There are many reasons to leave your country. Examples would be better career opportunities, cheaper training or simply nicer people (high on the list for an Austrian). Unfortunately, as we all know, not all moves are voluntary. Not all people living abroad proudly call themselves expats, join English drama classes and hang out with their peers in Irish pubs. There is also the less popular sister term to the expat:the refugee. Today is about a group of refugees who have left their mark on Europe like no other. The Flight of the Huguenots.
What are Huguenots?
The Huguenots were something that is hard to imagine in France today:Protestants. Reformed. And the reason no one today associates Protestantism with France is, as one might expect, grisly. It all started out so wonderfully civilized. As is well known, it was in the year 1517 - the 500th anniversary may have caught your eye - when Martin Luther thundered his theses on the church door in Wittenberg. He probably wasn't quite aware of what he was supposed to do with it. Because his revolutionary ideas fell on surprisingly fertile ground, and not only in Germany. I mean, sure, there were a few whiners back then too. "How now? I should now also read the Bible myself?” is a phrase that you might have heard more often in the 1520s.
In any case, Luther was not unknown in France either. At that time there were already some big-headed philosophers in Paris. Erasmus of Rotterdam was there at the time, as was Jacques Lefèvre, who quickly began to grapple with Luther's ideas. Even the then French King Francis I was not averse to the idea. He had already got it in his head anyway to abuse the church as a quasi-substitute bureaucracy for the state. If this church should now get more independence from Rome, why should that bother dear Franz? Thus, reformatory ideas could quickly gain a foothold in France. Unfortunately, royal beliefs soon turned out to be quick to change.
What about the inquisition again? Nobody expects the...
The developments surrounding the Reformation got out of control faster than a G20 summit today. Martin Luther was excommunicated by the Pope in 1521. That would not have been a fundamental problem for King Franz, but the optics were not nice. Of course, the Catholic Church in France now expected its king to take action. And since this church, as I said, represented the only usable bureaucracy that Franz had in the country, he could not resist such demands forever. And well, it probably wasn't that important to him.
In any case, French Protestants, Huguenots and Reformed became more and more oppressed during the 1520s and finally escalated in the 1530s. After Protestants plastered several French towns with anti-Catholic posters in 1534 – yes, there were things like that back then – the keg was full. The following year, Franz founded the French Inquisition under the catchy name "Chambre ardente ", the "glowing chamber". Its members were big-headed as “the sleuths of the Lord” and as a result searched the whole country for “heretics” to teach them otherwise. How to do that. With torture and stuff.
In the course of these developments, John Calvin was also expelled from Paris, which turned out to be a rather mediocre move. As is well known, he went to Geneva and fueled the center of the Reformation that was developing there. Right at the gates of France! The result can be seen. Despite all the oppression, including the Inquisition, there were soon underground Protestant communities all over France. About 10% of the population of France should be reformed quickly.
Royal France goes to war against the Huguenots
The problem for King Francis and his son, later King Henry II, only increased over time. In the meantime, several nobles had also sided with the Huguenots. Open wars broke out between the two sides in some French countries. The persecution then reached a sad climax in 1572 on the so-called Bartholomäusnacht. In Paris, leading French Protestants were murdered by royal guards. During the night there were riots across the country and in the end tens of thousands of Huguenots were dead.
Smaller and larger skirmishes also followed in the next few years, until a truce was finally reached in 1598 with the Edict of Nantes. The Protestants were guaranteed full civil rights and religious tolerance, but at the same time Catholicism became France's state religion. It was basically just a ticking time bomb that none other than Louis XIV, the Sun King, was to detonate a little later.
After almost a century of relative peace, the French monarch's thirst for power was to triumph over reason after all. In 1685, Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes. By then the centralization of France had progressed so far that the Sun King could no longer seem to tolerate divisions like this. Or all that lead powder he smacked on his face at Versailles just went to his head. At least this theory cannot be dismissed out of hand.
And that's called the refugee crisis
Almost overnight, after the repeal of the Edict of Nantes, Protestantism in France became a criminal offense again. Anyone who openly presented themselves as a Huguenot had to reckon with imprisonment and expropriation. In some regions, the Protestant communities put up resistance, but this was crushed by Ludwig. The rest, who neither "converted" nor started an uprising, were at least dispossessed. And the result? The largest wave of refugees in modern Europe.
Around 200,000 Huguenots left their homeland at the end of the 17th century to move to neighboring Protestant countries. Most went to England, but Germany (particularly Berlin), Switzerland, the Netherlands and the North American colonies were also frequent destinations. And what did Ludwig get out of it? Not very much. The Huguenots were among the wealthiest and most educated classes in France. Her escape meant an unparalleled brain drain. Suddenly France was missing tens of thousands of skilled workers and exorbitant tax revenues. Extreme national debt and increasing economic inequality in the country would soon be the result. Unfortunately, it was not Louis XIV who paid the bill for this, but 100 years later his successor and namesake Louis XVI.
At the same time, the wave of Huguenot refugees from France was of great benefit to the rest of Europe. In the years that followed, the Huguenots and their descendants played a very important role in both Prussia and England. She and her expertise were involved in numerous technical and economic developments in the future, including the first steps towards industrialization. And if you look at the political, economic and military conditions in Europe 150 years later, you can also draw your own conclusions.
You can read about whether and what you should learn from this in this post, in which I deal with the often claimed repetition of history. See you in two weeks!