The Edict of Fontainebleau

The edict signed at Fontainebleau on 22 October 1685 runs to twelve articles and it is written as though the problem had already solved itself. Its preamble states that the better and greater part of the king's subjects of the so called reformed religion have embraced the Catholic faith, so that the execution of the Edict of Nantes has become useless. On that footing it revokes the edict and the articles granted under it, entirely and without exception.

What follows is a programme. Every temple is to be demolished immediately. Assemblies for worship are forbidden anywhere in the kingdom, including in private houses and on the estates of nobles. Ministers who will not convert must leave within fifteen days, and those who do convert receive a pension and exemption from certain duties. Protestant schools are closed. Children born to Protestants are to be baptised by the parish priest and brought up Catholic. And the article that gives the rest its character: ordinary Protestants are forbidden to leave the kingdom or send out their property, on pain of the galleys for men and confiscation and imprisonment for women.

The last provision reveals the intention. The state did not want the Huguenots gone. It wanted them converted and it wanted their skills, their trade and their capital to stay. The dragonnades, the billeting of soldiers in Protestant households with licence to make life intolerable, had been running since 1681 and were the instrument that produced the conversion figures the preamble cites.

The ban on emigration failed. Estimates of the number who left cluster between a hundred and fifty and two hundred thousand, out of a Protestant population of perhaps eight hundred thousand, and they went to places that wanted them. The Elector of Brandenburg issued the Edict of Potsdam nine days after the revocation, offering land, tax relief and guild rights; refugees became a significant fraction of the population of Berlin. Others reached the Dutch Republic, England, Ireland, the Swiss cantons, the Cape Colony and the American colonies, carrying silk weaving, watchmaking, printing and banking with them.

Those who remained went underground. Worship in the desert, in ravines and woods with itinerant preachers, continued at the risk of the galleys, and the Camisard rising in the Cevennes between 1702 and 1704 was put down with regular troops.

The undoing took a century and came in two steps. The Edict of Versailles, signed by Louis XVI in November 1787 and registered in January 1788, restored civil existence to non-Catholics: they could marry, register births and inherit, without being required to convert. It did not restore public worship. Full equality arrived with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1789 and the constitutional settlement that followed, and the Concordat of 1801 and the Organic Articles of 1802 gave the Reformed and Lutheran churches a recognised legal standing in France for the first time since 1685.