War of the Camisards
1704 uprising of Protestant peasants in France
The War of the Camisards (French: guerre des Camisards) or the Cévennes War (French: guerre des Cévennes) was an uprising of Protestant peasants known as Camisards in the Cévennes and Languedoc during the reign of Louis XIV. The uprising was a response to the Edict of Fontainebleau in 1685.
Background
The war in the Cévennes originated from the edict of Fontainebleau, signed by King Louis XIV on October 18, 1685. The law revoked the edict of Nantes, which had granted religious freedom and civil rights to the country's Protestant minority. The edict of Fontaineblue banned Protestantism from the country. In the provinces which the largest Protestant (or Huguenot) minorities, Huguenots were converted by force to Catholicism in what is now known as the dragonnades, which took place in the Cévennes as early as 1683. This persecution was strongest in Poitou, Guyenne, the Dauphiné, and Languedoc, where reformist ideas took root from 1530 to 1560. Many Huguenots decided to flee the country, while others opted to practice their faith in secret. "New Converts" (or NC) were employed by the French monarchy to monitor and suppress the Protestant faith.
Since late October 1685, Huguenots held "desert assemblies" in an attempt to continue following their religion, but countermeasures against Protestants strengthened since authorities used fines, sequestrated properties, military force, and took hostages as punishments. Reconversion to Protestantism was treated as a significant crime.
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This entry incorporates text from “War of the Camisards” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.