Huguenots

[Tamrin]

Huguenots

[Article by John Cannon, The Oxford Companion to British History, 2002,
via www.encyclopedia.com (emphasis added) - Linked Above]

Huguenots, a term of uncertain origin, were French-speaking (and some Walloon-speaking) protestants of Calvinistic temper, who fled from two centuries of persecution to seek asylum and freedom of worship in countries more sympathetic to Reformation practices. After the St Bartholomew's Day massacre (1572), the first wave of refugees to Britain were received at already established French churches in London, Canterbury, and Norwich, but hopes that their exile would be short soon faded. Relative quiet in France lasted only until 1661, when there commenced a steady erosion of privileges, culminating in the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685), after which the trickle of emigrés became a flood, then a torrent. Some 40,000–50,000 Huguenots are estimated to have settled in England, the majority in London (those associated with the silk trade around Spitalfields, professional families in Leicester Fields/Soho) but other communities in East Anglia, the south/south-west, and at Edinburgh; 10,000 are estimated to have settled in Ireland.

A distinct minority element, but deriving much support from their close-knit communities and their faith, they proved highly-motivated, productive, and a considerable economic asset to their new host nation, though sympathetic acceptance was not universal, since their craft innovations and competition were sometimes resented. Involvement in clothing and textiles (especially silks), luxury trades like goldsmithing, watchmaking, glassware, and cabinetry, and the introduction of white paper were complemented by professional expertise in law, banking and insurance, education, and the armed forces, and contributions to the arts and sciences, and freemasonry. Integration and assimilation generally took several generations, though a few refugees migrated on to America. Today only one French church remains in London, but Huguenot names such as Courtauld and Olivier are familiar to all, and Huguenot descendants retain great respect for their forebears.

[Tamrin]

Fortress of the Soul:
Violence, Metaphysics, and Material Life
in the Huguenots' New World, 1517-1751 (Early America)
by Neil Kamil

[Synopsis - Powell's Books (emphasis added) - Linked Above]

French Huguenots made enormous contributions to the life and culture of colonial New York during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Huguenot craftsmen were the city's most successful artisans, turning out unrivaled works of furniture which were distinguished by unique designs and arcane details. More than just decorative flourishes, however, the visual language employed by Huguenot artisans reflected a distinct belief system shaped during the religious wars of sixteenth-century France.

In Fortress of the Soul, historian Neil Kamil traces the Huguenots' journey to New York from the Aunis-Saintonge region of southwestern France. There, in the sixteenth century, artisans had created a subterranean culture of clandestine workshops and meeting places inspired by the teachings of Bernard Palissy, a potter, alchemist, and philosopher who rejected the communal, militaristic ideology of the Huguenot majority which was centered in the walled city of La Rochelle. Palissy and his followers instead embraced a more fluid, portable, and discrete religious identity that encouraged members to practice their beliefs in secret while living safely — even prospering — as artisans in hostile communities. And when these artisans first fled France for England and Holland, then left Europe for America, they carried with them both their skills and their doctrine of artisanal security.

Drawing on significant archival research and fresh interpretations of Huguenot material culture, Kamil offers an exhaustive and sophisticated study of the complex worldview of the Huguenot community. From the function of sacred violence and alchemy in the visual language of Huguenot artisans, to the impact among Protestants everywhere of the destruction of La Rochelle in 1628, to the ways in which New York's Huguenots interacted with each other and with other communities of religious dissenters and refugees, Fortress of the Soul brilliantly places American colonial history and material life firmly within the larger context of the early modern Atlantic world.

"Secret Assembly, 1685"

[Tamrin]

A further review of the same book. With the following comments in mind, consider the disproportionate number of Huguenots (including Desaguliers) and other Calvinists (including Anderson) involved with the premier grand lodge when the trigradal system was introduced.

Craft Secrets Religiously Kept:
Neil Kamil’s Fortress of the Soul

[Excerpts - Review by Mary Henninger-Voss -
Technology and Culture (emphasis added) - Linked Above]

It is through intensive examination of material artifacts that Kamil builds out the artisanal networks that created them and reconstructs the mental, spiritual worldview they were meant to convey. At the outset, Kamil claims that “Material things were silent extensions of an entire cosmos of Huguenot artisanal discourse, mediating, like the refugees themselves, among different Protestant groups, as well as vis-à-vis their intractable enemies” (p. xix). Palissy’s pottery, Hogarth’s art, Long Island furniture: all have been seen in terms of their popularity as commodities, but all are connected to Huguenot communities and a sinuous aesthetic that according to Kamil must be followed through winding paths. Kamil takes his readers on just such winding journeys. He traces Palissian figures to “rustic” motifs, alchemical symbology, and Jean de Léry’s history of Brazil; he connects the signs of a Hogarth painting to Huguenot artisans in London, Robert Fludd’s magical arts, and popular stories of biblical characters; he draws the similarities between the front stretcher of a chair turned in Long Island, the architecture of a French Protestant church, and the printer’s device in a Protestant reader.

Kamil argues that these sinuous connections are necessary to a community that learned to dissimulate in order to avoid assimilation, or even annihilation. If safety for Huguenots was to be found in dissimulation, assimilation in appearance only, then resistance and identity could be maintained by alternative modes of apprehending appearances. The cosmic significance of a platter or an armchair would be clear to co-religionists, if not to the average consumer—or for that matter to the average historian.

It is perhaps Kamil’s use of the alchemical tradition that will raise the most concern on the part of historians of science and technology. Fortress is not about alchemy. Rather it uses alchemical literature as a kind of Rosetta stone that decodes meanings lying in the shadows of Huguenot artifacts. However, Kamil draws a very straight, almost unmediated line between Renaissance Neoplatonism, Paracelsian alchemy, and Robert Fludd’s work (on the one hand), and his reading of a large variety of Protestant artisanal experience and production (on the other). In its bold connections among texts, events, and objects, Fortress is reminiscent of the work of Dame Frances Yates, which in fact Kamil employs unproblematically. For Kamil, interest in Paracelsian alchemy leads not to questions of epistemology or approach to nature (questions we are now so comfortable with), but rather to the deciphering of a covert language of spirituality and politics (a project with a checkered past). His use of alchemical literature as a code for political and millenarian Protestant hopes will no doubt raise flags...

Many will object to specifics of Kamil’s interpretation, perhaps even to his underlying insistence that an alchemical-German spiritual-Neoplatonic worldview holds the key to the meanings embedded secretively into Huguenot arts. However, all this will only point up the core assumption of this work: true power is found in the control over meaning, and, as successive administrative authorities found, “private messages could not be controlled” (p. 921). Kamil has made it his herculean task to discover and make public a great number of the private and collective messages from the Huguenot past; he draws them into a compelling story of survival and hope among a community torn by violence and persecution.

[Tamrin]

The Huguenot Role in Industrial England

[Excerpts - Paper by Bernard Boucher, www.bearne.com - Linked Above]

The Huguenot Diaspora of the 16^th and 17^th centuries disposed France of many thousands of her most skilled and creative citizens, together with her best soldiers and sailors. Two million Huguenot Protestants fled their native France following ongoing religious wars and persecution over two centuries. They left in two waves, the first beginning in 1535 as they sought refuge in the non-Catholic nations of Europe — including the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Scandinavia and Russia — and as far abroad as Canada, Ireland and Africa

In general, the Huguenots who left France were of a superior type, many of them belonging to the nobility and more coming from the highly skilled artisan class. For this reason French culture and artistic ability have been scattered through the world.

Some 50,000 refugees fled to England where their unprecedented manufacturing skills, passed on to their descendents, were a major contributor to Britain’s industrial revolution of the 18^th and 19^th centuries.

A fresh wave of some 80,000 French manufacturers and workers arrived in Britain following the Revocation by King Louis XIV in 1685 of the Edict of Nantes which had given religious freedom to the Huguenots since 1598. The new refugees introduced industries such as paper making, silk making, tanning, furniture making and silver smithing, and England was converted from an importer to an exporter of a wide range of products, including velvets, satins, silks, taffetas, laces, gloves, buttons, serge cloth, beaver and felt hats, linen, ironware, cutlery, feathers, fans, girdles, pins, needles, combs, soap, vinegar and many more items manufactured by her new Huguenot citizens. Some 400 Huguenot families who settled in Scotland helped to establish the Scottish weaving trade.

Huguenot artisans were noted for their propensity to zealously guard the secrets of their trade, passing them on only to the next generation of their family.

[Tamrin]

The Huguenots
their faith, history, and impact

[Excerpt - Article by Dorothea Scarborough, The Reformation Society - Linked Above]

The Huguenots were French Protestants who, if one counts their forerunners the Waldensians, were persecuted with varying intensity for five or 6 centuries right up to the coming of Napoleon. Their forerunners, the Waldensians, arose in the 12th century and were led by Peter Waldo, a rich merchant of Lyons who, at a time when the Holy Scriptures were a closed book, declared the Bible to be the only rule of faith and life, and used lay preachers to proclaim the Gospel. The Waldensians did not believe in the doctrine of purgatory, and they rejected prayers and masses for the dead. Eventually they (together with the Manichean Albigenses) grew so numerous that they became a threat to the very existence of the Roman Catholic Church. They were declared heretics and fearfully persecuted by the Inquisition and the armies of Pope Innocent III. It is said that for twenty years "blood flowed like water." As a result, the fairest provinces of Southern France were turned into a wilderness, and their cities into ruins. The Albigenses were rooted out, and the Waldensians who survived were later integrated with the Huguenots.

The Huguenot Cross

[Tamrin]

Cross of the Order of the Holy Spirit
colloquoially known as the Cordon Bleu Cross
because of the blue ribbon from which it hung.
Based on the Maltese Cross and being itself
the basis for the Huguenot Cross (previous)




Mar Thoma Sleeba
a.k.a the Cross of St. Thomas
Persian Cross or Nasrani Menorah
(note dove at top)

[Tamrin]

Les Huguenots

[Tamrin]

Huguenot

[Excerpt - Article, Art & Popular Culture - Linked Above]

In the 16th and 17th centuries, the name Huguenot was applied to a member of the Protestant Reformed Church of France, historically known as the French Calvinists. They were a French counterculture avant la lettre. Used originally as a term of derision which the Huguenots took up as a badge of honour, the derivation of the name Huguenot remains uncertain. The origin of Huguenot beliefs (and perhaps of some of the Huguenots themselves) lies among the Cathars in the medieval past of the eastern Mediterranean.

Toulouse, Occitanian or Cathar Cross

Also of interest in this context:

The Cathars awaited a Messiah who would be the son of a widow; like Parzival. One of their symbols was the dove, which according to Wolfram was the bird that brought a wafer to the Grail on each Good Friday. It is also said that they believed in reincarnation, and that through good works one could obtain redemption from sins committed in a previous life.

[Tamrin]

"The Huguenot Pope"

[Excerpt - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - Linked Above]

Philippe de Mornay (November 5, 1549 – November 11, 1623), seigneur du Plessis Marly, usually known as Du-Plessis-Mornay or Mornay Du Plessis, was a French Protestant writer and member of the Monarchomaques ("killer of kings").

He was born in Buhy, now situated in Val-d'Oise. His mother had leanings toward Protestantism, but his father tried to counteract her influence by sending him to the Collège de Lisieux at Paris. On his father's death in 1559, however, the family formally adopted the reformed faith. Mornay studied law and jurisprudence at the University of Heidelberg in 1565 and the following year Hebrew and German at the University of Padua. On the outbreak of the second religious war in 1567, he joined the army of Condé, but a fall from his horse prevented him from taking an active part in the campaign. His career as Huguenot apologist began in 1571 with the work Dissertation sur l'Église visible, and as a diplomat in 1572 when he undertook a confidential mission for Admiral de Coligny to William the Silent, Prince of Orange.

He escaped the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre by the aid of a Catholic friend, and took refuge in England. Returning to France towards the end of 1573, he participated during the next two years with various success in the campaigns of Henry IV of France, then King of Navarre only. He was taken prisoner by the Duke of Guise on the October 10, 1575, but ransomed for a small sum. Shortly afterwards he married Charlotte Arbaleste at Sedan. Mornay was gradually recognized as Henry's right-hand man, representing him in England from 1577 to 1578 and again in 1580, and in the Low Countries 1581-1582. With the death of the Duke of Alençon-Anjou in 1584, by which Henry was brought within sight of the throne of France, the period of Mornay's greatest political activity began, and after the death of the Prince of Condé in 1588 his influence became so great that he was popularly styled the "Huguenot pope". He was present at the siege of Dieppe, fought at Ivry, and was at the siege of Rouen in 1591-92, until sent on a mission to the court of Queen Elizabeth. He was bitterly disappointed by Henry IV's abjuration of Protestantism in 1593, and gradually withdrew from the court, devoting himself to the Academy of Saumur, which had a distinguished history until its suppression by Louis XIV in 1683.

Philippe de Mornay

[Tamrin]

Aug 30, 2009 12:16:44 GMT 10 Tamrin said:

Philippe de Mornay (November 5, 1549 – November 11, 1623), seigneur du Plessis Marly, usually known as Du-Plessis-Mornay or Mornay Du Plessis...

In the context of the family's Protestant conversion leading to de Mornay studying Hebrew, we should consider how the Calvinists placed much emphasis in translating the Biblical texts from the original languages. Perhaps we should also consider how he was known as Philippe Du-Plessis-Mornay, when Phillipe de Plessis was the name of the thirteenth Grand Master of the Knights Templar, who held office at the very height of their power in Europe.

Coat of Arms of Phillipe de Plessis

Some references say Huguenots were colloquially called Templars: Both groups having been persecuted by the Catholic Church and the French Crown, the latter group may have felt some affinity with the former, there may even have been some familial connections (as there had been with a number of French Templars and Cathar families).

Any further information would be greatly appreciated.