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| "A Protestant signs his act of abjuration" |
The Dragonnades.
At the time of the reign of King Louis XIV of France (1660-1715), there were over a million Reformed people, called Huguenots, in his kingdom. The king's religion consisted of nothing but exact external observance of the religious customs prescribed by the Roman Church. The Duchess of Orleans, his sister-in-law, writes: "One cannot be more simple-minded in religion than the King (Louis XIV) was. What the priests spoke, he believed as if God had spoken it, for he had never read a word in the Bible, and knew nothing but what his confessors told him." So it became easy for the priesthood and the Jesuits, with the help of his confessor named La Chaise, to inflame him to the plan of exterminating the Reformed church in France, and thus to turn his whole country into a purely papal land. The king was made to understand the grace that could be obtained from God by so many sinners being restored to the true, all-saving Church. He was reminded how he could thereby make good his indescribably lewd life. Thus all kinds of severe oppression of the Huguenots were first begun, in order to make them dislike their religion and to induce them to convert to the Roman Church. They were accused of all kinds of completely unproven transgressions, in order to be able to sentence them to severe punishments; they were declared incapable of holding many offices and positions of honor; they were deprived of their rights of trade; their children were not admitted to the higher schools; Reformed teachers were only allowed to teach reading, arithmetic, and writing; in each place there could be only one school and one teacher; they were forbidden to perform any official church duties; they were also not allowed to be doctors and lawyers, printers and booksellers. They were forbidden to emigrate, and to prevent this from happening, the harbor and border towns were manned with guards. They were also forbidden to have their children educated abroad; if they tried to do so, their children were snatched from them to be educated in the papist faith. Those who let themselves be converted by the priests did not have to pay their debts to their Reformed creditors, while those who did not want to convert were condemned to pay the debts of those who had become Catholic. The king allocated large sums of money to establish special missionary institutions for the conversion of his heretical subjects. Although by all this whole multitudes could be brought to convert to the Roman Church, nevertheless, by driving the Huguenots to the last man either into the Papal Church or to exterminate them, finally in 1681, on the advice of the wicked Minister of War Louvois, even harsher measures of violence were taken, the infamous so-called dragonnades, namely, by sending dragoons [Dragoner] with the priests into all provinces to complete the alleged work of conversion. When the priest arrived with his dragoons at the house of a Huguenot, he announced to the inhabitants: "It is the king's will that all should become Catholics and that the recalcitrant should be forced to do so by force. If they now prayed that they were ready to lay down their lives for the king, but that they could not accept the Roman Catholic faith against their conscience, then the dragoons moved in; into individual noble houses up to a hundred men; occupied all the entrances and shouted with the sword in their fist: “Die, or become Catholic!”
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Continued and concluded in Part 2 - - - - - - - - - - - - -
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