Introduction
Scholars of refugee and forced migration studies often begin their analyses with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ (UNHCR) 1951 Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, which set the international, legal definition for refugees as those “persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.”Footnote 1 Or scholars point to Hannah Arendt’s definition of refugees as peoples existing in a legal purgatory of “statelessness,” as having lost the right to have rights guaranteed by a state.Footnote 2 To begin this article, I want to return to an even older definition in order to encourage us to consider an even deeper genealogy of the term refugees. Denis Diderot, the chief editor of the compendium of Enlightenment thought, L’Encyclopédie (1751–1772), defined “Refugees” thus:
This is what people called the French Protestants whom the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes forced to leave French soil and to look for sanctuary in foreign nations in order to hide from the persecutions that a blind and rash zeal made them endure in their own country. Since this time France saw herself deprived of a great number of citizens who brought to her enemies some arts, talents, and resources that they often used against her. … Louis XIV in persecuting the Protestants deprived his kingdom of close to a million industrious men whom he sacrificed to the interested and ambitious purposes of some bad citizens who are the enemies of all freedom of thought, because they can only reign in the shadow of ignorance. … How do these partisans of intolerance construe humanity and religion? Those who believe that violence can shake the faith of others provide a rather contemptible opinion of their feelings and of their own constancy.Footnote 3
Diderot’s definition marked a significant departure from those of dictionaries published in the preceding one hundred years. Le dictionnaire de l’Académie française (1694), for example, defined a “refugee” and the verb “réfugier, se réfugier” as someone seeking security, but only gave examples of an individual seeking a place of refuge in a city, kingdom, or church.Footnote 4 In Pieter Marin’s 1743 Dictionnaire complet François et Hollandois, the word “refuge” appears in a quote on the Ancient Israelites.Footnote 5 Diderot’s choice to focus on the Huguenot refugees as a collective identity reflected a significant linguistic transition in the early modern era.Footnote 6 The refugee as a category of displaced people had been invented.Footnote 7
What explains this shift? Diderot, like many French philosophers, was regularly in contact with Huguenots. Louis de Jaucourt authored nearly a quarter of the articles of the Encyclopédie and happened to be a Huguenot. Both men were steeped in Huguenot writings, especially those of Pierre Bayle, the architect of the Republic of Letters. The writings of Pierre Bayle and Jaucourt shaped Diderot’s definition. In 1685, Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, which had guaranteed limited toleration to French Calvinists (also referred to as Huguenots) since 1598. While the Revocation only initially ordered the expulsion of Huguenot pastors, approximately 200,000 Protestants fled the country to maintain their confessional community, joining a diaspora that may have numbered well over 500,000 people in Europe and around the Atlantic World. Those in the diaspora had fled France during the Wars of Religion. Huguenots pushed the early cosmopolitan phases of the Enlightenment from Rotterdam, Geneva, and London, publishing clandestine literature that infiltrated France and, in the process, laid the groundwork for some of the more radical, openly critical, anticlerical manifestations of the Enlightenment, including that of Diderot’s Encyclopédie project.Footnote 8 Huguenot refugees positioned themselves in ways that made Diderot’s definition likely.
This article traces one such intellectual genealogy to understand the evolution of the conceptual category of refugees and in doing so to build a bridge from the early modern period to the modern refugee crisis debates. To accomplish this task, I propose revisiting several key Huguenot intellectuals – Pierre Jurieu, Claude Brousson, Pierre Bayle, Antoine Court, and Rabaut Saint-Étienne – who have received extensive biographical treatment, but their conceptions of refugeedom have not been read against one another. As Jérôme Elie argues, “the early modern era has been ‘particularly marked by the religious dimension of the forced movements’ even if it could be mixed with other factors.”Footnote 9 How do we get from refugee crises colored by “religious clashes” to the current, supposedly secular era, where “refugee” is considered mostly as a legal category? As I argue in this article, Huguenots were arbiters of this transition between the sacred and secular statecraft, and from their peripheral position, shaped the latter.
To understand our current refugee crisis, we need to dive deeper into the history of the refugee concept and explore the longue durée origins of refugee identity and the ways actual refugees employed such constructions for their own aims. In fact, considerable ink has been spilled on the disciplinary disconnect between history and refugee studies. In his 2007 article, “Refugees and History: Why We Must Address the Past,” Philip Marfleet notes that refugee studies is “a new field which has required time to explore disciplinary boundaries and to develop distinct perspectives.”Footnote 10 A field built on the backs of a “multiplicity of academic disciplines” with their own “academic partition[s],” claims of the ahistoricity of refugee aid programs, and perhaps the more direct “silencing” of the refugees in their own processes have been particularly poignant critiques.Footnote 11 As Jérôme Elie has shown, historians have not failed outright in examining historically significant aspects of refugee existence and migration, but have largely remained content to relate their research to the adjacent historical fields of transatlantic slavery, revolutionary upheaval, imperialism and decolonisation, and emergent totalitarianism, rather than refugee studies. Where historians have made interventions has been with histories of humanitarianism, especially within the institutional history wheelhouses of international organisations (NGOs, in particular) – an intervention, at least in part, driven by access to primary source documents.Footnote 12 In addition to research into international aid organisations, which often appear under the header of refugee studies, studies of so-called push factors and the refugee experience have increasingly become associated with forced migration studies. Social historians have begun to respond to this lacuna. Notably, David de Boer and Geert H. Janssen have edited a collection on the very topic of refugee politics in early modern Europe. They noted that the notion of a refugee “was strictly bounded by confessional discourse,” and that a “new emotional culture” emerged during the Enlightenment to challenge this confessional character.Footnote 13
Who constitutes a refugee is a subject in need of historicisation. Debates over definitions crisscross both international and institutional histories of the refugee experience as well as forced migration studies. The strengths of certain definitions and inherent pitfalls in relying on certain definitions leads to claims of anachronism or teleology. B. S. Chimni argues that the “legal definitions of ‘refugee’ have always been partial and designed to serve state policy.”Footnote 14 A refugee’s statelessness then is determined by its utility to the nation-state, when defined in legal terms. One solution to this, proposed by historian Peter Gatrell, is to think about refugees as transnational agents, not just victims cast from a national system, void of the ability to act or shape the historical processes they participated in. In advancing this argument, Gatrell encourages historians to think transnationally, “through oceans.” Oceans often provide refugees with an avenue towards resettlement elsewhere. Shifting our analytical lens to the transnational forces us to challenge the domain of the nation-state, supplanting it with another regime, which Gatrell calls “refugeedom” after the Russian concept bezhenstvo. He defines refugeedom as “a matrix involving administrative practices, legal norms, social relations and refugees’ experiences, and how these have been represented in cultural terms.”Footnote 15 At the heart of the problem of refugee studies then is the definition of a refugee and its relationship to the state and citizenship. Gatrell’s is one solution of many which attempt to rectify power imbalances through linguistic recastings. Other historians have preferred to use the phrase “refugee regimes” to draw attention to the discursive agency refugees could mobilise for their own cause.Footnote 16
Labelling “refugees” has been a historical practice dominated by the twentieth century, in part because historians and refugee studies practitioners have maintained that the period following the World Wars inaugurated a new era of refugee crises. Simply put, issues of scale cut historians off from the pre-twentieth-century eras. Marfleet recognises that a widespread view of “refugees did not appear as a meaningful category of persons until the mid-twentieth century.”Footnote 17 This meaningfulness is largely derived again from its relationship to the utility of refugee label as a legal category to nation-states. In Emma Haddad’s analysis of Huguenot refugees, she argues for a break between the early modern Huguenot case and the twentieth century, primarily because early modern states did not develop international means to regulate statelessness. This was not needed, she argues, because Huguenot refugee numbers failed to reach a critical threshold in comparison to the scale of twentieth-century crises and Huguenots tended to bring wealth with them, thus limiting their need for state financial assistance or housing in the form of camps.Footnote 18 Such a focus on the twentieth century and the “meaningfulness” of the category of the refugee inherently reifies its legal utility and as such the power of the nation-state that fills the negative space, allowing us to imagine an image of the refugee figure, but in focusing on the twentieth-century’s legal apparatus we forefront the nation-state instead of the displaced and therefore negate the refugee’s agency or ability to shape said state.
If we want to decenter the nation-state from our analysis of refugees, we need to rethink the centrality of the twentieth century to our analyses of refugees as a category then as well. In this article, I want to follow Frank Caestecker’s lead in pushing us to think “beyond the administrative category of policy-making and use an independent category of ‘refugee’ to understand what happened on the ground.”Footnote 19 This requires rigorous contextualisation and a focus on the historical actions of refugees as they constituted their refugeedom and imagined their refugee identity against such a matrix. A transhistorical focus, then, on Huguenots, refugee identity, and the role these played in the emergence of what might be deemed secular statecraft helps us to provincialise the state and center those Huguenots on the frontiers of the French kingdom.Footnote 20
In challenging the legal definitions of refugees dominated by the nation-state by pushing the field to think transnationally and in cultural terms, it is interesting that Gatrell fails to think transhistorically, or at least beyond the twentieth century. That this remains a general critique of the field of refugee and forced migration studies is an important point to deconstruct. In addition to the sheer scale of the twentieth-century refugee problem, there are two central explanations for the general absence of the longue durée. Since most early works were contemporary reflections on refugee crises, presentism acted as a limiting factor in the larger historicisation of the period. Authors wrote about lived experience and found little reason to dig deeper historically. That refugees partly determined this to focus their attention on the future rather than the past is culturally significant but beyond the scope of this article. In addition, refugee studies emerged alongside social historians that gave preference to in-depth microhistories rather than transhistorical shifts. Intellectual historians, including the likes of Sophia Rosenfeld, Darrin McMahon, and David Armitage, have shown that transhistorical focuses can reveal complicated genealogies of ideals as diverse as happiness, genius, civil war, and democracy.Footnote 21 “Refugee” has a similar meandering past filled with fits and starts.
If the concept of a refugee is largely determined to “serve state policy” in the twentieth century, the nation-state was created, in part, as a response to the Huguenot refugee crisis and because of Huguenot calls for state authority separate from religious power. J. G. A. Pocock defines the Enlightenment as “a series of programmes for strengthening civil sovereignty and putting an end to the Wars of Religion.”Footnote 22 Huguenot refugees actively participated in such an Enlightenment by shaping programs to guarantee their security in the refuge and even shaped the development of the French state from across France’s frontiers.Footnote 23 Concomitantly, nationalism as a mode of identity emerged alongside the development of the nation-state. As David A. Bell and others have shown, nationalism often manifested in ways that resembled religious rites and rituals. Huguenot refugees actively promoted their cause by using patriotic language in the mid-eighteenth century, which called into question the religious qualifications of subjecthood and later citizenship.Footnote 24
Recognising that Huguenot refugees figured into larger debates over religious toleration, the relationship between church and state, returns agency to refugees. That Huguenots invented the refugee category also evidences the ability of refugees to frame themselves in ways that would court favorable responses from the state or the international community. Gatrell astutely analyzes in its twentieth-century context and how refugees drew upon the historical refugee antecedents to defend themselves, but what this study shows is that for Huguenot refugees, their historical refugee revisionism depended on a Biblical past that they could mine for their own defense. In this revisionism emerged a kind of refugee script pulled straight from scripture. As such, “refugee” is understood as a retrospective identity, capable of diluting the polemic arguments used to justify the group’s original expulsion by emphasising sentimental characteristics and natural, even human rights of the individual exiled. That this process had religious origins is almost entirely missed by refugee studies scholars who ignore the early modern era.
Huguenot refugees redefined themselves from three camps. First, radical Huguenot refugees reacted to the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes by conceiving of themselves as refugees, chosen people capable of surviving the march through the Desert and their Babylonian Captivity. This religious connotation and accompanying millenarianism proved too dangerous for more moderate Huguenot refugees, who subsequently stripped the religious exceptionalism from the category. Finally, those Huguenots who survived the early years of the Revocation began to abandon the refugee category and identity in favor of adopting more patriotic language while maintaining the sentimental, affective narratives common to both the radical and moderate Huguenot refugees. These Huguenot refugees, from beyond France’s frontiers or from within France itself, began pushing for state authority, which could guarantee some iteration of religious toleration.
Radical Refugees, or the New Israelites: Pierre Jurieu and Claude Brousson
The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes radicalised much of the Huguenot community. For those who remained in France, especially those in the Cevennes Mountains in southern France, resistance against the king’s dragonnades—a paramilitary force charged with forcibly converting those Calvinists that remained in the country (Figure 1)—became an integral part of their communal worship, as did the turn to lay preachers in an absence of seminary-educated Calvinist pastors. Out of this crucible of purgation emerged the Church of the Désert, a regeneration of the Ancient Church replete with a theological and historical narrative for their suffering.
Godefroy Engelmann, Gravure protestante représentant les dragonnades en France sous Louis XIV, circa 1686. Image in Public Domain.
The face of the radical resistance to Louis XIV and the most notable architect of the refugee narrative was the pastor, professor of theology, and author of many histories of Calvinism, Pierre Jurieu.Footnote 25 Born in 1637 in Mer-sur-la-Loire to a family with a long pastoral line, he had theology in his blood and was almost predestined to study theology in Sedan. In 1674, after obtaining his doctorate, he became a professor of theology and Hebrew at the Protestant Academy in the Sedan; yet in 1681, Louis XIV issued an order that stripped the Calvinists of the academy, turning the premises over to the Catholic Church. Jurieu fled France shortly after, taking up a position as a professor of theology at the École Ilustre in Rotterdam. From there he wrote dozens of works of theology, political theory, and history.Footnote 26
Jurieu is best known for his Lettres pastorales addressées aux fidèles de France qui gémissent sous la captivité de Babylon.Footnote 27 Published after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and coinciding with the English Revolution of 1688, Jurieu’s pastoral letters remained true to titular form, appearing as a collection of letters between himself, the Calvinist correspondent reporting on the atrocities leveled against Huguenots, and those internally displaced Calvinists trying to wait out the Revocation storm. His letters ranged from lessons on scriptural interpretation to his politics of contractual political power, but were foremost intended to foster a sense of community within the burgeoning “Protestant international.”Footnote 28 The epistolary form proved integral to resurrecting the Huguenot community from the devastation of the Revocation.Footnote 29
Jurieu used his pastoral letters to provide support to those who might be tempted to convert to Catholicism in France to avoid the ire of the king’s forces, but he also used them to stoke the fires of revolutionary insurrection. Jurieu did so through prophecy and apocalypticism, and by connecting those in France with those in the refuge through a common refugee identity. He was a leader of the Calvinist Church and a republican. Like many theologians of the time, a strict separation between religious belief and political preference did not exist. Principles that determined religious observance applied to political engagement, and to think otherwise would be to engage in anachronism. Jurieu’s apocalyptic formula lacked precision, as is often the case, but was particularly gripping because of its reflection of contemporary events. Jurieu predicted the fall of the Antichrist, which he understood as the embodiment of the Catholic Church. The 1688 Revolution that dethroned the Catholic James II in England seemingly evidenced this point and presaged the complete fall of the Catholic Church around 1710. According to Jurieu, man would come to embrace the one true faith—Calvinism—and then towards the end of the eighteenth century, Jesus Christ would commence his reign on earth.Footnote 30 This refugee identity was not superficial to Jurieu; it was inflected with belief and deeply wed to his view of the end of days. In the fulfillment of prophecy, Huguenot refugees were going to make the way for God’s return to the profane world in fulfillment of the promises of Revelation.
Jurieu crafted a theologically and historically detailed narrative of Huguenot displacement, written in an epistolary form, to attract Huguenots to his cause. The theological inflection of the refugee identity had roots in the title of the pastoral letters. Jurieu’s depiction of the post-Revocation era as a kind of Babylonian Captivity immediately likened Huguenots to God’s chosen people, the Ancient Israelites. It also imagined the spaces of (especially southern) France where those Huguenots remained to be a metaphorical, if not a literal, besieged Jerusalem. Allusion coupled with historical discussions of Henri IV, the architect of the Edict of Nantes, and the Wars of Religion in a forceful way.
Jurieu’s letters travelled in France, but other radical Huguenots left the safety of the refuge to walk in the “Désert.” Claude Brousson first referred to those spaces still occupied by Calvinists in France after the Revocation as the desert in his La Manne mystique du désert ou sermons prononcez en France dans les déserts et dans les cavernes durant les ténebres de la nuit et de l’affliction, les années 1689, 1690, 1691, 1692 & 1693.Footnote 31 Brousson had been a lawyer before 1685, but he had always shown a predilection for theology and preaching. Therefore, once he was expelled from France, it did not take long for him to decide to return. He traversed those same smuggling routes that cut through France’s hinterlands to preach to Calvinists directly. If Jurieu’s letters represented an international news network by which Huguenot refugees could remain informed of their own persecution, Brousson travelled that network, sleeping in barns and evading the king’s forces by hiding deep in forests and even on one occasion down a well.Footnote 32
The “refugee minister,” Brousson, like Jurieu, compared the persecution of Calvinism in France to the biblical persecution of the Jews. The story of Jewish persecution and their languishment in the Egyptian desert was one with which Calvinists could identify. Yet, through it all, the Huguenots still maintained the position of the people of God, a celebrated identity – one which assuaged those who might have been lured into conversion. One day, as it was written in the Bible, God’s chosen people would emerge from the remoteness of their desert and could repatriate to their ancestral kingdom.Footnote 33 Brousson was eventually captured in the Béarn region of southwestern France on 18 September 1698 and executed in his own imagined Désert.
The idea of repatriation was portentous and therefore inevitable in both Jurieu and Brousson’s writings. For Jurieu, repatriation would come as Christ’s reign subsumed the entire world. For Brousson, it would come after a period of persecution designed to test the strength of the Calvinist community. In both cases, repatriation reaffirmed the chosen status of the Huguenot refugees while preserving the consciences of those who might have been tempted to convert to Catholicism. Not all Huguenots were tempted by this vision of refugeedom. In their constructions of refugeedom, both drew from the long biblical past, in addition to their recent histories.
The Huguenot refugee identity was first expressly religious. Theologians and pastors referred to themselves as refugees because they shared a common theological and historical referent – the exodus of the ancient Israelites from Egypt. While modern legal and secular definitions of the refugee rarely directly correlate biblical refugees and the plight of displaced peoples today, refugees themselves, attempting to explain their purgation, often liken their struggle to religious refugees that preceded them. Arguably much of the Zionist movement to resettle Israel was predicated on the long history of Jewish persecution and religious exceptionalism. Muslim refugees, like those Muslim Bosnians who fled eastern Europe after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, too often imagined their migration as fulfillments of the Hijra, a critical tenet reflective of Muhammad and the other early Muslims’ experiences being expelled from Mecca and fleeing for Medina.Footnote 34 In both circumstances, such narratives legitimated decisions, provided social cohesion at the exact time that each community was being torn apart, and ultimately speak to a much longer history of religious exceptionalism informing refugee identity. When Huguenots fled France in the 1680s, they responded to many of the same issues by creating a religious refugee identity that was strengthened by their religious dogma.
From Religious to Political Refugees: Pierre Bayle
Refugees shifted from an identity to an overt political category when Bayle, a Huguenot by ancestry if not by theology, rebuked Jurieu’s millenarianism and not-so-veiled republicanism in two seminal texts of the period—Réponse d’un nouveau converti à la lettre d’un réfugié (1689) and the book that “sparked the intellectual war of Rotterdam,” Avis importante aux réfugiés (1690).Footnote 35 He grew up in a small French Calvinist community, just beneath the Pyrenees Mountains at a time of religious and political tumult. Persecuted for his Reformed faith, like many in seventeenth-century France, Bayle fled the region. He converted to Catholicism in 1668 while attending the Jesuit college of Toulouse, only to abjure and return to the Calvinist fold two years later in 1670 at Mazères. He studied theology in Geneva and became a private teacher until he, however briefly, found solace in the Protestant Academy of Sedan. In 1681, Bayle fled again, this time from France into the Huguenot diaspora, landing in a position at the newly created École Ilustre in Rotterdam, the Dutch Republic alongside Jurieu. In Rotterdam, Bayle worked and wrote some of his most important tomes – those texts others took as evidence for his errant, apathetic, or hostile attitude towards organised religion,Footnote 36 including Nouvelles de la république des lettres and the Dictionnaire historique et critique. Bayle’s writings proved canonical for eighteenth-century secular rationalists as well as those few overt atheists.Footnote 37
Yet the texts that quaked the Huguenot refuge most and fundamentally shifted the meaning of the refugee crisis were the Réponse d’un nouveau converti à la letter d’un réfugié and especially Avis important aux réfugiés, which Mara van der Lugt argues “sparked the intellectual war of Rotterdam.”Footnote 38 Bayle authored both the Réponse and the Avis anonymously, and understandably so, as Bayle, like Jurieu, had been expelled from France only to settle with the Huguenot community in Rotterdam. Contradicting Jurieu held consequences.Footnote 39 Bayle was a far more moderate Huguenot than Jurieu. He urged the Huguenot refugee community not to stoke the ire of Louis XIV nor the fires of martyrdom. If Huguenots ever sought to return to France, they needed to temper their relationships with the more radical camp of the Huguenot diaspora as well as those European powers hostile to Catholic authority. Most dangerous to this repatriation was the relationship Huguenots like Jurieu were cultivating with the revolutionaries who eventually helped overthrow the Catholic James II, installing the Dutch stadholder William of Orange on the English throne in what was known as the Glorious Revolution. Such an act, cast in millenarian and prophetic terms, all but guaranteed that Huguenot refugees would not be able to return safely to France. Refugee Huguenot revolutionaries only served as evidence for the Catholic elite who had pushed Louis XIV to expel the Reformed in the first place.
For Bayle, the Huguenot refugee crisis was expressly political. Bayle’s Réponse caused the greatest stir. In it, he anticipated many of the themes of the Avis – including the injurious nature of the Huguenots’ alliance with those leading England’s revolutionary invasion. Bayle reminded his readers in the Réponse and in the Avis, specifically those Huguenot supporters of William, that any attempt to justify violence on behalf of their faith or even of future religious toleration would prove a double-edged sword. Either rulers would view Huguenots as entrenched in their violent ways and use such arguments to further religious violence or would undoubtedly be taken up later by Catholics in Protestant kingdoms to unseat Protestant kings. Therefore, Bayle sought to reconceive revolutionary action as secular and separate from the Protestant mentalité, which many Catholics insisted linked the Reformed to all forms of anarchical violence.
Jurieu quickly embroiled Bayle in controversy over his authorship and the arguments made by the so-called nouveau converti.Footnote 40 That Jurieu was the target of these anonymous pamphlets is certain. In the text of the second edition of the Avis in 1692, Bayle forcefully wrote:
The year 1689 has come to a close without so much as a memorable event. You promised us bells and whistles in that year; that the Catholic Church would face its demise, especially in France; that one would only see … miraculous revolutions, and all that, in a word, would [make 1689] the most climatic year in world history. … The year 1689 has not fulfilled your predictions.Footnote 41
For Bayle, the Williamite coup was an example of the general dynastic war that had embroiled Europe for a millennium. Social and political ideologies divided Catholics from Protestants more than their religion. Bayle used the word revolution repeatedly in his Avis, so what is notable here is the adjective “miraculous,” which was intended to take aim as the religious significance of the event that Jurieu claimed. Bayle noted in the same section that the rhetoric employed by those millenarian preachers only served to enflame the “prejudices” and the “superstitions of the masses,” as well as to play upon the “population’s credulity.”Footnote 42
Beyond his efforts to distance refugees from violent revolutionaries, Bayle feared that Huguenot refugees would stigmatise themselves as calumnious liars and disseminators of mistruths. If the miraculous revolutions that Jurieu portended were false, then his talk of revolutions must be hyperbolic, only serving to stir the Huguenot population and undercut any chance moderate Huguenots might have at brokering peace with the French king. “Our enemies,” wrote Bayle, “print volatile pamphlets in Holland to divide people from their brothers and to represent the refugees as gossip monsters.”Footnote 43 While chastising Huguenots for engaging in libel, he offers the explanation that all displaced people are tempted by subterfuge out of anger, but such passions needed to be tempered. Even Catholics expelled from Britain had fallen victim to such impulses. Bayle disconnects calumny from Calvinism, instead insisting that the culture of displacement produced such heated and defamatory texts.
In writing their own narratives of refugeedom, refugees need to be conscious of not aiding the self-fulfilling prophecies of their expellers, yet as Bayle insightfully recognises, the conditions of displacement led people to reinforce those same arguments for their expulsion. That freedom of conscience led to republicanism and revolution, if not anarchy and endless strings of sectarian violence, were regular arguments made by Catholics in France. Bayle saw these arguments playing out abroad in ways that made him fear for future repatriation efforts. At least the actions of a few can have overwhelming consequences for the majority. Just as Jurieu gave Huguenots a revolutionary republican name, so too do the few refugees to Europe and the United States who turn to violence, crime, and terrorism paint their entire refugee community with broad, libelous brushstrokes. Often international organisations like NGOs or popular mediation via media (from pamphlets in the seventeenth century to sentimental novels in the eighteenth century to podcasts in the twenty-first century) can help to slow the politics of marginalisation that have led to this churn of displacement.
Wandering the Désert: The Religious Enlightenments of Antoine Court and Rabaut Saint-Étienne
The years spanning from 1685 to 1787 are often referred to as the Désert period. Jurieu, Brousson, and Bayle entered the desert, but second- and third-generation desert-dwelling Calvinists continued the fight and adopted new strategies to pursue religious toleration in France. Their arguments shifted away from the rhetoric of Reformed refugees, but the connection had been palpably made in the French social imaginary – best embodied by Diderot’s entry in the Encyclopêdie. Antoine Court and Rabaut Saint-Étienne were two prominent leaders of the eighteenth-century Désert. Both continued to build on the messaging of early Huguenot refugees, while distancing themselves from such language. Court emphasised the patriotism of Huguenots whereas Saint-Étienne returned to the theme of their victimhood, suffering, and longing to return to France. Neither used the term refugee to refer to their cause. The early modern refugee, as an embodiment of election of God’s chosen one, had fallen by the wayside in favor of religious moderation.
In 1695, Court was born in Villeneuve-de-Berg in Vivarais, France. While some preachers like Brousson continued to make their way from Huguenot enclave to enclave across France, the absence of educated pastors had forced laymen to seize the wooden rostrums of their clandestine meetings. Lay leaders issued prophecies and spoke of their visions.Footnote 44 Antoine Court grew up in this “Church of the Désert.” As early as 1713, Court started preaching, only to realise the church he grew up in was too disorganised to survive and the preachers too uneducated and too dangerous to lead the church much longer.Footnote 45 In 1715, Court led the first synodal meeting at Montèzes in the Gard. He later attended seminary in Geneva, acquiring the education he demanded of his fellow pastors. A bounty placed on his head and the realisation that a new seminary was needed to rebuild the French Calvinist Church drove Court to Lausanne, where he organised a seminary that would prove a key institution of the Huguenot church.
Beyond establishing a seminary for the Calvinist pastorate to re-establish itself, Court also advanced several key arguments for the repatriation of the Calvinist population abroad and the tolerance of those who remained internally displaced. In his Lettre d’un patriot sur la tolerance civile des Protestants de France (1756), Court appealed to the French king for the repatriation of Huguenots. In it, he adopted many of Bayle’s moderate tactics, especially in calling for Huguenots to abandon sectarian violence and prophecy.Footnote 46
In Court’s letter, he shied away from réfugié in favor of a “patriot” discourse. This is significant, in so far as Court recognised the ascendant statist and proto-nationalist discourse of the eighteenth century. Like Bayle before him, Court realised that the primary mode of identification Huguenots needed to adopt was not a religious one, but a secular, nationalist one, one that reached beyond France’s frontiers and spoke to a trans-generational identity. Court, like others who participated in the Religious Enlightenment of the eighteenth-century, increasingly recognised that the state was the only guarantor of religious equilibrium. To avoid a reoccurrence of the horrors of the Wars of Religion meant strengthening the powers of the state while limiting connections to one established religion or the other. This proved a particularly important point for Court, who had faced the terrors of the dragonnades earlier in his life.
Court addressed the state’s use of violence for religious purposes in three overlapping ways. First, he emphasised the futility of conversion by force. Dragonnades “converted” Calvinists in great numbers, but whether their conversions could be trusted was always an issue that plagued Catholics. Second, Court’s reliance on the idea of patriotism emphasised the inherent loyalism of the Calvinist people who did not have a foreign spiritual leader whose authority might conflict with the temporal power of the state. “The true patriots groaned” at the zeal of those who supported the Revocation, “and we deplore today the disasters which this revocation was followed.”Footnote 47 This was a common apologetic tactic of the Désert and one that inherently challenged the role of the Catholic Church in Old Regime French politics. Lastly, Court lamented the loss of wealth the expulsion of Huguenots had brought to France. Like Diderot’s definition, Court emphasises the lost “industry and work” of Huguenots.Footnote 48 Expulsion stripped France of these talents and benefited “Holland, Switzerland, the German states, Denmark, and all across the North … [who] have been peopled with infinite numbers of religious fugitifs.”Footnote 49 Court advanced this crisis narrative in terms of conscience, politics, and the political economy of France. Even the choice of the term fugitifs was strategic. In eighteenth-century France, fugitif carried a different connotation than réfugiés. Both referred to those who fled, but the former emphasised the relationship of the individual to the state, whereas the latter emphasised the act of seeking refuge. For Court, fugitifs provided a better cipher for thinking about the state’s role in ostracising the Huguenot population.Footnote 50
Court supported fugitive pastors through education and then sent them back into France to preach to the Church of the Désert. One such pastor was Rabaut Saint-Étienne, who was the son of well-known French Calvinist pastor Paul Rabaut. Saint-Étienne eventually became a key figure in securing religious toleration for Calvinists in 1787. He also became a leader of the early French Revolution. Court argued that Saint-Étienne displayed “fruits précoces” while at seminary.Footnote 51 Saint-Étienne became well acquainted with Scripture, Calvinist theology, as well as classical philosophy and history. Following seminary, Saint-Étienne moved to Geneva and continued to study theology, philosophy, and philology. In Geneva, Saint-Étienne would have come into contact with the writings of the German Aufklärer, who promoted a middle ground between reason and revelation, and proponents of radical “enthusiasm” like the Pietists, whose fervor would have mirrored the Camisards in the Cevennes that Court had so disdained. He undoubtedly came into contact with Jacob Vernet, a theologian and philosopher who believed in a rationalist approach to religious doctrine.Footnote 52 In 1748, Vernet had helped to disseminate Théorie des sentiments agréables, which maintained that “proofs of sentiment” could achieve more change than “useful arguments.”Footnote 53 Helena Rosenblatt argues that an “Enlightened Christian sentimentalism” was born in Geneva, and this sentimental city produced the likes of Rabaut Saint-Étienne as well as Enlightenment juggernauts like the “citizen of Geneva,” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who offered one of the most cited definitions of sentimentalism of the entire eighteenth century in his sentimental novel Émile.Footnote 54 Saint-Étienne finally matriculated and became a pastor in 1764. For fifteen years, he preached in and around Nîmes. His surviving sermons speak to his thoughtful consideration of sentiment and religion during a time of continued religious persecution. In the late 1770s, he began to work on his own work of sentimental fiction.
One of Saint-Étienne’s earliest efforts to promote religious toleration was Le vieux Cévenol, a sentimental novel first published in 1779 that followed a Huguenot refugee named Ambroise Borély through his expulsion from France.Footnote 55 Saint-Étienne’s fictional account masqueraded as non-fiction. Saint-Étienne regularly drew from Élie Benoît’s history of persecuted Calvinists from the Edict of Nantes in 1598 through the Revocation to add a realistic texture to his tract.Footnote 56 Borély was of a man whose birth to Protestant parents came right as Louis XIV issuing arrêts against the Huguenot community and then the issuance of the Revocation. Early in his childhood, Borély witnessed his father’s execution on suspicion of having attended a clandestine meeting. Ruthless dragoons ransacked his home. Despite these events, Borély’s mother found a way to support her children and to continue raising them as Calvinists. At fifteen, Borély’s plans for his future employment were dashed as he was expressly forbidden, on account of his religion and by the king’s ordinances, from entering the legal profession, as judge, solicitor, advocate, or notary, or practicing as a physician, apothecary, or even horse-riding instructor. Not only had the kingdom lost the industriousness and hard work of Huguenots to countries abroad, but the French state actively limited professions to which a Huguenot might apply themselves within the country. The military remained open to Protestants, but advancement was impossible, and it seemed likely that if he supported Louis XIV in this manner he would inevitably have to act against his fellow Protestants. He found trade to be his only professional refuge.
The state’s persecution quickly dissolved any intra-Christian camaraderie that may have existed. A once close family friend, Claude Hypocris, then informed on the Calvinist family to take advantage of an edict that placed in his hands the wealth and property of any captured Calvinist. The mother became poor; Borély’s sisters were carried off to convents; Catholics tricked the youngest brother, only seven years old at the time, into converting for treats; and Catholics had dragged a Protestant’s corpse through the streets and subjected it to calumnious and insolent mockery, before being flung into a sewer. Borély resolved to flee the country for Switzerland, but was arrested and turned over to galley ship authorities, who then sent him to the Americas on a rickety ship that proved incapable of making the transatlantic voyage. His French captors abandoned the ship at sea, and Borély, who clung to its floating remains, chanced upon a passing English vessel, echoing Candide’s journey towards liberation from philosophical and religious persecution. He arrived in London, became naturalised and took up his trade. Borély’s perspective added a deeply empathetic element to the story for readers. Readers could understand what it was like to have one’s family torn apart and view the harsh corporal punishments common to the eighteenth century as extensions of a tyrannical state rather than expressions of justice.
France maintained a gravitational hold over Borély. Once he became wealthy enough, he returned home, only to find that one of his sisters was in possession of the family’s property. Borély returned, incognito, to a petty sister who misunderstood his intentions. He then left his former home and sister, ready to return to London, only to meet and fall in love with a Roman Catholic girl by the name of Sophie Robinel. They consecrated their nuptials in front of a Protestant minister. Their romance soon led to the birth of child, after which his wife died. Later, a bill arrived informing Borély that he must turn over all his late wife’s possessions to her mother and father. Borély defended the rights of his son, only to be informed that the boy, under the laws of Louis XIV and Louis XV, was considered to be a bastard and thus was not owed any of the family’s property. Borély’s lawyers took a stand, evoked the laws of nature, and failed. The judges refused to justify their actions, choosing to enforce one part of the law but not the other. They spoke of a type of de facto toleration of the Protestant, but despite their vague assurances, Borély fled the country once again. Bound up in romance, Saint-Étienne explores the legal quagmire Huguenots suffered in France without explicit recognition of their rights. The system had been configured in such a way to ensure his marginalisation.
The story ends in a hopeful tone. Once safe in a free country, Borély renounced any future desire to return to France, his place of birth where man’s most sacred, most natural rights were proscribed, yet his mind never left his homeland. In his final moments, and included in the last sentence of the story, were the names “Henri IV,” the protector of the Huguenots, and “Louis XVI,” a king capable of recapturing the good legacy of Henri IV. Saint-Étienne ended his sentimental narrative on an encouraging note to the new French king, Louis XVI. The Bourbon did not have to maintain the legacy of Louis XIV. He could instead turn to Henri IV, who the Calvinists imagined as a martyr to their toleration.
Sentimentalism remains at the heart of portrayals of refugees. Borély on a wrecked ship echoes refugees on makeshift barges hopelessly floating towards a country that may or may not grant them asylum. Even the red tape and financial strain that Borély faced after his wife died resembles the very real legal and financial straits refugees face when they attempt to bring their wealth with them or acquire it after they can return to their homelands. Sentimentalism connected Frenchmen in France and beyond. Huguenots regularly used representations of affective suffering, and so too did refugees in the twentieth century draw attention to their own suffering to promote their cause. Portrayals of the emaciated, war-torn, and on occasion drawn-and-quartered Huguenot body translated to the familial body, which translated to the body politic of the nascent nation-state body. Saint-Étienne’s sentimentalism offered a fundamental critique of the body politic of the monarchy, just as contemporary photographs of refugees act as a critique of repressive regimes around the world.
This refugee sentimentalism had origins in the Enlightenment’s empathetic revolution, which had profound effects for the political revolution that soon followed. The French revolutionaries heard the call of the Huguenot refugees from beyond their borders. Over 105 years after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the short-lived French Constitution of 1791 included in its definition of citizenship those “born in a foreign country and descended in any degree whatsoever from a French man or a French woman expatriated because of religion.”Footnote 57 In short, the foreign-born Huguenot population had the right to return to France and enjoy the civil benefits associated with French citizenship. Citizenship was not enough for some of the revolutionaries. In the years that followed, through the Reign of Terror, which saw revolutionary efforts to de-Christianise France, the revolutionaries continued to debate ways of courting Huguenot refugees back to France. In 1796, Huguenot, liberal Benjamin Constant chronicled his Protestant family’s plight and flight from France during the Wars of Religion in his pamphlet, Note sur les droits de cité appartenant à la famille Constant de Rebacque. Under the auspices of the 22 December 1790 law which actively sought to attract the religionnaires fugitifs, using similar language as Court, his family returned to France, provided the necessary documentation, and was restored to their alienated land in the Franche-Comté.Footnote 58 Constant received French citizenship, his family’s lost land, and soon after buried his father on their ancestral property. Having “reclaimed, obtained, inherited, and exercised the same rights” as his father, Benjamin Constant wrote, “I am therefore French, son of a Frenchmen, and a descendant of a Frenchmen.”Footnote 59 Huguenot refugees could repatriate.Footnote 60
The Cultural Origins of the Refugee Crisis and Methodological Lessons
In 1685, Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, which forcibly expelled over 200,000 Huguenots from France into a diaspora that spanned most of Europe and the Atlantic World. In response to the Revocation, Huguenots adopted the label “refugee” when referring to their displaced peoples, especially outside of France, but also to those still in France. They did so for three primary reasons: First, the word “refugee” carried with it biblical reference to the ancient Israelites, who in the Book of Exodus experience tribulations, but because they are the chosen people of God, maintain their community and eventually find peace from their persecution. Such an allusion fortified Huguenot resolve against the persecutions of the Catholic French state and the tolls of forced migration and helped them imagine a transnational space – what Phillipe Joutard would only later call the “Huguenot diaspora” in 1979 – and maintain a sense of community into the eighteenth century.Footnote 61 Second, this biblically reinforced sense of community provided them with a language capable of representing their victimhood at the hands of a “malicious” state. Enlightenment philosophers like Denis Diderot would refer to Huguenots as refugees to emphasise the suffering of individuals at the hands of the government. As such and lastly, the word refugee became a cultural cipher for criticising the burgeoning, centralising nation-state (an idea and an infrastructural entity that was itself coming into existence in the early modern period). At its outset, refugee was a term used to criticise the state, not a term used by the state for administrative purposes. It did not denote statelessness; it denoted the state’s loss of the “chosen people.” Yet, as Huguenot refugees persisted in the Désert, they began to barter and reimagine the state as their best ally in the struggle for repatriation to France. Those who followed, second- and third-generation Huguenots, continued to use the refugee identity as a lens through which to attract and enhance secular state power and critique sacral power in the process.
Two centuries years later, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees passed the Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees in 1951. It would be erroneous to draw a direct line between Reformed refugees from the Revocation era and the persecution that displaced Jews and other communities faced following World War II, but studying the Huguenot refugee crisis does reveal interesting continuities that merit further exploration. Yet, it is worth also returning to the historiographical question surrounding the dearth of historical research on refugee and forced migration studies and the sizable lacunae in the literature on the connection between the early modern and modern refugee crises.
In part, the latter conundrum owes much to the nation-state and the role it plays in the mediation of refugee crises today, but in the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, nation-states did not exist in the same way that they do today. International cooperation was much more regularly coordinated by marriage than by diplomatic conference. Technologies of the state, ranging from communication technology to bureaucratic infrastructures, simply did not exist in a way for international cooperation, nor, if we follow Lynn Hunt’s lead, did Europeans have a anything seemingly like a developed sense of human rights in the eighteenth century.Footnote 62 The disconnect between the early modern and the modern period of refugee and forced migration studies exists in terms of the state, not of the refugee identity. To allow the state to take center stage in this debate would be to strip the agency from those refugees who invented a lasting identity.
The Huguenot invention of the category of refugees and its concomitant forms of crises shaped the French state over the eighteenth century. Huguenots forced the French state to come to terms with one hundred years of persecution; with the effects of religious persecution on the political, economic, and social scales of a kingdom; and ultimately what power should rest on. In the same way, historians of more contemporary refugee crises need to be sure to not let national and supranational efforts silence the stories that refugees tell about themselves. Moreover, decentering the state from the history of refugees calls into question what factors determine refugeedom. Examining the Huguenot refugee crisis not only reveals the linguistic, religious, and cultural origins of the refugee crisis, but contextualising Huguenot arguments for repatriation over the course of the long eighteenth century also offers us an opportunity to challenge the transnational character of refugees – as the UNCHR charter reads, “outside the country of his former habitual residence” – to also include internally displaced peoples.Footnote 63 Huguenots regularly communicated and traversed national boundaries. Their communities did not conform to the nation-state, and historians of contemporary refugee struggles should be careful not to superimpose national boundaries on refugee communities and communication networks today. Just as Jurieu sent his Lettres pastorales across France’s frontiers, so too can refugees today use cell phones and the internet to maintain their communities and their cultures across great distances. In these veins too, they can lobby for their own interests, secure places of refuge, and even push for repatriation if possible – just like the Huguenots did in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The Huguenot refugee was not monolithic, and no refugee identity that followed maintained a solitary definition. As historians interrogate the refugee identity through crisis, they must remain attuned to differing constructions of that identity. Jurieu tapped into theology to satiate the need for community in the refuge, while Bayle abandoned the theological quality of refugeedom to stress the need for a secular relationship with the state. Bayle’s philosophical and political approach proved more powerful in the eighteenth century. Court turned to patriotic discourse to posit a new relationship between the state and religion. Secular power could guarantee religious toleration, if it separated itself from its sacral ties. Doing so would strengthen the power of the regime. Saint-Étienne emphasised the victimisation of the refugee in order to metaphorically extrapolate the ways that purgation of a people weakened the larger secular corporate entity – namely, in the early modern period, the monarchical regime – but a similar extrapolation could be applied between images of starving children on makeshift boats in the Mediterranean and the nation-state(s) that displaced them.
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