Louis XIII was only eight years old when his father, King Henry IV, was stabbed to death. His mother was Henry’s second wife, Marie de’ Medici, and she served as regent until her son came of age. At that point their relationship soured, and Louis sent his mother into exile at Blois in 1617, after which she tried to raise several rebellions against him. Louis came to rely instead on his most trusted minister, the ruthless Cardinal Richelieu (known to many as the famous villain from Alexandre Dumas’s Three Musketeers). One of the principal aims of these two pious Catholics was reversing the progress made by Protestants in France, and in particular eliminating the Huguenot places de sûreté (safe havens) established under the Edict of Nantes, which Louis saw as constituting an unacceptable state within a state. This revived anti-Protestant campaign generated new Huguenot rebellions in the 1620s. La Rochelle, then the strongest Huguenot safe haven and one of France’s most important Atlantic ports, was the main center of resistance—a status captured in the city’s motto, belle et rebelle (“beautiful and rebellious”).
In 1627, royal forces besieged La Rochelle, starving the inhabitants and preventing foreign powers from coming to their aid. After fourteen months, with only a few thousand inhabitants left alive, the city was forced to surrender. It was a critical moment not only for French Huguenots, who were then stripped of their territorial and political rights, but for the French monarchy, which was advancing ever further toward absolutist control over all French territory. During the seventeenth century, as religious repression continued under both Louis XIII and his son Louis XIV, several hundred thousand Huguenots fled France for Protestant states in Europe or for the American colonies. Many ended up in New Amsterdam (now New York City) and journeyed up the Hudson River to found the town of La Nouvelle-Rochelle, or New Rochelle.
Despite their near eradication in France, the Huguenots contributed some interesting gastronomic legacies. A key Protestant criticism of the Catholic Church was that it was fundamentally hypocritical and corrupt, and food turned out to be a good way of illustrating this point. The Church had dozens of fast days each year, but as we have seen, monks and clergymen nevertheless found a thousand ways to eat well on those days. The Church also sold dispensations that allowed well-off people to eat as they liked. In Normandy, for example, already famous for its delicious dairy products, many local people purchased dispensations so that they could continue to eat butter during Lent, which was normally forbidden. The so-called Butter Tower of the Rouen Cathedral, a High Gothic masterpiece immortalized in a series of Claude Monet paintings, was financed largely with butter dispensations from local Normans. Those who could not afford dispensations had to use expensive or ill-tasting cooking oils instead, which fostered considerable resentment (except in southern France, where olive oil was traditionally used anyway).
But Protestants believed there was no point in having fast days, especially when so many people got around the restrictions. Martin Luther himself railed against the dairy dispensations, arguing in 1520 that
fasts should be matters of liberty, and all sorts of food made free, as the Gospel makes them. For at Rome they themselves laugh at the fasts, making us foreigners eat the oil with which they would not grease their shoes, and afterwards selling us liberty to eat butter and all sorts of other things . . . it is no longer easy to preach about this liberty because the common people take such great offense, thinking it a greater sin to eat butter than to lie, to swear, or even to live unchastely.1
Protestants believed that people should be allowed to eat anything, at any time, although in moderation, remembering that the purpose of eating was sustenance, not pleasure.
Fasting rules were already unevenly applied across Europe, and so when millions of Protestants started abandoning them altogether, it is not surprising that some of the least popular ones—like the restrictions on butter—faded entirely, and from the sixteenth century onward, butter became a more prominent ingredient in French cooking. Today, France is the largest consumer of butter in the world, which can hardly be surprising to anyone who has wandered into a proper French patisserie or boulangerie.2
As the Reformation continued to spread, and the uniform dietary rules of the Church receded, it became easier for the national cuisines of Europe to diversify. But in Catholic stalwarts like France, a number of Church rules, like the prohibition of meat on fast days, proved resilient. After Louis XIV finally revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685, the eating of forbidden foods was a sure marker of religious deviance. Protestants no longer enjoyed any religious freedoms and were forced to choose between conversion, prison, enslavement, or exile. Some Huguenots chose to keep practicing their faith in secret, but they had to be careful not to reveal themselves by disobeying Catholic fasting rules. It would have been madness, for example, to eat oeufs à la Huguenote (eggs cooked in mutton juice) on a fast day.
But perhaps the most interesting Huguenot food legend has to do with the last gasp of Protestant rebellion in France, in the early 1700s. Royal troops had been dispatched throughout the provinces to eradicate every last heretic holdout. In what became known as the dragonnades, royal soldiers (dragoons) were forcibly lodged in Huguenot towns and homes, horribly mistreating the residents until they converted or fled. It was a very successful strategy, as many towns surrendered even before the dragoons arrived.
But some Huguenots, while seemingly converted, continued to worship in secret, even when royal administrators arrested and executed those they discovered. In the Cévennes, a mountainous and remote Protestant region in the always independent-minded Languedoc, resentment ran high against the local Catholic enforcer, Father du Chaila. His murder in 1702 was the catalyst for a rebellion among local peasants and craftsmen. They became known as the Camisards, and they successfully exploited their superior knowledge of the terrain and the support of the local population to sustain a Protestant insurgency against the crown for two years.3 Never numbering more than a few thousand fighters, they used traditional rural guerrilla tactics, like ambushes and raids, against more than twenty thousand royal troops and militiamen. Lay preachers and prophets provided them with spiritual motivation, casting their struggle as a sacred mission to restore free worship.
As in most holy wars, both sides committed terrible atrocities. Whole villages were massacred or shipped off to royal prisons. In the fall of 1703, royal forces commenced the Burning of the Cévennes, determined to eradicate the rebellion by destroying the population that supported it (a brutal counterinsurgency approach still tragically employed today). More than 450 villages were destroyed, their residents either killed or forcibly displaced (some were even deported to Canada). It was a somewhat counterproductive move, however, as many locals then joined the Camisards.
But eventually, the crown prevailed. The Camisards were defeated or induced to surrender, and the rebellion faded away. New attempts to rouse the population continued in subsequent years but failed to take hold. Royal authority had been definitively established. The Cévennes was forced to submit to Catholic observance until the late eighteenth century, when the signing of the royal Edict of Toleration and the subsequent French Revolution granted new freedoms to non-Catholics (this period between the revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the revolution was later dubbed le Désert, the Desert). Today, the region is once again mostly Protestant, a rarity in modern France.
A popular belief in the Cévennes is that the Camisards would never have been able to fight the royal troops for so long if it had not been for the chestnut tree, which grows all over the region. Chestnut trees are a fabulous resource and grow well in the terraced mountainsides of the Cévennes. Each tree can provide up to seventy thousand calories of food per year, with little maintenance required.4 Chestnuts (châtaignes) are very nutritious, rich in both vitamins and starch, and can be dried and preserved for off-season use. You can make a very filling chestnut porridge or a dark bread from chestnut flour or simply eat them roasted. Their leaves can also serve as fodder for sheep or goats. Medieval monks helped establish the first orchards in the Cévennes, and for centuries the trees provided the hardy locals with a considerable degree of self-sufficiency. It was said that the Cévennes never experienced famine, not even in the worst eras of food scarcity. As long as they had their chestnut orchards, their vegetable gardens, and their flocks of sheep and goats, they needed little from the outside world. So some point to the chestnut trees as an ingredient in the famous independent streak of the Cévennes people.
More prosaically, the chestnut trees became a very useful food resource for the Camisard fighters. It is easy to romanticize rebellion, with its idealistic aims and dashing fighters, but in reality, it is mundane things like food that often determine a rebellion’s fate. As a nineteenth-century general later explained, in reference to Corsica, another great producer of chestnuts: “You want to subdue the Corsicans? Cut down the chestnut trees!”5
Today, the Cévennes is still one of the main chestnut-producing areas of France. Chestnuts are sold grilled in markets all over the country in the fall and winter, and they are particularly well loved at Christmastime. They are also a classic accompaniment to a number of holiday dishes, such as roast turkey and brussels sprouts. Marrons glacés, or candied chestnuts, are a specialty from southern France (marrons are a type of larger chestnut, particularly popular in confectionary). Unfortunately, chestnuts are rarely eaten at other times of the year, and over time they have gained a reputation as stodgy peasant food. The Cévennes has also been subject to the same rural depopulation as many other parts of France. So it is not too surprising that chestnut production has gradually gone down, from five hundred thousand tons per year in the late nineteenth century to only nine thousand tons today.6
A sublime description of the chestnut trees comes courtesy of Robert Louis Stevenson, the author of Treasure Island, who in 1878 spent two weeks traipsing through the Cévennes on a donkey in a fruitless effort to forget a lost love (happily, they later reunited and married). He related his adventures in the book Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes, in which he included this description of the chestnut trees:
I wish I could convey a notion of the growth of these noble trees; of how they strike out boughs like the oak, and trail sprays of drooping foliage like the willow; of how they stand on upright fluted columns like the pillars of a church; or like the olive, from the most shattered bole can put out smooth and youthful shoots, and begin a new life upon the ruins of the old.7
Robert Louis Stevenson recounted his lovelorn wanderings in the Cévennes in one of his earliest works, Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes. His hiking route can be retraced as the Stevenson Trail today. Frontispiece etching by Walter Crane, from the 1907 edition (London: Chatto & Windus).
Today, the Cévennes remains a relatively unexplored corner of France, but it is easy enough to follow in the author’s footsteps on the Stevenson Trail, tracing ancient footpaths through the rugged hills, river valleys, and tiny villages so little changed since the time of the Camisards themselves. As in Cathar country, the distant history of rebellion and tragedy lies close to the surface in the region, a proud element of local tradition. It is another indication that the question of what it means to be “French” is not as straightforward as some may wish to believe.