Camisard Rebellion

When Louis the Fourteenth revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685, he withdrew the legal toleration French Protestants, the Huguenots, had held for nearly a century, and the mountainous Cevennes region of southern France, one of the last strongly Protestant areas left in the kingdom, was subjected to forced conversions and to dragonnades, the practice of quartering royal troops in Protestant households until their occupants submitted. Resentment simmered for years under a Catholic clergy many Cevenols regarded as an occupying presence, and it broke into open revolt in July 1702, when a band of Protestant villagers killed the Abbe du Chayla, an abbot notorious locally for imprisoning and torturing Huguenots who had continued worshipping in secret.

What followed was two years of guerrilla warfare fought by peasant bands who called themselves Camisards, from the white shirts some wore in night raids, under popular leaders including the baker's apprentice Jean Cavalier and the shepherd Pierre Laporte, known as Roland. Though never numbering more than a few thousand fighters, the Camisards tied down some twenty five thousand royal troops under two marshals of France before Cavalier negotiated a surrender in May 1704. Roland fought on and was killed in an ambush that August, and scattered resistance continued for several more years before the rebellion was fully suppressed.

The Camisard revolt was directed as much by prophecy as by military command. In the years before the fighting began, a wave of religious enthusiasm swept the Cevennes: lay men and women, forbidden their own pastors under the Revocation, began preaching at clandestine gatherings while in trance states they and their listeners described as possession by the Holy Spirit, punctuated by convulsions, glossolalia and predictions of the coming end of Catholic persecution. Abraham Mazel, a shepherd who became one of the movement's central prophets, was among the first whose visions were credited with foretelling the uprising itself, and prophetic utterance continued to shape the rebellion once fighting began.

Camisard commanders including Jean Cavalier and Roland regularly consulted these prophets before major operations, and raids and ambushes were in several documented instances organized and timed on a prophet's direct instruction rather than by conventional military planning. This fusion of charismatic religious authority with guerrilla command gave the rebellion a character distinct from other Huguenot resistance elsewhere in France, and it left a lasting mark on French Protestant memory: the Camisards' prophetic worship is widely regarded by historians as an ancestor of the ecstatic and charismatic currents that later appeared within Protestant revival movements well beyond the Cevennes.