Abstract
Reviewed by: Jaap Geraerts, University College London, UK
On 24 July 1702, a group of Protestants gruesomely murdered François de Langlade, archpriest and abbé du Chaila, thus igniting what came to be known as the War of the Camisards. Between 1702 and 1709, militant Protestants in the Cévennes, a mountainous area in south-central France, guided by messages or ‘inspirations’ their leaders received from the Holy Spirit, waged a war on the ‘Devil Church’ by killing Catholic priests and schoolmasters, and by burning churches and other ecclesiastical property. As the French state sent troops to suppress the violence enacted by the Protestant rebel bands, and lay Catholics started to form their own militia, this conflict quickly evolved into a full-scale religious and civil war, resulting in thousands of dead and the destruction of almost 250 churches and over 500 villages.
In this book, W. Gregory Monahan, an American emeritus professor of history, analyses the nature and the evolution of this conflict, making effective use of letters as well as various (partisan) accounts of the war and the rebel movement, including memoirs written by Camisard leaders. He opts for a long-term perspective, starting with the fate of Protestants in the Languedoc from the 1660s onwards, showing that Protestants were increasingly marginalized because of the state policies leading up to the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685). In the decades after the Revocation, Protestants in the Cévennes had to do without clerical leadership and their own churches, thus giving way to lay leadership and increasing the importance of oral culture and the role of women. Because of the collapse of the institutional infrastructure of the Protestant Church in the Cévennes, the Camisards emerged from the illegal assemblies of Protestants, who gathered in secluded places in the mountains and were led by lay preachers. In the early 1700s, the various rebel bands were commanded by prophets, who received messages from the Holy Spirit that authorized the killing of the servants of the Catholic Church and the destruction of its churches. The actions of the Camisards were not aimless, however, since throughout the war, the Camisards fought for the restoration of the rights formerly granted to Protestants in the Edict of Nantes.
As much as this book is an analysis of the Camisards and their historical origins, Monahan carefully reconstructs the reaction of the French state to the Protestant rebels, and by analysing a large corpus of letters sent between Versailles, the Crown’s intendant in Languedoc, and the various military commanders active in the region, he convincingly argues that for Louis XIV this rebellion was a nuisance, a mere distraction from his larger geo-political ambitions in Europe. According to Monahan, the fact that the French king largely depended on the authority and the network of his intendant, shows the fallacies of traditional notions of Louis XIV’s absolutism.
Monahan’s larger argument, though, deals with the development of the conflict rather than with the scholarly debates about absolutism. He argues that it was a ‘failure to communicate’ which often resulted in misunderstandings and bloodshed, since every party involved in the conflict ‘had their own language, their own set of mentalities, and their own perspective on this last rebellion in the reign of the Sun King’ (253), and ‘not until one side or the other could begin speak its opponent’s language, could such a rebellion in fact come to an end’ (107). Whereas the discourse of the Camisards revolved around lay prophecies, the royalist discourse was dominated by the dynastic ambitions of Louis XIV, and ‘the lack of understanding of what the rebels wanted or why they had rebelled coincided with the low importance assigned to the conflict by a royal government with larger concerns’ (254). Indeed, there were ‘vast differences that separated the rationalist officials of the Crown from their prophetically inspired subjects’ (107).
However, even though claiming to be inspired by the Holy Spirit, in their writings Camisards stressed that they fought in order to regain the freedoms once granted to Protestants in the Edict of Nantes, and even though royalist officials condemned these prophecies (as Calvinists in England would later do as well), it is questionable whether they did not understand the Camisard discourse because of their ‘rationalist’ outlook. Rather, the Revocation betrays that Louis XIV clung to the notion of ‘un roi, une loi, une foi’, and this stance made it impossible to come to terms with the rebels’ demands. Moreover, the conflict was prolonged because of factors which Monahan mentions himself, including the persistent but misleading theories about the Camisard leadership (the supposed involvement of Protestant nobles), the inexperience of royalist commanders with the guerrilla warfare waged by the Camisards, the scorched-earth policies of some generals, and the increasingly violent acts of the Camisards and the Catholic militia.
Even though the importance of the chasm between the different discourses might be slightly overstated, this hardly detracts from the overall value of this study. As Monahan carefully reconstructs the diverse discourses as well as the social makeup of the Camisards, and masterfully narrates the various stages of the conflict and the dynamic between the various parties involved, this book deserves a wide readership.