Désubas is remembered on February 3 by the Lutheran Church. He has been the subject of several ballades, and his name is imprinted on a plaque standing in the Plain of Montpellier in remembrance of the Huguenot pastors who have lost their lives for their faith.

Huguenots in 18th-century France were well-aware of the dangers they faced by attending Protestant services. Many had been Protestants since birth, children or grandchildren of a generation that had enjoyed some freedoms allowed by the 1598 Edict of Nantes.

But things had changed, In 1685, King Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes and launched a fierce campaign against Protestants. In spite of restricting their worship to private homes or hidden outside spaces, many Huguenot congregations were discovered and punished, with their pastors imprisoned or exiled. Those who insisted on preaching were executed. About 700 churches were destroyed, and Protestants who refused to convert to Roman Catholicism were imprisoned.

While initially some Huguenots (known as Camisards) fought back, most of them realized that violence was not the answer. In 1715, taking advantage of the death of Louis XIV, a group of French pastors met at the Synod of Montèzes, deliberating to free the church from acts of violence and claims of prophetic revelations, and to return to the orderly discipline exercised by Huguenot churches before 1685. Pastors were encouraged to study in Switzerland to be better prepared to care for their flocks.

Désubas, Pastor and Apologist

This is what Mathieu Majal, nicknamed Désubas (“from Ubas”), did when he became aware of God’s calling. Born on 28 February 1720, he grew up in his native Ubas, near Vernoux-en-Vivarais (by the Ardeche mountains in southern France). His calling as a preacher was confirmed at the synod of 30 April 1738, where he received a recommendation to study at the seminary in Lausanne, Switzerland.

His seminary education lasted three years, from 1740 to 1743, when he was ordained as a pastor. He then returned to France where he served as pastor and itinerant preacher in his native region of Vivarais, often traveling further south to Languedoc. On some occasions, as many as 5000 people gathered to hear him preach.

With other pastors, he also labored to fight rumors and calumnies about the Huguenots. In a letter written in 1744, he chided the parish priest of Le Gua, in southwest France, for attributing to the Huguenots a seditious document that had been circulating around the region.

“Put yourself for a moment in other people’s shoes. Suppose there was a paper full of heresies and impiety, contrary to your true beliefs, entitled, ‘Letter of the priests of Vivarais,’ and that you all were on its account prosecuted as heretics. How would you defend yourself? Wouldn’t you quite obviously ask for evidences and witnesses, and wouldn’t you consider it injust for someone to condemn you on the basis on simple prejudices, without listening to your explanations?”

If the priest’s prejudices were based on the accounts of the Camisards’ wars, Désubas said, he should remember the present pastors had done everything in their power to combat such fanaticism. “Any suspicion that we are rebels simply because a small number of seers, whom we have always condemned, to the point of depriving them of the Lord’s Supper, have in the past caused some tumult, is baseless.”

“If the religion we profess authorizes rebellion and revolt, you would have some reason to be suspicious and to attribute to us writings and actions leading to sedition. But have we ever believed or taught anything like it? Don’t we profess to believe that we must obey those who rule over us and submit to them in anything that does not violate the conscience? In the time when our ministries have been serving in Vivarais, have you ever seen uprisings and rebellions? Haven’t we suffered every mistreatment with great patience? … You may say that assembling against the edits of our ruler is a rebellion. But we ask you: do kings have a right to the conscience of their subjects?

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