THE LAST DISPERSION OF THE HUGUENOTS IN FRANCE.

Thames Star, Volume XII, Issue 3999, 22 October 1881, Page 1

THE LAST DISPERSION OF THE HUGUENOTS IN FRANCE.

For about two centuries, with but brief intervals, the Protestant inhabitants of France were subject to the most/bitter cruelties on the part of their rulrrs. The most notable event during.the firsts century of this reign of terror was the " massacre of St. Bartholomew, and the supreme agony of the second was' during the " JDragonades" which followed the revocation of the edict of Nantes'. Be* tween these two events there lay 113 years, but the Huguenots : had been per* secuted, massacred and^hunted 'down for more than a generation antecedent to St. Bartholomew, and they were persecuted, banished, and , sometimes, massacred for many years after the edict of recall issued by Louis XIV in 1685. Tbe protestant Church disappeared from F*»»ce as a visibly active organisation in fact, and a|l professors of the reformed faith were pro* secuted by law up to the.outbreak' of the French Revolution in 1789. The suppression of free thought was not more thorough in Spain than in France, and, although France was spared the horrible ourse of the Inquisition, the results of the brutal policy of persecution and its Bourbon tools were for a time, perhaps, more disastrous to the progress of the French people than to the wealth and power of Spain. One remarkable act in connection witqthe persecutions in France was the part taken at their worst periods by two women who, each in turn, exercised an overmastering influence upon the policy of the Govern* ment. The massacre of St. Bartholomew, was brought about chiefly by the, machinations of Catherine de Mediois, probably one of the basest women of ability that ever lived; and the revocation of theiediot of Henry of Navarre by Lottis XlV.y with the consequent ravages of his mitsiorutires bottes —as be culled his herds of Huguenot " converting " or murdering, dragoonswas . accomplished chiefly through the exertions of Madame ,De Maintenon, herself of Huguenot origin. Work more disastrous was never done in this world than these two women did, and to this day France, suffers incalculably by their, misdeeds. The best blood of a nation cannot be abed like water in wanton cruelty, its noblest intellects, its most industrious and intelligent citizens, cannot be banished or forced to dishonour themselves by abjuring all that they hold sacred at the price of life, and no ill effects follow. , France owes her bloody Revolution in modern

days, her frequent moral lapses, so t 0 gay, her materialism, and the singular perver•ion of her spiritual aspirations so frequently visible in her most brilliant literati in no small degree to the suppression -of Huguenots. Voltaire and the encyclopedists, Bousseau and Robespierre, were all the legitimate offspring of a policy by which air intellectual independence, as well as spiritual freedom, was sternly crushed and destroyed.—Spec* tator. - -