It would be impossible for me to cover every historical detail about the Huguenots in one post, so I’ll give a bare bones overview and a chronology of events which we may need to round back to and expand upon at a later date.
Huguenots are, generally speaking, any French Protestants who were persecuted for practicing their faith in 16th and 17th century France. (1) In 1519, German reformer Martin Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith and his ideas about emphasizing the importance of Scripture had reached Paris. The protestant belief system, aided by the popularity of French humanist philosophy, led to the spread of Calvinism among the population. Calvin’s belief was that Catholic masses were blasphemy since he saw communion not as a sacrifice but as a memorial service.
Many wealthier French nobles took to the Protestant faith and joined John Calvin in exile in Geneva. Robert J. Knecht, the author of Essential Histories: The French Religious Wars 1562-98, writes:
In the towns, Protestantism began appealing to the lower orders of society, particularly the artisans…Protestantism appealed to virtually all social strata and to a wide variety of occupations.
By 1559 we see an official gathering in Paris, considered the first Protestant national synod, where a ‘Confession of the Faith’ was endorsed. For those who are studying genealogy and are curious to know where the largest concentrations of Huguenots in France were, Knecht elaborates, “…the majority of Calvinist churches in France were south of the river Loire, in a broad sweep stretching from La Rochelle in the west to the foothills of the Alps in the east.” (2)
The most important question to ask is perhaps not how, but why the Protestant faith came into such bloody conflict with the Catholicism. The reasons are myriad, but I like Barbara Diefendorf’s explanation from her fantastically complex book Beneath the Cross: Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth-Century Paris:
We are used to viewing the wars of the early modern period as almost uniquely the affairs of princes and kings, but the religious wars were different. They had a resonance among the common people…They did not just affect people in material ways, in terms of higher taxes and devastated fields, but also appeared to threaten the very bases on which civil society was built…the doctrinal differences that separated Catholics and Huguenots were not perceived by the common people as abstruse scholarly debates but rather as crucial choices between truth and error…the religious war represented a crusade against heresy, a crusade that had to be won if civil society was to be preserved and salvation to be assured. (3)
This was the world which Jean deJarnat and others like him were born into and subsequently expelled from. Further study is needed to determine what Jean was leaving from more than what he was coming towards. After leaving France, did he go straight to England? Did he join William of Orange’s army in the Netherlands?
The following is a chronology of events that would have influenced the emigration of the Huguenots, some of which we will cover in later posts:
While there may never be concrete answers, drawing reasonable conclusions from existing sources and creating a coherent narrative is certainly not outside the realm of possibility. That is exactly what I will attempt to do over the next few months.
Sources
1.Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica, 2016. s.v “Huguenot | French Protestant.” Accessed September 6, 2016. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Huguenot.
2.Knecht, Robert Jean. The French Religious Wars: 1562-1598. Oxford: Osprey, 2002, 15-16.
3.Diefendorf, Barbara B. Beneath the Cross: Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth-century Paris. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991, 178.
4.Ruymbeke, Bertrand Van, and Randy J. Sparks. Memory and Identity: The Huguenots in France and the Atlantic Diaspora. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2003, xv.
Réformées in the New World 