ANDREW JAINCHILL
In 1685 Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, ending the religious toleration granted to France’s Calvinist minority in 1598 by his grandfather, Henri IV. The presence of France’s Calvinists, who comprised approximately 5 percent of the total French population and were known as Huguenots, was seen to constitute a challenge to the French monarchy’s traditional adage Une foi, une loi, un roi (One faith, one law, one king).1 As the monarchy increasingly claimed absolute sovereignty in the seventeenth century, the rights guaranteed to the Huguenots by the Edict of Nantes represented a glaring counterexample to the professed unity of the kingdom and the absolute rule of Louis XIV. Louis XIII had ended the Huguenots’ rights to maintain fortifications and garrisons, and even laid siege to the Huguenot stronghold of La Rochelle in 1628, but it was not until Louis XIV began intensive persecution of the Huguenots in 1680 and then revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685 that true confessional uniformity was attempted and nominally achieved. Public Calvinist worship was prohibited (although Calvinist belief was tolerated), children were ordered to be baptized, and pastors were commanded to leave the country. The laity was prohibited from leaving, but 150,000 to 200,000 Huguenots fled France (about a fifth of France’s Protestant population), seeking refuge primarily in the Dutch Republic, England, Prussia, and the Swiss cantons, but also in the central German lands, Scandinavia, and Russia. In fact, the Huguenot exiles in England and Holland gave “first circulation” to the term “refugees” as tens of thousands of them took up residence in London, Amsterdam, and Rotterdam.2 The diaspora created by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes soon stretched across the globe as the Huguenots spread themselves from the Hudson River valley to Suriname to South Africa.3 The Huguenots who spread out across Europe and the globe augmented existing international networks and established new ones, facilitating future geographical, financial, cultural, and intellectual mobility and communication.4 This global diaspora injected wealth, talent, and energy into its hosts, predominantly Protestant Europe and its overseas colonies, and conversely deprived France of those same resources.5 The revocation of the Edict of Nantes fundamentally altered early modern France, Europe, and Europe’s colonies.
The revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the creation of the Huguenot diaspora do not occupy the foundational place they once did in accounts of early modern France, displaced perhaps by the great attention paid in recent decades to the austere Augustinian Catholic movement known as Jansenism that was condemned by the papacy and persecuted by the French crown.6 An older historiographical tradition assigned the revocation of the Edict of Nantes a substantially more central role in the political drama of the day. Jules Michelet observed that “what the Revolution was to the eighteenth century, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes [and] the emigration of Protestants was to the seventeenth.”7 And Paul Hazard judged the revocation of the Edict of Nantes to be at the origins of the “crisis of European consciousness” that for him was the beginning of the Enlightenment itself.8 This chapter argues that such a perspective merits serious attention and that 1685 needs to be reinscribed into the story of the origins of the French Revolution, especially its long-term intellectual origins.9 Doing so necessarily trains the historian’s gaze beyond France’s borders.
The revocation of the Edict of Nantes fits into the narrative of the long-term origins of the French Revolution in numerous ways. On an abstract level, the very existence of the Huguenot diaspora served as a challenge to the sacral absolutism constructed by the French monarchy in the wake of the sixteenth-century Wars of Religion, in a manner similar to and accentuating that of Jansenism as described by Dale Van Kley. According to Van Kley, the fact that “the French monarchy reinvented itself as a religious as well as a political institution” made it “uniquely vulnerable…in the longer run” to religious challenges.10 The Huguenot diaspora constituted just such a challenge. In legal terms, France was unitarily Catholic from 1685 until the Edict of Toleration promulgated in January 1788. The presence of a substantial Huguenot population outside of France that claimed for itself a French identity, coupled with the remaining domestic Huguenot population, was a constant reminder of the fact that France was not unitarily Catholic, and thus contributed to the “desacralization” of the French monarchy.11 This challenge furthermore cut straight to the heart of the Bourbon monarchy’s legitimacy, which derived in part from its ability to resolve and transcend the religious conflict that had riven France in the sixteenth century. The revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the creation of the Huguenot diaspora thus played an integral role in the abstract “religious origins” of the French Revolution.
A more immediate manner by which the revocation of the Edict of Nantes contributed to the origins of the French Revolution was the fact that the Huguenot diaspora quickly became a Huguenot international bent on discrediting the French monarchy. Huguenot writers aimed to shape perceptions, especially English and Dutch perceptions, of France. Pierre Bayle, based in the Netherlands, chastised Louis XIV for cruelty, stupidity, and hypocrisy in Ce que c’est que la France toute catholique, sous le règne de Louis le Grand (1686), and Pierre Jurieu, also in the Netherlands, accused Louis XIV of tyranny in his Lettres pastorales (1686–88) and Soupirs de la France esclave, qui aspire après la liberté (1689).12 In addition, Louis XIV was repeatedly represented as determined to conquer all of Europe and establish a universal monarchy. Collectively, the writings of the Huguenot diaspora contributed mightily to anti-French sentiment throughout Europe, especially in Protestant Europe. Along with the fact of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes itself, Huguenot writers helped to crystallize Protestant Europe’s unified opposition to Louis XIV, which was then given further ammunition when French troops devastated the Palatinate during the War of the League of Augsburg (1688–97). The writings of the Huguenot diaspora likewise contributed to the beginnings of France’s “second Hundred Year War” (1689–1815) with England after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which was in no small part a Protestant revolution against James II’s Louis XIV–inspired Catholicizing monarchy. The wars that ensued dominated French foreign policy in the eighteenth century and took a devastating toll on France’s state finances, feeding the debt crisis that sparked the events of 1789. None of this is to say, of course, that the revocation of the Edict of Nantes played a direct causal role in these developments, only that it contributed in ways that might be easy to overlook, but that a more international vantage point suggests.
The Huguenot diaspora created by the Edict of Nantes furthermore played a transformative role in Europe’s intellectual life and helped set the stage for the Enlightenment.13 Taking advantage of the extraordinary publishing environment in the Dutch Republic—Dutch publishers churned out more books on a greater diversity of subjects and faced less censorship than any others in Europe—Huguenot exiles produced some of the most important works of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Most famously, Bayle founded the journal Nouvelles de la République des Lettres in 1684 before discontinuing it in 1687 in order to devote his full energies to the Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697), which directed withering skepticism and wit at seemingly every institution, belief, and custom in Europe and was later labeled “the Arsenal of the Enlightenment.”14 Jacques Bernard revived the Nouvelles de la République des Lettres and directed it successfully from 1699 to 1710 and 1716 to 1718. Jean Frederic Bernard’s fictional account of Persian visitors to Amsterdam in the Réflexions morales, satiriques et comiques sur les Moeurs de notre Siècle (1711) had a direct influence on Montesquieu’s landmark fictional account of Persian visitors to Paris, the Persian Letters.15 Jean Frederic Bernard and Bernard Picart’s Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde (1723–37) has recently been dubbed “the book that changed Europe.”16 And Paul de Rapin de Thoyras’s immensely successful Dissertation sur les Whigs et les Torys (1717) and Histoire d’Angleterre (1723–25), which will be discussed shortly, respectively introduced Continental Europeans to England’s seemingly bizarre political system and established the standard account of English history in both French and English (in translation) until David Hume’s History of England (1754–62).17 The combination of epistemological skepticism, political irreverence, and religious toleration on display in these works did much to foster the critical spirit that would provide the Enlightenment’s sense of itself. The Enlightenment commitment to religious tolerance in particular was powerfully informed by the Huguenot narrative of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes and its depiction of Louis XIV as cruel and myopic—“fanatical” in the lexicon of the Enlightenment—for provoking the emigration of over 150,000 “refugees” who then boosted the economies of France’s rivals.18
Finally, and more specifically, Huguenot writers based for the most part in the Dutch Republic bombarded France with political writings that aimed to delegitimize Louis XIV’s monarchy in the eyes of the French reading public and, at the same time, to mobilize positive principles taken from Dutch and especially English political life and thought. The most prominent, although not unanimous, principle among these writings was religious toleration.19 In addition, there was a strong, recurrent emphasis on the importance of mixed government in order to prevent despotism or tyranny. Crucially, the terms by which the Huguenot writers argued for the importance of mixed government reprised those of the early modern republican tradition. Early modern republicans looked to the ideal of a mixed and balanced constitution that placed the three classical political forms—monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, or one, the few, and the many—in a state of balance so that no one form could ever triumph over the others.20 The Huguenot writers championed this ideal largely through reference to the English constitution, with its balance among king, Lords, and Commons, and which was typically described in post-1688 England in precisely such terms—as a “mixed form of government, combining elements of rule by one, the few, and the many.”21 Such a constitutional arrangement was, of course, deeply antithetical to France’s absolute monarchy. The praise of England’s mixed and balanced government in the publications of the Huguenot diaspora amounted to a subversive political program that helped to revive the discourse of mixed government in France and thus to establish an alternative conception of sovereignty to that of the absolute monarchy.22
The discourse of mixed government took different forms in eighteenth-century France, from Montesquieu’s moderate, epoch-making Spirit of the Laws (1748) to Mably’s radical Observations sur les Romains (1751) and Observations sur l’histoire de la Grèce (1764) to Jean Louis Delolme’s Constitution de l’Angleterre (1771), which placed great weight on executive power and was later praised by John Adams as “the best defense of the political balance of three powers that ever was written.”23 Whatever their differences, such works and the discourse of mixed government more broadly posed a critical counterpoint to the absolute monarchy and contributed fundamentally to the intellectual origins of the French Revolution. Once the Revolution was under way, a version of mixed government, more monarchical and more mechanistic than that of the traditional ideal, was advocated by Mounier and the monarchiens.24 During the critical debates in late August and September 1789, the monarchiens succeeded in winning a suspensive veto for the king, but their efforts to establish a second legislative chamber were overwhelmingly defeated due to the traditional association of such a chamber with the aristocracy or nobility.25 As François Furet put it, establishing a senate or the like would have been symbolically tantamount to “repudiating” the accomplishments of the Revolution to that point.26 The principle of a mixed or balanced constitution was then signally rejected in favor of a more unitary conception of sovereignty when the republic was established in September 1792 and in the radical republicanism that triumphed between 1792 and 1794.27 It was, however, revived during the drafting of the Constitution of 1795, when the revolutionaries set out to rebuild the republic after the Terror.28 This trajectory highlights the perhaps paradoxical fact that in France the paramount constitutional ideal of the early modern republican tradition, the venerable tradition of mixed government, contributed to the origins of the French Revolution in the essentially negative sense of posing a critical alternative to absolute monarchy but disappeared at precisely the moment when France first declared itself a republic. The point here is that the Huguenot diaspora played a vital role in the revival of the discourse of mixed government in France and that Huguenot writings thus constituted an important element of the long-term intellectual origins of the French Revolution. Consideration of the writings of the Huguenot diaspora thus begins to cast a decidedly international light on the intellectual origins of the French Revolution due to the physical location of the Huguenot diaspora, their reliance on supranational publishing networks to disseminate their work, and the international character of early modern republicanism.
The story of the Huguenot diaspora’s transmission to France of the principle of mixed government as incarnated in the English constitution involved both the communication of republican values more broadly through the translation and presentation of key texts from the English republican tradition, and more specific explanations of the English political system. The effect of the former of these, the Huguenot diaspora’s translations and explanations of English republicans, was such that in the 1750s the marquis d’Argenson wrote in his journal of a “philosophical wind” blowing from England that carried “the words liberty and republicanism” and that would lead to a “revolution.”29 D’Argenson rightly identified the source of those notions and words as England, but the wind itself actually blew from Huguenot writers based predominantly in the Netherlands.30
The list of seminal works from the English republican tradition that were translated into French by Huguenot exiles is truly impressive. Collectively, it constituted a French-language library of English republicanism: Ludlow’s Memoirs (1699–1707), Algernon Sidney’s Discourses Concerning Government (1702), Toland’s An Account of the Courts of Prussia and Hanover (1706), Molesworth’s An Account of Denmark (1732), Bolingbroke’s A Dissertation upon Parties (1734), and Thomas Gordon’s commentary on Tacitus (1742) were all translated into French during the first half of the eighteenth century, each appearing with The Hague or Amsterdam as the place of publication. In addition, the Huguenot journals published in the Dutch Republic summarized, explained, and translated the writings of the great English republicans. The Nouvelles de la République des Lettres published in 1700 alone a three-part, eighty-two-page, chapter-by-chapter summary of Sidney’s Discourses and a twenty-page précis of the life and writings of James Harrington upon the publication of John Toland’s monumental edition of Harrington’s Oceana and other works.31 The journal praised Sidney for his “wisdom concerning all matters relating to government” and introduced Harrington as “a great republican” who “shows that monarchical government is not the most perfect and the most advantageous.”32 The journal then described Harrington’s proposed government as a mixture of three powers modeled on the three traditional forms of government, “a Government composed of a Senate that proposes, a People that deliberates, and a Magistrate that executes.”33 If the principle of balance were to be violated, the result would be tyranny, oligarchy, or anarchy. The editor of the Nouvelles de la République des Lettres at this moment was Jacques Bernard, a French Protestant minister who had fled France in 1683 and, reports Rachel Hammersley, “appears to have had a particular interest in the works of the English republican tradition.”34 Similar if less strident notes were sounded in the Histoire des ouvrages des savans between 1698 and 1702,35 and then in 1737 and 1740 by the Bibliothèque britannique, published in The Hague, when it reported on a reedition of Harrington’s Oceana and other Works and gave a lengthy introduction to Milton’s political writings.36 Both authors were celebrated as republicans, and the piece on Milton went out of its way to signal Sidney’s Discourses as the most important work on the right to depose monarchs.37
Sidney, who was the most vociferously antimonarchial writer of the English republican tradition, seems to have been the favorite of the Huguenot press. Peter Augustus Samson, a Huguenot living in The Hague, produced a full-length translation of Sidney’s Discourses Concerning Government in 1702 and stressed in his introduction to the text that Sidney taught the importance of the form of government for maintaining liberty. Sidney, Samson explained, “wanted to establish the rights of peoples, to show them that they are born free, that it depends on them to establish whichever form of government that they believe to be the most advantageous;…and that it depends absolutely on them to change the form of their government if they see that it is necessary to do so to maintain and strengthen their precious liberty.”38 The full importance of this statement by Samson—and its emphasis on the form of government—becomes all the more clear in light of Sidney’s analysis of forms of government in section 16 of the Discourses, titled “The best Governments of the World have been composed of Monarchy, Aristocracy, and Democracy.” In this section, Sidney explained that “there never was a good government in the world, that did not consist of the three simple species of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy.” All of history’s most successful governments, Sidney argued, had followed this model and “were composed of the three simple species.”39 The Huguenots’ efforts to introduce Sidney to French readers were successful enough that Sidney was widely read and discussed in France during the first half of the eighteenth century, more so even than John Locke (later, Sidney would be celebrated in the revolutionary festivals as a martyr for liberty).40 In fact, Sidney’s prominence was such that d’Argenson wrote in his journal of a project to refute the ideas of Sidney, since, as the marquis wrote, “it is the best piece that has been written against the power of a single individual. Reading this book, one becomes a republican.”41
In addition to providing both a home and printing presses, the Dutch Republic may also have provided a meeting ground for Huguenot writers and English Commonwealthmen or “Real Whigs.” John Toland, for example, spent considerable time in the Dutch Republic (and spoke fluent French) and was closely connected to the London-based Huguenot journalist Pierre Desmaizeaux, as was Thomas Gordon, whose discourses on Tacitus and Sallust were so important and were translated into French by the London-based Huguenot Pierre Daudé.42 In addition, radical or “real” Whigs from England traveled to the Dutch Republic in order to build an international Protestant alliance against Louis XIV’s territorial ambitions.43 It is important to remember in this context the longer-standing ties between English Whigs and the Dutch Republic: Shaftesbury and Locke among others were in exile there before the Glorious Revolution, which itself, of course, saw a Dutch army invade England.
It seems clear, then, that the Huguenot exiles worked to introduce the ideas of the great English republicans to France and that a healthy portion of these texts advocated the ideal of mixed government. It is of course impossible to discern the true influence of such texts, but they were known among France’s leading intellectuals, such as d’Argenson. The fact that the Huguenots did so much to introduce English republican ideas to France constitutes a historical irony of sorts. Before the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the Huguenots had long worked to shed the stigma of republicanism, and of subversion more generally, which had become attached to them due to the Huguenot political theorists of the Wars of Religion and to the presence nearby of the Calvinist republics of Geneva and the Dutch Republic. During the English Civil War and then the Fronde, for example, Huguenot political theorists went out of their way to advocate the most rigorous forms of absolutism.44 Once in exile, however, they bombarded the French reading public with the tenets of English republicanism, rendering earlier suspicions a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In addition to introducing the ideas of the English republicans to the French reading public, the writers of the Huguenot diaspora also aimed to introduce the English political system and constitution, especially its more republican features. In fact, these Huguenot writers played the central role in introducing the English constitution to French readers before the publication of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws. Their descriptions of the English constitution clearly echoed the early modern republican depiction of the “mixed constitution” and made the latter appear to French readers to be incarnated in a powerful, modern state that incorporated a republican conception of sovereignty within its monarchy. England appeared to be, as Montesquieu would famously quip, “a nation where the republic hides under the form of a monarchy.”45
The Huguenots’ analyses of the English constitution entered a larger French discussion about England at the end of the seventeenth century and during the first half of the eighteenth century. English history and the English political system were the objects of considerable curiosity at the time, with writers such as Pierre-Joseph d’Orléans and the abbé Raynal criticizing the English model, and others, most notably Voltaire and ultimately Montesquieu, celebrating it.46 Not only was England France’s neighbor and rival, but its political system represented the most important extant alternative to France’s absolute monarchy. It thus emerged as a privileged site of reflection precisely because of the radical contrast its political system and political life presented to those of France. England was strange and different, yet close enough to represent a real alternative in a way that few other places ever could. Representations of the English constitution were often distorted and even imaginary, but they fit into a developing French discussion about the nature of France’s political institutions, especially during the years after the long reign of Louis XIV.47 They served, in the words of the historian Edouard Tillet, “in the same capacity as antiquity, [or] the history of the Franks,…as a distorting mirror, the echo chamber for the aspirations and questions of an epoch.”48
Crucially, the terms used by the Huguenot writers to describe the English political system and constitution distinctly echoed those used to describe the classical form of the republic in the early modern period and thus helped to normalize or make real the ideal of the mixed and balanced republican constitution. For example, F.-M. Misson’s Mémoires et observations faîtes par un voyageur en Angleterre, published in The Hague in 1698, defined the English constitution as an “aristocratic-democratic-monarchical” government.49 Tillet, in his exhaustive study of the reception of the English constitution in France, writes that the Huguenot diaspora “gave new vigor to the old idea of the mixed regime. Far from being a historical chimera,…this ideal seemed to be realized” on the other side of the Channel.50
Just why the Huguenot writers celebrated the mixed and balanced English constitution is impossible to discern exactly, but there seem to have been several reasons. First and most obvious was the Huguenots’ experience with absolute monarchy: their repression under Louis XIV led many Huguenot writers, but not all it needs to be emphasized, to distrust absolute sovereignty and thus to advocate constitutional designs that aimed to fracture sovereignty. Second, Calvin had located authority in the entire church just as the conciliarists had located authority in the councils rather than in the papacy.51 And third, contact with radical Whigs in England and the Netherlands may have helped to push the Huguenots in that direction. Regardless of the reason, the Huguenot writers put forward a republican reading of the English political system. A version of the mixed constitution of classical antiquity was living and breathing across the Channel. Moreover, it seemed to guarantee religious liberty and a certain prosperity. Thus, more than the existing republics of Europe, the English political system helped to establish and to an extent even to normalize republican ideas about constitutions and political life as an alternative to absolute monarchy.
The most important Huguenot writer to explain the English political system to the French reading public was Paul de Rapin de Thoyras, who was, more generally, the most influential writer on the English political system during the first half of the eighteenth century. In a slim volume titled Dissertation sur les Whigs et les Torys published in The Hague in 1717, and then in a ten-volume Histoire d’Angleterre published from 1723 to 1725, also in The Hague, Rapin explained the curious political system of the English, both its current shape and its historical origins, to seemingly puzzled Continental Europeans.
Rapin was a Huguenot exile who settled in the French-language literary world of The Hague after an extended stay in England. After leaving France in 1686, he first went to London but then relocated to the Dutch Republic after finding his path blocked by the pro-Catholic programs instituted under James II. In the Netherlands, he joined a company of French refugee volunteers who served in William of Orange’s army that “invaded” England in 1688. Rapin fought in a number of battles and was shot in the shoulder in 1690 during the Irish campaign. He stayed in England for thirteen years after the Glorious Revolution, serving as governor to the son of the first Earl of Portland and frequently traveling with Portland. He then moved back to the Dutch Republic in 1701 and settled in The Hague, where he founded a literary club along the lines of Benjamin Furly’s famous The Lantern (in Rotterdam), and then relocated to the nearby Prussian territory of Wesel in 1707. Rapin devoted the rest of his life to writing about English history and the English political system, the most important results of which were the Dissertation sur les Whigs et les Torys and the Histoire d’Angleterre.52
Rapin’s accounts of the English government and English history were extraordinarily influential and almost single-handedly established the basic understanding that would prevail in France until Montesquieu’s celebrated description in 1748.53 His Dissertation went through ten French-language editions over the next hundred years and was translated into German, Dutch, Danish, Spanish, and English. The Histoire saw six editions printed over the next thirty years and immediate translation into English (followed by multiple English-language editions, including a schoolbook version that itself ran through twenty-four editions in the eighteenth century).54 The key to Rapin’s analysis of the English government was that it was “mixed.” He described it as “a unique type; today there is nothing similar in the rest of the World.” “It would be in vain,” he explained in the opening pages of his Dissertation, “to use the usual labels of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy for this government, none of which apply. It is a mixed government…composed of a mélange of the three [monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy].”55
Rapin’s analysis here employed the standard lexicon of the early modern republican constitution. In England, the three classical forms, incarnated in the king, Lords, and Commons, kept each other in check so that no one power could attain a preeminent position. Any attempt to upset this balance amounted to a violation of its “mixed government.” Rapin’s account of the English Civil War was thus critical of both royalists and republicans: James I and Charles I tried to extend their authority and overturn the system of balance, as did the Independents when they established a unitary republic.56 Only the Glorious Revolution of 1688 properly restored the ancient balance among the king, House of Lords, and House of Commons. Rapin’s history was thus very much a Whig history and has been credited by J. G. A. Pocock and Hugh Trevor-Roper with helping to establish the canonical form of the “Whig interpretation of history.”57 Crucially, the essence of the English government that Rapin described—and prescribed—was a political balance among England’s three traditional orders, one that both ensured the continued respect of each order’s rights and prevented the undue extension of those rights, and not a more modern juridical or technical separation and then balancing of governmental powers.58 Rapin’s analysis was heavily indebted to Thomas Smith’s De Republica Anglorum (1583), the sole source on English history that he cited other than documents and to which he referred readers who desired more information on the structure of the English government.59 Smith’s book had provided a partisan reading of the English constitution and has been identified by the historian Patrick Collinson as the key work of “quasi-republican modes of political reflection” in Elizabethan England.60 Rapin’s depiction of the English constitution thus followed the ideal constitutional arrangement of the early modern republican tradition, the “mixed” or “balanced” constitution celebrated by Polybius in his Histories. Even if Rapin himself did not use the term “republic” or invoke Polybius, such a reading of the English constitution easily led to inscribing it in the early modern republican tradition. D’Argenson, for example, in his influential Considérations sur le gouvernement ancien et présent de la France, penned in the mid-1730s, described the English system of government in virtually the same terms but placed it squarely within the classical tradition. In fact, he criticized the English for hewing too closely to the classical model, which was first established by Lycurgus in Lacedaemon.61
Rapin traced the unique character of the English government, specifically the fact that it was “mixed,” to the Anglo-Saxon conquest of Britain. When the German peoples overran the ruins of the Roman Empire, they carried their form of government throughout western Europe: the Anglo-Saxons carried it to England, the Francs to Gaul, the Visigoths to Spain, and the Ostrogoths and then the Lombards to Italy. Rapin characterized this “revolution” in government as “one of the most remarkable events in history.”62 The intervening centuries, however, saw the erosion of mixed government and the triumph of absolute monarchy throughout Europe. The English alone “have conserved the form of their government.”63 As Catherine Larrère has nicely put it, in Rapin’s narrative England “plays its ecological role as an island: it is the conservatory of extinct species.”64 Rapin furthermore claimed that the Saxons’ laws and customs were identical to those of the ancient Germans described by Tacitus in Germania.65 He thus located the deep origins of the English government among the ancient Germans, an argument that Sidney and a number of other radical Whigs had made in England and that Montesquieu would also adopt, and that mirrored François Hotman’s account in Francogallia of the ancient Germanic origins of Frankish political institutions. In all of these explanations European history contained an alternative tradition of government that predated the absolute monarchies dotting the contemporary political landscape.
Rapin’s emphasis on political balance also characterized his portrayal of England’s post-1688 settlement. The two sides of the seventeenth-century conflict morphed into England’s two great parties, the Whigs and the Tories. The key to England’s party system, Rapin argued, was that neither side triumphed and that both parties remained committed to preserving balance among the government’s constituent parts. What England needed, wrote Rapin, was to “leave the government on its ancient footing” and for “the People to remain divided…. If one of the parties were to acquire superiority over the other, it would be even worse for the public than the discord that follows from equality between them.”66 Thus, Rapin’s analysis of both England’s history and its contemporary politics emphasized the importance of political balance. The very fact of division as a positive phenomenon pointed in the exact opposite direction of the principles underpinning France’s monarchy. Jean Domat had signaled the unity or division of sovereignty as the essential distinction between monarchies and republics in Les Loix civiles dans leur ordre naturel (1689).67 Rapin’s analysis of England’s constitution and political life presented divided sovereignty as a real, functioning alternative. As a result, the historian Joseph Dedieu even credited Rapin, no doubt hyperbolically, with being “the true creator” of the parlementary “movement” in the eighteenth century.68 Even if Rapin denied that the English political system was republican, the terms of his analysis pointed in a republican direction and were easily assimilated to the mixed constitution of the early modern republican tradition. Rapin’s writings constituted the most influential introduction of the English political system to French readers in the first half of the eighteenth century and two of the most important texts in the broader introduction of the ideal of mixed government carried out by the Huguenot diaspora in the wake of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
The writings of the Huguenot diaspora thus helped lay the foundations for the revival of the discourse of mixed government in eighteenth-century France and need to be included in any narrative of the long-term intellectual origins of the French Revolution. At the same time, the subsequent generations of the Huguenot diaspora continued to play an occasional role in French political life. For example, the Gazette de Leyde, a long-standing Huguenot journal, functioned as “the opposition press” during the 1750s, reprinting parlementary remonstrances and adopting a pro-parlement and Jansenist line during the refusal-of-sacraments-controversy.69 Throughout the rest of the eighteenth century and into the Revolution, the Gazette remained arguably the most important newspaper of its day, with readers “scattered from Boston to Calcutta, from Glasgow to Constantinople.”70 Elizabeth Eisenstein describes it as “the journal of record that the best informed Frenchmen had to read” and notes that it “consistently upheld the benefits of constitutional ‘mixed’ governments.”71 In a parallel vein, the Amsterdam publisher Marc Michel Rey, also a descendant of Huguenots, published politically corrosive texts, such as the forbidden works of Voltaire, d’Holbach, and Rousseau, including Émile and the Social Contract, as well as a variety of anticlerical tracts.72 Even if the later generations of the Huguenot diaspora did not boast a Bayle or Rapin, they continued to play an important role in the development of French political and intellectual culture over the course of the eighteenth century.
The Huguenot diaspora created by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes was invited to return to France during the French Revolution. The National Assembly decreed equal civil status for Protestants in December 1789 (Louis XVI had decreed a much more limited Edict of Toleration in 1787) and then in December 1790 conferred citizenship on any member of the Huguenot diaspora who sought to return. “All persons who, born in foreign countries, descend in whatever degree from a Frenchman or Frenchwoman expatriated for religious reasons, are declared French natives [naturels français] and to possess the rights attached to this quality if they return to France, establish their place of residence, and give the civic oath.”73 In addition, restitution of property was promised. The exact number of Huguenots who took advantage of this legislation and “returned” to France is impossible to calculate, but it seems that their numbers were quite negligible and that the descendants of the original generation of émigrés had adopted the identities of their homelands and did not conceive of themselves as French in the manner of the original diaspora.
Among those who did choose to return were Benjamin Constant and Charles-Guillaume Théremin, both of whom “returned” in 1795 and played a central role in the development of French liberalism.74 Constant’s family had emigrated to Switzerland during the sixteenth-century Wars of Religion, not because of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, but the legislation applied to the descendants of anyone who “expatriated for religious reasons.” Théremin’s family had fled to Prussia following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Constant became an active politician and writer upon his arrival in France and is now remembered as a founding thinker of French liberalism. Théremin took up a position in the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and wrote a series of political pamphlets in which he outlined a vision of the international order with an expansionist France at its center, articulated a liberal political philosophy for the still new French republic, and advanced an important argument for extending political rights to women. Théremin openly announced his status as the descendant “of a Protestant who left France for religious reasons” in his tract De la Situation intérieure de la République (1797) and, two years before, upon his arrival in France, explained in a letter to Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès: “I descend from refugees from the time of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.”75 The full story of 1685 and the French Revolution thus includes the origins of French liberalism and the noteworthy fact that it emerged in no small part at the margins of French political culture in the works of the descendants of Huguenots.76
In conclusion, I would like to suggest that reinserting 1685 into the narrative of the origins of the French Revolution and even into the origins of French liberalism compels historians to look beyond France’s borders. The revocation of the Edict of Nantes was originally a specifically French event, but one rooted deeply in Europe-wide questions. The creation of a Huguenot diaspora that spanned the globe had important implications for the intellectual, religious, and economic lives of Britain, Prussia, and especially the Dutch Republic. The Huguenot diaspora then turned their pens against the French monarchy, directing withering criticism against Louis XIV and inundating the French reading public with antimonarchial and prorepublican writings. The result was the introduction to the French reading public of a number of key principles from the early modern republican tradition, especially its English variant. Foremost among these was the ideal of mixed government, which had occupied such a central place in the republican tradition and which presented such a radical contrast to France’s absolute monarchy. The transmission of this ideal helped lay the foundations for the broader revival of the discourse of mixed government in eighteenth-century France and contributed in a fundamental manner to the intellectual origins of the French Revolution by posing a critical alternative to absolute monarchy. It was then subsumed under progressively more unitary conceptions of sovereignty during the early years of the French Revolution before playing a constitutive role in the post-Terror Constitution of 1795. The story of the Huguenot diaspora’s transmission of the ideal of mixed government needs to be counted among the intellectual origins of the French Revolution.