I love you as much as if you were my own child, and so long as you are always very modest, you will find in me all the tenderness of a true mother. I have plans for you that you cannot imagine, and I hope, with the help of God, to make you happy one day. Pray to the Lord that he will bless and meet the needs of those who work for my freedom, and then I will bring you near to me. And I will do my utmost to ensure that you do not lack anything.

Your letter gave me great pleasure, for I feared that you no longer lived. The Lord returned you to full health; I am told. I give him thanks and pray that he will continue to do this for you.

You will receive six new blouses of white cloth, decorated with muslin. They are not elegant but will be useful.

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