Antoine Court Convenes the First Synod of the Church of the Desert

On 24 August 1715, the twenty year old lay preacher Antoine Court convened nine believers, four laypeople and five preachers, at the hamlet of Montezes in the Gard, in France's Cevennes region, for what became known as the Synod of the Desert, the first attempt to rebuild a functioning Reformed church structure in France since Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685, already recorded here, thirty years earlier, and seventy two years before Louis XVI signed the Edict of Toleration in 1787, also recorded here. The synod met only days before Louis XIV's death on 1 September 1715 and just months after the king's March 1715 declaration reasserting that every subject of France belonged to the Catholic Church. Its central act was reinstating the office of elder, laypeople who would organize clandestine meetings in the countryside, called assemblies of the desert, find safe houses and escape routes for traveling preachers, and collect funds for the poor. Court's reforms deliberately sidelined the ecstatic Camisard prophetic movement that had dominated Protestant resistance since the 1702 revolt, replacing improvised prophecy with a trained, disciplined ministry; several former Camisards, including Jean Huc and Pierre Durand, brother of the later prisoner Marie Durand, sat among the nine at Montezes. Meeting in secret under threat of the galleys or death, Court's reorganized synods gradually rebuilt Reformed church government across France's Protestant regions over the following decades, restoring the institutional continuity that let the underground Church of the Desert receive the civil toleration Louis XVI's 1787 edict finally extended to it.