10

Jacques Roumain, ‘Défense de Paul Morand’, dans Œuvres complètes, éd. par Léon-François Hoffmann (Paris:
Éditions de l’Unesco, 2003), pp. 469 –71.
11
Jacques Roumain, ‘Notre Bulletin incriminé’, dans Œuvres complètes, p. 490.
12
Ibid.
13
Ibrahim [Jacques Roumain], ‘Mon Carnet, XIII’, Œuvres complètes, p. 558.
14
Ibid.
doi:10.1093/frebul/ktr018

WHO WERE THE CAMISARDS?

LIONEL LABORIE , University of East Anglia

Early modern scholars often tend to discuss the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes
(1685) and the subsequent Huguenot diaspora from a global perspective that leaves
aside regional specificities. Yet not all French Protestants abjured or deserted. Some in
fact resisted the religious persecution instigated by Louis XIV against his Reformed sub-
jects. A subgroup of Calvinist diehards known as the Camisards rebelled in the southern

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province of Languedoc, sparking the last French war of religion between 1702 and 1710.
While this significant religious episode has been extensively covered by francophone
historians, it remains virtually unknown to English-language historiography, despite
the considerable publicity it received across Europe at the time.1 This article examines
the identity of these Protestants in relation to the wider Huguenot diaspora that
frames them.
The Camisards were in many ways predisposed to fight religious persecution, for
Languedoc had a long history of dissent dating back to the Cathars in the twelfth
century. Although the Albigensian Crusade and the Inquisition eradicated Catharism
by the 1240s, Languedoc saw sporadic heresies and revolts over the following centuries,
and quickly became a Protestant haven at the Reformation.2 By the mid-sixteenth
century, the Cévennes mountain region in Lower Languedoc had massively converted
to Protestantism and erected temples in most towns. The area stood at the forefront
of the wars of religion and, despite the freedom of worship guaranteed by the Edict of
Nantes in 1598, remained a hotbed of discontent throughout the seventeenth
century. Even after 1700, the Cévenols continued to claim Cathar heritage, which
their Catholic opponents, from local administrators to Pope Clement XI, also
recognized.3
On a political level, the centralizing force of Louis XIII’s absolutist rule ended Langue-
doc’s autonomy and, under Cardinal Richelieu’s growing influence in the late 1610s,
rapidly eroded the terms of the Edict of Nantes. The Cévenols took up arms under
the leadership of Henri de Rohan (1574 – 1638) in 1620, but were severely defeated
and lost their safe havens at the peace of Alès in 1629.4 Under Louis XIV, further
decrees limiting the remaining rights and privileges of his Calvinist subjects followed
at a faster pace after 1661.5 The Sun King noted in his memoirs in 1666 that the
people of the Cévennes and neighbouring Vivarais were causing him many troubles.6
Louis originally believed in coercing Protestants into conversion by making
Catholicism a more advantageous religion. Fiscal and financial incentives nevertheless
failed, and a new armed rebellion initiated by Claude Brousson (1647 – 1698), a lawyer
defending the Reformed Churches before the Parliament of Toulouse, was crushed in
1683.7

54 [120]
 If the Crown’s coercive measures targeted Languedoc throughout the seventeenth
century, it was precisely because the people of the Cévennes occupied a peculiar place
among French Protestants. The Huguenots were, broadly speaking, a population of mer-
chants, craftsmen, bankers and professionals that had developed along the main trading
routes connecting Geneva to Béarn via Lyon and Montpellier. As such, they were gen-
erally better off, more educated and more mobile than the average Catholic of the time.
By contrast, the Cévenols were overwhelmingly poor, illiterate shepherds and peasants,
secluded half of the year from nearby towns by the winter snows. They lived in a
rugged environment of caves, forests and mountains only accessible by goat paths
and, therefore, could not relocate their capital and activities abroad as easily.8 Nicolas
Lamoignon de Bâville, Louis’s local intendant, ascribed their insurrectional propensity
to their geo-cultural isolation and insisted on the necessity of building roads to assert
the state’s authority in a territory he deemed entirely Calvinist:
Ces montagnes étoient impraticables et rien ne contribuoit tant à rendre ces gens-là mutins et séditieux;
en effet, il falloit un fort petit nombre d’hommes pour arrêter une armée entière. Ces travaux ont bien

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réussi et ont beaucoup facilité tout ce qu’il a fallu faire pour remettre ces peuples dans l’obéissance.9
The more their persecution intensified, the more apparent became the Cévenols’ attach-
ment to their land. Over 200,000 Huguenots fled France clandestinely in the twenty years
that followed the Revocation, but only 5% of the Cévenols (about 4000 in total) emi-
grated over the same period.10 Bâville began deporting them to Canada in 1686, when
it became clear that this plucky mountain population feared being uprooted more
than death.11
The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in October 1685 forced the Cévenols to unite
in order to preserve their identity as the dragonnades intensified. Early in 1686, they orga-
nized clandestine nocturnal assemblies to replace exiled ministers and preach to the
young generations of the ‘Désert’. Oral culture formed an integral part of the Cévenol
resistance, as did beliefs in martyrdom and miracles. Lower Languedoc became the
theatre of supernatural manifestations from 1689, when a pentecostal wave of ‘inspired’
children announcing the Fall of Rome and the Antichrist crossed the Rhône from
neighbouring Dauphiné and spread north of the Cévennes to the Vivarais. The Cévennes
remained inexplicably immune to this prophetic contagion until 1700 and stuck
to more orthodox Calvinist preaching despite hundreds of executions for illegal
worship.12
Whilst the Huguenots had increasingly distanced themselves from prophetic claims
over the seventeenth century, the Cévenols continued to read the political conjunctures
through a millenarian lens. They likened themselves to the Old Testament Jews trapped
in the tyrannical kingdom of Egypt. The sudden overthrow of Catholic James II from the
English throne by his Protestant nephew, William III of Orange, revived hopes for relief
in the Cévennes.13 The stadholder-king emerged as the champion of Protestantism and
his leading role in the War of the League of Augsburg (1688 – 97) was widely understood
in the ‘Désert’ as the ‘ruin of the Roman Antichristian Empire’, announced by the influ-
ential Calvinist theologian Pierre Jurieu ahead of Christ’s Second Coming.14
Anticipating their imminent relief, the Cévenols embraced martyrdom as a prerequisite
for the fulfilment of their destiny. Their leaders, François Vivens, a twenty-six-year-old
wool-carder, and Claude Brousson, the lawyer-turned-itinerant-preacher, exhorted
their followers to fight after gathering intelligence of an Anglo-Dutch expedition to the
Mediterranean coast. Only after Vivens was killed in 1692 did Brousson begin to

[120] 55
advocate pacific resistance in the Cévennes.15 The Peace of Rijswijk in 1697 suddenly
axed the Cévenols’ hopes for freedom and Brousson’s execution the following year
caused a severe blow to the entire Languedoc. With the Cévenols’ organization
decapitated, the resistance was temporarily stifled.
The beginning of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1701 coincided with a prophe-
tic outbreak in the Cévennes. Some 8000 ‘inspired’ Cévenols prophesied a French
collapse and the imminent Fall of Rome by a coalition of Protestant nations. This
time, however, the Cévenols took up arms under Abraham Mazel and sparked a
bloody civil war on 24 July 1702 with the murder of the abbé du Chaila (officially
known as the ‘archiprêtre des Cévennes’), a notorious Catholic persecutor.16 The auth-
orities acknowledged these rebels as a distinct subgroup of Huguenots by referring to
them as ‘Barbets’ after ‘an ugly and shaggy Kind of Dogs’.17 The ‘Barbets’ also
became known as ‘Osards’ or ‘Mécontents’, whilst recanted Huguenots were generally
called ‘nouveaux convertis’. The term ‘Camisards’ only appeared toward the end of
1702 in reference to the smocks the insurgents wore for mutual identification, and
finally prevailed in the spring of 1703.18 In this context, the Camisards emerged as the

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last diehards of the French Protestant cause in the Ancien Régime.
The Camisard uprising was not just a Huguenot rebellion, or even a jacquerie. It was a
prophetic war whose fighters adopted a strategy of guerrilla warfare under the alleged
guidance of the Holy Spirit. The Camisards operated as a ‘military theocracy’ whose
leaders were elected upon their level of inspiration on a scale of four: l’Avertissement, le
Souffle, la Prophétie and le Don.19 The greatest warriors, Roland, Cavalier and Castanet,
were therefore the greatest prophets, while Pierre Claris had received le Don, as evidenced
by his alleged immunity to fire.20 Miracles, prophecies and ecstatic trances thus formed
an integral part of the Camisard identity in a religious war that millenarians understood as
the harbinger of Armageddon.
By contrast, most Huguenots had abjured or fled in exile since the Revocation. If they
actively promoted the cause of their Cévenol coreligionists abroad, the last local Protes-
tant nobles distanced themselves from the Camisards’ prophetic war.21 Paradoxically,
Catholics and foreign governments believed for a long time that the uprising was led
by Protestant princes, as the Camisard leaders signed their names ‘Earl Roland’ and
‘Prince des Cévennes’ to disguise their modest origins.22 Unlike Rohan’s wars, the Cami-
sard rebellion remained a wholly popular movement, a peasant revolt for the restoration
of Calvinism in absolutist France. Although Cavalier signed the treaty of Nı̂mes with
Marshall de Villars in May 1704 to grant amnesty to the rebels, most Camisards contin-
ued to fight until extermination, when their last surviving leader, Abraham Mazel, was
executed in 1710.
Far from being a spontaneous revolt, the Camisard uprising marked in reality the cul-
mination of centuries of dissent and resistance confined by the topographical isolation of
the Cévennes. The remoteness of the ‘Désert’ also delineated the boundaries of the
Cévenol identity, a distinct Calvinist subculture of alleged Cathar descent among French
Protestants. Accordingly, historians should remain cautious not to consider the Huguenot
diaspora as a homogenous exodus at the expense of its regional, spiritual, socio-cultural
and even linguistic diversity. As the Huguenots converged upon refuge countries from
all parts of France, they merged with a minority of exiled Cévenols, but never witnessed
the supernatural manifestations of the ‘Désert’. These differences largely accounted for
their hostility toward the Camisards or ‘French Prophets’ in London, Rotterdam or
Halle, when the latter travelled across Europe between 1706 and 1715.23

56 [120]
 1
See for instance Philippe Joutard, La Légende des Camisards, une sensibilité au passé (Paris: Gallimard, 1977); Henri
Bosc, La Guerre des Cévennes 1702 –1710, 6 vols (Curandera: Presses du Languedoc, 1985 –93); Liliane Crété, Les Camisards
(Paris: Perrin, 1992), and Robert Sauzet, Les Cévennes catholiques: histoire d’une fidélité, XVI e – XX e Siècles (Paris: Perrin,
2002).
2
See Gordon Leff, ‘Cathari’ (1987), Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. by Lindsay Jones, 2nd edn, 14 vols (Basingstoke: Mac-
millan, 2005), Vol. III, pp. 1456 –8, and Emmanuel le Roy Ladurie, ‘Huguenots contre Papistes’, in Histoire du Languedoc,
ed. by Philippe Wolff (Toulouse: Privat, 1990), p. 318.
3
See Jean Cavalier, Memoirs of the Wars of the Cévennes (Dublin: John Carson, 1726), pp. xi– xii and p. 218, and the
anonymous Histoire des Camisards (London: Moı̈se Chastel, 1744), Vol. II, pp. 118 – 22. See also Crété, Les Camisards,
p. 31.
4
See Valérie Sottocasa, ‘Les Guerres de Rohan (1620 –1629) et la construction de l’identité cévenole’, Bulletin de la
Société de l’histoire du protestantisme français, 152:4 (2006), 625 –46.
5
See Herbert Lüthy, La Banque protestante en France, de la Révocation de l’Édit de Nantes à la Révolution, 2 vols (Paris:
S.E.V.P.E.N, 1959), Vol. I, p. 21.
6
See Œuvres de Louis XIV, ed. by Philippe-Henri de Grimoard and Philippe-Antoine Grouvelle (Paris and Stras-
bourg: Treuttel and Würtz, 1806), Vol. I, pp. 84 –9; Vol. II, pp. 239 – 41.
7
See Walter C. Utt and Brian Eugene Strayer, The Bellicose Dove: Claude Brousson and Protestant Resistance to Louis XIV,
1647 –1698 (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2003), pp. 20 –33.
8
See Crété, Les Camisards, pp. 27 –8, and Robin Gwynn, Huguenot Heritage: The History and Contribution of Huguenots in
Britain (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), pp. 3 and 17 –18.

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9
Nicholas Lamoignon de Bâville, Mémoires secrets de Lamoignon de Basville (Montpellier: Bureau d’abonnements des
chroniques du Languedoc, 1877), pp. 3a, 8a; also his Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du Languedoc (Amsterdam, 1734),
pp. 76– 9.
10
See Joutard, La Légende des Camisards, p. 25.
11
See Cavalier, Memoirs of the Wars, p. 4.
12
They prophesied in French, the holy language of the Geneva Bible, instead of their native dialect; see A Relation of
Several Hundreds of Children and others (of Dauphiné) That Prophesie and Preach in their Sleep (London: Richard Baldwin, 1689).
See also Joutard, La Légende des Camisards, pp. 26 –8.
13
See Cavalier, Memoirs of the Wars, pp. 21 –2.
14
See Pierre Jurieu, The Accomplishment of the Scripture Prophecies (London, 1687), p. 36.
15
See Crété, Les Camisards, pp. 42 –6.
16
See Mémoires inédits d’Abraham Mazel et d’Elie Marion sur la guerre des Cévennes 1701 – 1708, ed. by Charles Bost (Paris:
Fischbacher, 1931), pp. 3– 10. See also Crété, Les Camisards, pp. 62 –6.
17
See Cavalier, Memoirs of the Wars, p. 47.
18
See Maximilien Misson, Meslange de littérature historique & critique, sur tout ce qui regarde l’état extraordinaire des Cévennois,
appelez Camisards (London: Candide Alethir, 1707), p. 45. See also Crété, Les Camisards, pp. 94 –5.
19
See Joutard, La Légende des Camisards, pp. 35 –9, and Peyrat, Histoire des pasteurs du désert (Paris, 1842), Vol. I, pp. 266,
334.
20
See Maximilien Misson, Le Théâtre sacré des Cévennes (London: Robert Roger, 1707), pp. 51 –4 and 110 –15.
21
See W. Gregory Monahan, ‘Between Two Thieves: The Protestant Nobility and the War of the Camisards’, French
Historical Studies, 30:4 (2007), 544 –5, and Crété, Les Camisards, pp. 140 –4.
22
See Joutard, La Légende des Camisards, pp. 78 – 81, and Cavalier, Memoirs of the Wars, p. 236.
23
See Lionel Laborie, ‘The Huguenot Offensive against the Camisard Prophets in the English Refuge’, in The
Huguenots: France, Exile and Diaspora, ed. by Jane McKee and Randolph Vigne (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press,
forthcoming). See also Hillel Schwartz, The French Prophets: The History of a Millenarian Group in Eighteenth-Century
England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).
doi:10.1093/frebul/ktr017

‘JE DISAIS TOUT HAUT CE QUE BEAUCOUP PENSAIENT TOUT BAS!’1:

MARCEL CARNÉ, FILM CRITIC
BEN MCCANN , University of Adelaide

Marcel Carné is nowadays principally remembered as the director of Le Jour se lève (1939),
Les Enfants du paradis (1945), and twenty other meticulously crafted films that expressed
their doom-laden narratives in a precise, austere visual style.2 Yet there is another phase
of Carné’s career that remains neglected: his work as a film critic from the late 1920s and
early 1930s. In March 1929, Carné entered a competition organized by the monthly film

[120] 57