The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes

OCT 18 1685 · 12:00

Louis XIV signing the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, 18 October 1685. Place: Château de Fontainebleau, France Figures: Louis XIV, signing the Edict of Fontainebleau · Michel Le Tellier, chancellor, drafting the text on his deathbed · Madame de Maintenon, the king's secret wife · the Huguenot consistories, suddenly illegal Eighty-Seven Years of Toleration, Revoked Henri IV signed the Edict of Nantes in 1598, ending the French Wars of Religion by granting Protestants the right to worship in specified places, hold office, and garrison fortified towns. The compromise had been corroded for decades: the fortified places lost under Richelieu, public worship narrowed under Mazarin, the dragonnades of 1681 (forced billeting of dragoons in Huguenot households) producing nominal conversions by the tens of thousands. On 18 October 1685, at Fontainebleau, Louis XIV signs the revocation. Protestant churches are to be demolished. Protestant schools are closed. Pastors have fifteen days to leave the kingdom; ordinary Huguenots are forbidden to follow them on pain of the galleys for men and imprisonment for women. The king's preamble announces that the original edict is no longer necessary because there are, effectively, no Protestants left in France. The statement is performative: it becomes true by being declared. The Cost of Total Sovereignty Within a few years roughly 200,000 Huguenots emigrate, in defiance of the law, to England, the United Provinces, Brandenburg-Prussia, Switzerland, and the American colonies. They are weavers, watchmakers, printers, naval officers, financiers. Brandenburg's Great Elector issues the Edict of Potsdam within a fortnight, offering tax exemptions and travel costs; Berlin's textile and luxury trades are reconstituted around the new arrivals. France's losses are concrete and lasting. The silk industry of Tours and Lyon contracts. Naval shipbuilding loses key technicians. The Bank of England, founded in 1694, is staffed disproportionately by Huguenot refugees and their descendants. The first major demonstration of post-Westphalian absolutism produces also the first major demonstration of its price: sovereign reach over the private confession of subjects is technically possible, and economically punitive on a century-long horizon. Other rulers (William III, the Great Elector, later Joseph II) draw the corresponding lesson.