History of the Calvinists of the Cévennes.

— The war undertaken by Louis XIV against the Calvinists, or Tremblers of the Cévennes is, beyond any shadow of a doubt, one of the saddest and most moving episodes in the history of France. It is perhaps less remarkable from the purely military point of view, repeating the atrocities so common in wars of religion, than for the innumerable cases of spontaneous somnambulism, ecstasy, second sight, predictions, and other phenomena of the same kind, which occurred throughout the whole course of that unhappy crusade. These facts, which were then considered supernatural, sustained the courage of the Calvinists, hunted down in the mountains like wild beasts, while at the same time causing them to be regarded as possessed by the devil by some, and as illuminated by others. Having been one of the causes that provoked and fed the persecution, they play a principal and not an accessory role. But how could the historians appreciate them, when at the time they lacked all the elements necessary to enlighten themselves as to the nature of their reality? They could only distort them and present them in a false light. Only the new knowledge furnished by magnetism and Spiritism could shed light on the question. Now, since one cannot speak truthfully about what one does not understand, or about what one has an interest in concealing, this knowledge was as necessary for a complete work on the subject, free of prejudices, to be done, as Geology and Astronomy were for commenting on Genesis.

By demonstrating the true cause of these phenomena, by proving that they do not depart from the natural order, this knowledge restored to them their true character. Thus they provide the key to phenomena of the same kind that occurred in many other circumstances, and allow the possible to be separated from exaggeration, from legend.

Joining to the talent of a writer and to the knowledge of a historian a serious and practical study of Spiritism and of magnetism, Mr. Bonnemère finds himself in the best conditions to treat with full knowledge of the cause and with impartiality the object he has undertaken. The Spiritist idea has once more contributed to works of fantasy, but it is the first time that Spiritism figures by name and as an element of verification in a serious historical work. It is thus that, little by little, it takes its position in the world, and that the predictions of the Spirits are fulfilled. Mr. Bonnemère's work will only appear between the 5th and 10th of February, but since some proofs were shown to us, we have extracted from them the following passages, which we have the satisfaction of being able to reproduce in advance. We have, however, suppressed the notes indicating the supporting documents. We shall add that it distinguishes itself from works on the same subject by new documents, which had not yet been published in France, so that it may be considered the most complete.

Thus, it recommends itself by more than one title to the attention of our readers, who will be able to judge it by the fragments below:

— “The world has never seen anything resembling this war of the Cévennes. My God! men and demons joined their forces; bodies and Spirits entered into struggle and, in a manner very different from that of the Old Testament, the prophets led to the combats the warriors, who themselves seemed dazzled beyond the ordinary conditions of life.

“The sceptics and the scoffers find it easier to deny; Science, confounded, fears to compromise itself, turns away its eyes, and refuses to pronounce. But, as there are no historical facts more incontestable than these, nor any that have been attested by so great a number of witnesses, mockery and mere denial can no longer be admitted. It was before the serious English people that the depositions were juridically collected, in the most solemn forms, dictated by refugee Protestants, and they were published in London, in 1707, when the memory of all these things was still alive in everyone's recollection and the denials could have crushed them under their number, had they been false. “We wish to speak of the Sacred Theatre of the Cévennes, or Account of the various marvels newly worked in this part of Languedoc, from which we are going to make extensive quotations.

“The strange phenomena referred to therein did not seek, in order to occur, either shadow or mystery; they manifested themselves before the intendants, the generals, the bishops, as before the ignorant and the poor in spirit. Anyone who wished and was able could witness them and study them, had he so desired.

“I have seen of this kind, Villars wrote to Chamillard, on the 25th of September 1704, things which I would never have believed, had they not taken place before my eyes: an entire town, whose women all seemed possessed by the devil. They trembled and prophesied publicly in the streets. I had twenty of the worst arrested, one of whom had the audacity to tremble and prophesy in front of me. I arrested her as an example and had the others confined in the hospitals.

“Such procedures were common in the time of Louis XIV, and to have a poor woman arrested because an unknown force constrained her to say, before a Marshal of France, things that did not please him, was a way of acting that revolted no one, so simple and natural was it and so much in keeping with the habits of the time. Today, one must have courage to confront the difficulty and to seek solutions less brutal and more conclusive.

“We do not believe in the marvelous, nor in miracles. We are therefore going to explain naturally, as best we can, this grave historical problem which, until now, has remained without solution. We are going to do so by aiding ourselves with the lights that magnetism and Spiritism today place at our disposal, without claiming to impose these beliefs on anyone.

“It is regrettable that we can devote only a few lines to that which, it is understood, would require a volume of developments. We shall say only, to reassure timid spirits, that this in no way clashes with Christian ideas; we need no other proof than these two verses of the Gospel of Saint Matthew:

“But when they deliver you up into the hands of the governors and of the kings, take no thought how or what you shall speak, for it shall be given you in that hour what to say;

“For it is not you who speak, it is the Spirit of your Father who speaks in you. (Matthew, 10:19 and 20.)

“We leave to the commentators the care of deciding what exactly is this Spirit of our Father, which, at certain moments, substitutes itself for our own, speaks in our stead, and inspires us. Perhaps it may be said that every generation which disappears is the father and mother of the one that succeeds it, and that the best among those who seem to exist no more, rising rapidly when freed from the fetters of the material body, come to occupy the organs of those of their children whom they judge worthy of serving as their interpreters, and who will one day pay dearly for the bad use they may have made of the precious faculties delegated to them. “Magnetism awakens, over-excites, and develops in certain somnambulists the instinct that Nature gave to all beings for their healing, and which our incomplete civilization has stifled in us, to replace it with the false lights of Science.

“The natural somnambulist puts his dream into action, that is all. He takes nothing from others, he can do nothing for them.

“The fluidic somnambulist, on the contrary, the one in whom the contact of the magnetizer's fluid provokes that bizarre state, feels himself imperiously tormented by the desire to relieve his brothers. He sees the ill, or comes to indicate the remedy for it.

“The inspired somnambulist, who may at times be, at the same time, fluidic, is the most richly endowed, and in him the inspiration keeps to the elevated spheres, when it manifests itself spontaneously. He alone is a revealer; in him alone resides progress, because he alone is the echo, the docile instrument of a Spirit different from his own, and more advanced.

“The fluid is a magnet that draws the beloved dead toward those who remain. It emanates abundantly from the inspired ones and goes to awaken the attention of the beings who departed first, and who are sympathetic to them. These, for their part, purified and enlightened by a better life, judge better and know better those primitive, honest, passive natures, which can serve as their intermediaries in the order of facts they judge useful to reveal to them.

“In the last century they were called ecstatics. Today they are mediums.

“Spiritism is the correspondence of souls among themselves. According to the adepts of this belief, an invisible being puts itself in communication with another, who enjoys a particular organization that renders him apt to receive the thoughts of those who have lived and to write them down, whether by an unconscious mechanical impulse imparted to the hand, or by direct transmission to the intelligence of the mediums.

“If, for a moment, one is willing to grant some belief to these ideas, it will be easily understood that the indignant souls of those martyrs, whom the great king immolated by the hundreds every day, came to protect the loved ones from whom they had been violently separated, sustained them, guided them, consoled them in the midst of their harsh trials, inspired them by their spirit, and that they announced to them beforehand — which happened many times — the dangers that threatened them.”

“Only a small number were truly inspired. The fluidic emanation that issued from them, as from certain superior and privileged beings, acted upon that profoundly disturbed multitude that surrounded them, but without being able to develop in most of them anything other than the gross and widely fallible phenomena of hallucination. Inspired and hallucinated, all laid claim to prophesying, but the latter emitted a quantity of errors, in the midst of which one could no longer discern the truths that the Spirit really breathed to the former. This mass of the hallucinated in turn reacted upon the inspired and cast disturbance into the midst of their manifestations… “The abbé Pluquet says that extraordinary aids and prodigies were necessary to sustain the faith of the dispersed remnants of Protestantism. They burst forth on all sides among the reformed, during the first four years that followed the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. There were heard in the air, in the vicinity of the places where temples had once stood, voices so perfectly resembling the singing of the psalms, just as the Protestants sing them, that they could not be taken for anything else. That melody was celestial and those angelic voices sang the psalms according to the version of Clément Marot and Théodore de Bèze. These voices were heard in Béarn, in the Cévennes, in Vassy, etc. Fugitive ministers were escorted by that divine psalmody, and even the trumpet only abandoned them after they had crossed the frontiers of the kingdom. Jurieu carefully gathered the witnesses of these marvels and concluded from them that “God, having made mouths in the midst of the air, was an indirect reproach that Providence made to the Protestants of France for having too easily kept silent.” He dared to predict that in 1689 Calvinism would be reestablished in France… “The Spirit of the Lord shall be with you, Jurieu had said; it shall speak through the mouth of children and of women, rather than abandon you.”

“It was more than enough to make the persecuted Protestants moved at seeing the women and the children begin to prophesy.

“A man maintained in his house, in a glassworks hidden at the top of the mountain of Peyrat, in the Dauphiné, a veritable school of prophecy. He was an old gentleman, named Du Serre, born in the village of Dieu-le-Fit. Here the origins are a little obscure. It is said that he had been initiated at Geneva, into the practices of a mysterious art, the secret of which was transmitted to a small number of persons. Gathering in his house some young men and young women, whose impressionable and nervous nature he had no doubt observed, he subjected them beforehand to austere fasts; he acted powerfully upon their imagination, stretched out his hands toward them, as though to impose upon them the Spirit of God, breathed upon their brows, and made them fall as if lifeless before him, eyes closed, asleep, the limbs rigid with catalepsy, insensible to pain, no longer seeing or hearing anything of what was going on around them, although they seemed to listen to interior voices that spoke to them, and to see splendid spectacles, whose marvels they recounted. For, in that bizarre state, they spoke, they wrote; then, returning to the ordinary state, they no longer remembered anything of what they had done, of what they had said, of what they had written. “Such is what Brueys recounts of these “little sleeping prophets,” as he calls them. Therein we find the processes, today well known, of magnetism, and whoever wishes may, in many circumstances, reproduce the miracles of the old gentleman glassmaker…

“In 1701 there was a new explosion of prophets. They rained down from heaven, sprang up from the earth, and, from the mountains of the Lozère to the coast of the Mediterranean, they were counted by the thousands. The Catholics had taken the children of the Calvinists: God made use of the children to protest against that prodigious iniquity. The government of the great king knew only violence. They arrested en masse, at random, these little prophets; they impiously flogged the smaller ones, they burned the soles of the feet of the larger ones. Nothing came of it, and there were more than three hundred of them in the prisons of Uzès, when the faculty of Montpellier received orders to betake itself to that city, in order to examine their condition. After mature reflections, the learned faculty declared them “stricken with fanaticism.” “This fine solution of official science, which even today could not say much more on the question, did not put an end to that overflowing wave of inspirations. Then Bâville published a decree (September 1701) to make the parents responsible for the fanaticism of their children.

“They quartered soldiers at will in the houses of all those who had not been able to turn their children away from this dangerous occupation and condemned them to arbitrary penalties. For this very reason, everything resounded with the laments and clamors of these unfortunate parents. The violence was carried so far that, in order to rid themselves of it, there were several persons who denounced their own children, or handed them over to the intendants and the magistrates, saying to them: “Here they are; we discharge ourselves of them; do you yourselves make them lose, if possible, the desire to prophesy.” “Vain efforts! They chained, they tortured the body, but the Spirit remained free and the prophets multiplied. In November, they removed more than two hundred from the Cévennes “whom they condemned to serve the king, some in his armies, others in the galleys.” (Court de Gébelin). There were capital executions, which did not spare even the women. In Montpellier they hanged a prophetess of the Vivarais, because blood came out of her eyes and nose, which she called tears of blood, and she wept for the misfortunes of her coreligionists, the crimes of Rome and of the papists… “A muffled irritation, a wave of anger long contained, burst forth in every breast at the end of these twenty years of intolerable iniquities. The patience of the victims did not exhaust the fury of the executioners. They thought, at last, of repelling force with force…

“It was, without doubt, says Brueys, a truly extraordinary and very novel spectacle; one saw men of war marching off to go and fight little armies of prophets.” (Volume I, page 156.) [Histoire Du Fanatisme De Notre Tems, Volume 1 By David Augustin de Brueys - Google books.]

“A strange spectacle, indeed, because the most dangerous among these little prophets defended themselves with stones, taking refuge on inaccessible heights. But most of the time they sought only to defend their lives. When the troops advanced to attack them, they marched courageously against them, uttering loud cries: “Tartara! tartara! Back, Satan!” They said they believed that the word tartara, like an exorcism, must put the enemies to flight, that they themselves were invulnerable, or that they would resurrect at the end of three days, should they succumb in the fray. Their illusions did not last long at these various points, and soon they opposed to the Catholics weapons more effective. “In two encounters on the mountain of Chailaret, not far from Saint-Genieys, they killed several hundred, captured a good number, and the rest seemed to disperse. Bâville judged the captives, had some arrested, and sent the rest to the galleys; and as none of all this seemed to discourage the reformed in the least, they continued to seek out the assemblies in the wilderness, to slaughter without pity those who surrendered, without these yet thinking of opposing a serious resistance to their executioners. According to the deposition of a prophetess named Isabel Charras, recorded in the Sacred Theatre of the Cévennes, these unfortunate voluntary martyrs gave themselves up, having been warned beforehand by the revelations of the ecstatics, of the fate that awaited them. Therein one reads: “The man called Jean Héraut, of our neighborhood, and, with him, four or five of his children, had inspirations. The two youngest were, one seven years old, the other five and a half, when they received the gift; I saw them many times in their ecstasies. Another neighbor of ours, named Marliant, also had two sons and three daughters in the same state. The eldest was married. Being about eight months pregnant, she went to an assembly, in the company of her brothers and sisters, taking with her her little son of seven years. There she was massacred along with the said boy, one of the brothers, and one of the sisters. The brother who was not killed was wounded, but recovered, and the youngest of the sisters was left for dead, beneath the massacred bodies, without having been wounded. The other sister, still alive, was carried to the house of her parents, but died of her wounds, a few days later. I was not at the assembly, but I saw the spectacle of these dead and these wounded. “What is most remarkable is that all these martyrs had been warned by the Spirit of what was to happen to them. They had told it to their father, taking leave of him and receiving his blessing, on the evening when they left home to go to the assembly, which was to take place the following night. When the father saw all these lamentable misfortunes, he did not succumb to his grief, but, on the contrary, said with pious resignation: “The Lord gave them to me, the Lord has taken them from me; blessed be the name of the Lord.” It was from the brother, the son-in-law, the two wounded sons, and the whole family that I learned that all this had been foretold.” Eugène Bonnemère.

Allan Kardec.

Paris. — Imp. Rouge frères, Dunon et Fresné, rue du Four-Saint-Germain, 43.

[1] 1 vol. in-12, 3 fr. 50; by post: 4 fr. Paris, Décembre-Alonnier, lib. [Histoire des Camisards - Google books. — Les dragonnades: Histoire des Camisards - Google Books.]

[2]

ERRATUM. — February issue of 1869, p. 63, line 32, read: they opposed to the Catholics weapons…

(Translator's note: These corrections were made in the proper places.

If we give the erratum it is out of fidelity to the text.) [March issue.]

[3]

ERRATUM. — Same issue, p. 64, lines 16 and following, read: and the youngest of the sisters was left for dead, beneath the massacred bodies, without having been wounded. The other sister, still alive, was carried to the house of her father, but died of her wounds, a few days later. [Idem.]

[4] [see Eugène Bonnemère.]