The Cevennes, land of the Camisards

These are the places of memory of the Protestant struggle against the troops of Louis XIV. Following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes — granted a century earlier by Henry IV — the Cévennes erupted, and fierce battles took place from Aigues-Mortes to Mont-Lozère. Roland's House in Mialet bears witness to this cruel epic, and a visit to this House of Remembrance (Mialet is very close to Anduze) cannot fail to move those who wish to explore the mysteries of the Camisard story.

Arians, Waldensians, Cathars, Huguenots — Languedoc has never accepted a single way of thinking. A fierce legacy in a land that has always been rebellious. Languedoc did not wait for the 16th century or Calvin to plunge into opposition to orthodoxy, and even more so to the dominant ideology of the northern "Île-de-France" establishment.

Its capacity for religious dissent manifested itself in the early centuries after Christ, when the Visigoths Arianised the southern half of Roman Gaul. Meyrueis, for example, was under the rule of a Visigoth count at the beginning of the 5th century.

This Arian hold — a sharply dichotomous doctrine positing a God who is wholly divine and a Christ who is entirely human — challenged repeatedly by the Franks under Clovis (victory at Vouillé in 507), nevertheless maintained itself in Languedoc within the ancient Roman Septimania, including Meyrueis, Florac, and the Borgne Valley, at least until the arrival of the Saracens who invaded the region around 720 and remained for eighty years, until Pepin the Short and Charlemagne. The latter would push back through Spain by military force, liberating notably Barcelona, which he made a Frankish county — a "march" encompassing all of Lower Languedoc (including Gévaudan) and Catalonia.

The spiritual reconquest of the territory by Catholicism was carried out through Benedictine monasteries, rationally established in the 9th and 10th centuries (Saint-Guilhem, Aniane, Nant...). But this occupation of the land was felt by the Languedoc populations as a foreign, Germanic, and alien imposition. The independent-minded Languedoc was ill at ease.

Two new heresies would then claim the loyalties of regional dissent: Valdism (originating in Lyon and spreading to Vivarais, the Cévennes, and throughout Provence) and, of course, Catharism, centred on the axis of Carcassonne, Albi, and Toulouse.

Peter Waldo (born around 1150), a wealthy merchant from Lyon, underwent a sudden conversion — like Saint Francis of Assisi — sold all his possessions, and set out to preach on the roads. The official Church viewed this with great disfavour, especially as the Waldensian disciples, more zealous than the institution they challenged, accused the Church and its clergy of being tools of the devil, of having forgotten evangelical poverty, and of concealing the texts that "disturb." The Waldensians preached a return to the sources of Christianity and the Gospel outside any ecclesiastical structure. Quickly driven out from all sides, they took refuge notably in Piedmont and in the valleys of the Cévennes, where they would prepare the ground for the future Reformation, closely related in its early stages to Waldism.

The movement that appeared in the middle of the 16th century in Languedoc would spread like wildfire across the entire Cévennes and Lower and Upper Languedoc. The Huguenot party quickly found lords, armies, and fortified towns — bastions seized or conceded by the Crown under treaties negotiated throughout the 16th century. Massacres were organised on both sides. Gévaudan was systematically ravaged by Captain Merle, who (with remarkable thoroughness) demolished stone by stone the cathedral of Mende and the town of La Canourgue, while the Catholic party pillaged Marvejols and massacred Protestants — as in Vassy in 1562 and during the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre of 1572.

Languedoc, already severely tested by the Hundred Years' War and the Black Death, exhausted its last reserves in these fratricidal struggles laden with political and social tension. Although the Edict of Nantes by Henry IV (1598) temporarily calmed the situation, mutual mistrust persisted and the political exploitation of religious antagonism remained frequent. The dismantling of Protestant strongholds was the work of Richelieu (siege of La Rochelle, then the Treaty of Alès in 1630). Meyrueis itself suffered the wrath of the royal Catholic army, its castle (the Rocher) razed and the towers of Roquedols and Ayres beheaded as a form of humiliation. By the end of Louis XIII's reign, Protestantism found itself without any support other than its inner conviction and freedom to worship. The Edict of Nantes was already considerably undermined.

The persecution of Protestantism in France found its parallel in England, where minority Catholics (and the Irish) were equally hunted. Charles I of England was beheaded in 1649 by Cromwell and his Presbyterian troops — a lesson not lost on France. Louis XIV, unwilling to share that fate, implemented a whole system of constraints designed to reduce — or even eradicate — the so-called Reformed Religion: bans on certain professions, on taking apprentices, on holding worship outside enclosed spaces, on burying the dead except between six in the morning and seven in the evening.

As early as the 1660s and 1670s, bourgeois and artisans began emigrating to the Palatinate, Württemberg, and Savoy, where they found their Waldensian brethren. Languedoc gradually lost much of its economic strength, which was often Protestant. This emigration has been estimated at 300,000 people. In the Cévennes and the Languedoc hinterland — primarily rural, fiercely independent, and poor — Protestantism remained, confined to its valleys.

By the 1680s, forced conversions accelerated, especially in cities such as Nîmes and Montpellier. In the countryside, the king's dragoons occupied Protestant towns as so-called "missionaries" imposing a hegemonic form of Catholicism.

It was in 1685, under the influence of the Marquise de Maintenon, that Louis XIV — concluding that there was no longer any reason to tolerate Protestantism since there were (supposedly) no longer any Protestants — revoked the Edict of Nantes and ordered the destruction of all Protestant temples, on the grounds that they served no purpose.

In the region, the conduct of operations was entrusted to the Inspector of Missions in the Cévennes, Abbé du Chayla, charged with converting or arresting the recalcitrant — notably "those who prevent attendance at mass," the "psalm singers," and "pastors and seditious persons." A hard task, often military or police in nature. Christian charity had little room here.

Abbé du Chayla, the chief architect of this great campaign, imprisoned and tortured with full conviction at his headquarters in Pont-de-Montvert, seeking those famous "final" conversions. He was attacked and killed in 1703 by Esprit Séguier, determined to free the abbé's prisoners. This act would trigger the War of the Cévennes, known as the Camisard War — from camisade: the large white shirt worn by the rebels to recognise one another.

The three main Camisard armies were positioned: one on Mont Aigoual, with its headquarters near Vébron (halfway between Meyrueis and Florac), led by Castanet; another in the lower Cévennes led by Pierre Laporte, known as Rolland; the third around Nîmes under Cavalier. A fourth band held Mont Lozère under Mazel, Couderc, and Joany.

This guerrilla war, characterised by ambushes and sudden strikes, completely confounded the Intendant of Languedoc, Monsieur de Basville, as well as the successive leaders of the royal army dispatched to the region: Broglie, Montrevel, and finally Villars, after the failure of his two predecessors.

The relentless resistance — and even occasional victories — of these Protestant peasants drove the royal commanders to fury, notably the notoriously brutal Captain Poul, Baron de Saint Cosme (a former Huguenot convert), and Julien, who defeated Rolland at the battle of Vagnas. Brigadier Planque deserves mention too, infamous for ravaging the Valleraugues region and the Borgne Valley.

Before each battle, the Camisards, one knee on the ground, sang their battle psalm:

The battles were often inconclusive, but the rebels proved largely elusive.

Basville had two major roads cut through the Cévennes to allow his troops to move more freely — notably the Corniche des Cévennes road, running along the ridgelines to avoid constant ambushes in the valleys below. Near Vébron, the road known as the Cardinale served a similar purpose.

Unable to suppress the rebellion, Basville organised the "Grand Brûlement des Cévennes" — the great burning — so that the Camisards could no longer find food or shelter. Villagers were gathered into a few large fortified towns, and all the hamlets, villages, and farmhouses scattered across the valleys were demolished or burnt. An entire region was devastated to bring down two or three thousand rebels. Imprisonments, sentences to the galleys, torture, and savage executions followed until 1704, when Marshal de Villars finally managed to negotiate with the most powerful Camisard leader, Cavalier: the release of all those condemned, the right to practise his religion at least privately, and tax exemptions for those whose homes had been destroyed.

But the revolt, though weakening, did not cease. Other Camisard leaders, such as Rolland, preferred to die with arms in hand rather than trust the promises of so cruel a power — and so it proved. Gradually, the bands diminished; the leaders died or were captured, and the promises of release went unfulfilled, since total surrender had not been obtained.

Endemic persecutions continued until the middle of the 18th century. It would not be until Louis XVI, who in 1787 signed an Edict of Tolerance granting Protestants civil status, the right to marry outside the official Church, and — at last — the freedom of worship.