Huguenots

In the 16th and 17th centuries, the name of Huguenots came to apply to members of the Protestant Reformed Church of France, or historically as the French Calvinists.

Origin of the name

Used originally as a term of derision, the derivation of the name Huguenot remains uncertain. It may have been based on the name Besançon Hugues, or a French corruption of the German word Eidgenosse, meaning a Swiss person - Geneva, Switzerland was John Calvin's adopted home and the center of the Calvinist movement. In Geneva, Hugues was the leader of the "Confederate Party," so called because it favored an alliance between the city-state of Geneva and the Swiss Confederation. This theory of origin has support from the fact that the label Huguenot was first applied in France to those conspirators (all of them aristocratic members of the Reformed Church) involved in the Amboise plot of 1560: a foiled attempt to usurp power in France from the influential House of Guise, a move which would have had the side-effect of fostering relations with the Swiss. Thus, Hugues plus eidgenot becomes Huguenot, with the intention of associating the Protestant cause with some very unpopular politics.

Another theory is offered by O.I.A. Roche, who writes in his book The Days of the Upright, A History of the Huguenots that "Huguenot" is

"a combination of a Flemish and a German word. In the Flemish corner of France, Bible students who gathered in each other's houses to study secretly were called Huis Genooten, or 'house fellows,' while on the Swiss and German borders they were termed Eid Genossen, or 'oath fellows,' that is, persons bound to each other by an oath. Gallicized into 'Huguenot,' often used deprecatingly, the word became, during two and a half centuries of terror and triumph, a badge of enduring honor and courage."

Early history and beliefs

Huguenot predecessors included the pro-reform and Gallican Roman Catholics, like Jacques Lefevre. Later, Huguenots followed the Lutheran movement, and finally, Calvinism. They shared John Calvin's fierce reformation beliefs which decried the priesthood, sacraments and doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church. They believed in salvation as an act of God as much as in creation as an act of God, and thus that only God's predestined mercy toward the elect made them fit for salvation. Some see this dual emphasis on creation and on salvation, and God's sovereignty over both, as a cornerstone principle for Huguenot developments in architecture and textiles and other merchandise.

Above all, Huguenots became known for their fiery criticisms of worship as performed in the Roman Catholic Church, in particular the focus on ritual and what seemed an obsession with death and the dead. They believed the ritual, images, saints, pilgrimages, prayers, and hierarchy of the Catholic Church did not help anyone toward redemption. They saw Christian faith as something to be expressed in a strict and godly life, in obedience to Biblical laws, out of gratitude for God's mercy. Like other Protestants of the time, they felt that the Roman church needed radical cleansing of its impurities, and that the Pope represented a worldly kingdom, which sat in mocking tyranny over the things of God, and was ultimately doomed. Rhetoric like this became more fierce as events unfolded, and stirred up the hostility of the Catholic establishment.

Huguenots faced periodic persecution from the outset of the Reformation; but Francis I (reigned 1515–1547) initially protected them from Parlementary measures designed for their extermination. The Affair of the Placards of 1534 changed the king's posture toward them: he stepped away from restraining persecution of the movement. Still, Huguenot numbers grew rapidly between 1555 and 1562, chiefly amongst the nobles and city-dwellers. During this time, their opponents first dubbed the Protestants Huguenots; but they called themselves reformés, "Reformed". They organized their first national synod in 1558, in Paris. By 1562, they had a total membership estimated at least a million, especially numerous in the southern and central parts of the country. The Huguenots in France likely peaked in number at approximately two million, compared to approximately sixteen million Catholics during the same period.

Violently opposed to the Catholic Church, the Huguenots attacked images, monasticism, and church buildings. Most of the cities in which the Huguenots gained a hold saw iconoclast attacks, in which altars and images in churches, and sometimes the buildings themselves were torn down. Bourges, Montauban and Orleans suffered particularly.

Wars of religion

In reaction to the growing Huguenot influence, and the aforementioned excesses of Protestant zeal, Catholic violence against them grew, at the same time that concessions and edicts of toleration became more liberal. In 1561, the Edict of Orléans, for example, declared an end to the persecution; and the Edict of Saint-Germain recognized them for the first time (January 17, 1562); but these measures disguised the growing strain of relations between Protestant and Catholic. These bonds of peace became the knots of war; when violence unleashed them, the divisions became all the more irreconcilable.

Tensions led to eight civil wars, interrupted by periods of relative calm, between 1562 and 1598. With each break in peace, the Huguenots' trust in the Catholic throne diminished, and the violence became more severe, and Protestant demands became more grand, until a lasting cessation of open hostility finally occurred in 1598. The wars gradually took on a dynastic character, developing into an extended feud between the Houses of Bourbon and Guise, which — in addition to holding rival religious views — both staked a claim to the French throne. The crown, occupied by the House of Valois, generally supported the Catholic side, but on occasion switched over to the Protestant cause when politically expedient.

The French Wars of Religion began with a massacre at Wassy on March 1, 1562, in which at least 30 (some sympathetic sources say 1000 or more) Huguenots were killed, and about 200 were wounded. The Huguenots transformed themselves into a definitive political movement thereafter. Protestant preachers rallied a considerable army and a formidable cavalry, which came under the leadership of Admiral Gaspard de Coligny. Henry of Navarre and the House of Bourbon allied themselves to the Huguenots, adding wealth and holdings to the Protestant strength, which at its height grew to sixty fortified cities, and posed a serious threat to the Catholic crown and Paris over the next three decades.

In what became known as the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of 24 August – 17 September, 1572, Catholics killed many Huguenots in Paris; similar massacres took place in other towns in the weeks following, with an estimated total death toll of 70,000. An amnesty granted in 1573 protected the perpetrators. The fifth holy war against the Huguenots began on February 23, 1574, and conflict continued periodically until 1598, when Henry of Navarre, having converted to Catholicism and become King of France as Henry IV, issued the Edict of Nantes, which granted the Protestants equality with Catholics under the throne, and a degree of religious and political freedom within their domains. The Edict simultaneously protected Catholic interests by discouraging the founding of new Protestant churches in the Catholic-controlled regions.

Note the difficulty of the French vocabulary of the day, depending on the point of view. Protestants considered themselves to practice a "reformed" religion (religion réformée) — which of course implied that the Catholic religion was in need of reforms. In opposition, Catholics, when talking in polite terms, called the Protestant religion the "allegedly reformed religion" (religion prétendue réformée, or RPR) — with an obvious pejorative undertone of "pretense".

Flight

Under King Louis XIV (reigned 1643–1715), chief minister Cardinal Mazarin, who held real power during the king's minority up to his death in 1661, resumed persecution of the Protestants using soldiers to inflict dragonnades that made life so intolerable that many fled. The king revoked the "irrevocable" Edict of Nantes in 1685 and declared Protestantism illegal with the Edict of Fontainebleau. After this, huge numbers of Huguenots (with estimates ranging from 200,000 to 500,000) fled to surrounding Protestant countries: England, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Norway, Denmark and Prussia — whose Calvinist Great Elector Frederick William welcomed them to help rebuild his war-ravaged and underpopulated country.

On December 31, 1687 a band of Huguenots set sail from France to the colony at the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa. Individual Huguenots settled at the Cape of Good Hope from as early as 1671 and an organized, large scale emigration of Huguenots to the Cape of Good Hope took place during 1688 and 1689. Many of these settlers chose as their home an area called Franschhoek, Dutch for French Corner, in the present day Western Cape provice of South Africa. A large monument to commemorate the arrival of the Huguenots in South Africa was inaugurated on 7 April 1948 at Franschhoek. Many of the farms in the Western Cape province in South Africa still bear French names and there are many families, today mostly Afrikaans speaking, whose surnames bear witness to their French Huguenot ancestry. Examples of these are Joubert, du Toit, de Villiers, Theron, du Plessis and Labuschagne amongst others, which are all common surnames in present day South Africa.

Barred from settling in New France, many Huguenots moved instead to the 13 colonies of Great Britain in North America, the first in 1624 (in 1924 a commemorative half dollar, known as the Huguenot-Walloon Half Dollar, was coined in the United States to celebrate the 300th anniversary of this settlement), among them a silversmith called Apollos Rivoire, who would later anglicize his name to Paul Revere. He would, still later, give his name and his profession to his son, Paul Revere, the famous United States revolutionary. Huguenot immigrants founded New Paltz, New York, where is now located the oldest street in America with the original stone houses, New Rochelle, New York (named after the town of La Rochelle in France), and a neighborhood in New York City's borough of Staten Island was named "Huguenot" after them.

Some of the settlers chose the Virginia Colony, and formed communities in present-day Chesterfield County and Powhatan County just west of Richmond, Virginia, where their descendents continue to reside. The Huguenot Memorial Bridge across the James River was named in their honor, as were many local features including several schools.

Many Huguenots also settled in the area around the current site of Charleston, South Carolina. In 1685, Rev. Elie Prioleau from the town of Pons in France settled in what was then called Charlestown. He became pastor of the first Huguenot church in North America in that city. That church is the oldest continuously active Huguenot congregation in the United States today.

An estimated 50,000 Huguenots fled to Britain. A leading Huguenot theologian and writer who led the exiled community in London, Andre Lortie (or Andrew Lortie), became known for articulating Huguenot criticism of the Holy See and transubstantiation.

Huguenot refugees flocked to Shoreditch, London in large numbers. They established a major weaving industry in and around Spitalfields (see Petticoat Lane and the Tenterground), and in Wandsworth. The Old Truman Brewery, then known as the Black Eagle Brewery, appeared in 1724. Huguenot refugees fled Tours, France virtually wiping out the great silk mills they had built. Many Huguenots settled in Ireland during the Plantations of Ireland. Some of them fought against the troops of Louis XIV in the Williamite war in Ireland, for which they were rewarded with land grants and titles. Some of them took their skills to Ulster and assisted in the founding of the Irish linen industry.

The exodus of Huguenots from France created a kind of brain drain from which the kingdom would not fully recover for years. The French crown's refusal to allow Protestants to settle in New France was a factor behind that colony's slow population growth, which ultimately led to its conquest by the British. By the time of the French and Indian War, there may have been more people of French ancestry living in Britain's American colonies than there were in New France.

A third of American Presidents have some proven Huguenot ancestry, as do Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and other leading statesmen, and (according to an oft-repeated belief) one quarter or more of all Englishmen.

Frederick the Great of Prussia, a strong believer in the separation of church and state, invited Huguenots to settle in his realms, and a number of their descendents rose to positions of prominence in Prussia. The last Prime Minister of the (East) German Democratic Republic, Lothar de Maiziere, was a scion of a Huguenot family.

Persecution of Protestants ended in 1764, and the French Revolution of 1789 finally made them full-fledged citizens.

Refugee

The word refugee came into use in the English language to describe the early French protestants seeking Refuge. They subsequently became known as the Refugees by the locals. French réfugié, from past participle of réfugier, to take refuge, from Old French, from refuge.

Famous people with Huguenot ancestry

• John Andre-British Officer and spy
• Francis Beaufort, Hydrographer of the British Admiralty
• James DeLancey, Governor of New York
• Abraham De Peyster, Loyalist
• Arent Schuyler De Peyster, Loyalist
• Peter Carl Fabergé, Russian jeweller
• Gustav Fabergé, Russian jeweller
• Theodor Fontane, German novelist and poet
• Philip Freneau, American Poet
• Adolf Galland, Luftwaffe General and WW2 fighter ace
• Nicolaus Harnoncourt, Austrian conductor
• Alexander Hamilton, American Secretary of the Treasury
• Benjamin Huger, American General {Confederate}
• Daniel E. Huger, American politician
• John Jay, American diplomat
• Gustaf de Laval, Swedish engineer and inventor
• Henry Laurens, American Politian
• John Laurens, American War hero
• Simon Le Bon, English musician
• Sheridan Le Fanu, Irish writer
• Lothar de Maizière, German politician
• Thomas de Maizière, German politician
• [Arthur Middleton Manigault], American General {Confederate}
• Francis Marion, American War Hero
• Charles Manigault Morris, American Navy officer{Confederate}
• Gouverneur Morris, American Diplomat
• Lothar von Arnauld de la Periere Highest scoring Uboat commander of World War I
• Paul Revere, American Silversmith
• John D. Rockefeller, American capitalist
• Franklin D. Roosevelt, 32nd President of the United States
• Friedrich Karl von Savigny, German jurist
• Charlize Theron, South African actress
• Anton Friedrich Justus Thibaut, German jurist