From New Babylon to Eden: The Huguenots and Their Migration to Colonial South Carolina.

From New Babylon to Eden: The Huguenots and Their Migration to Colonial South Carolina. By Bertrand Van Ruymbeke. The Carolina Lowcountry and the Atlantic World. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, c. 2006. Pp. xviii, 396. $49.95, ISBN 1-57003-583-0.)

The French Huguenots, at heart, remain a conundrum. Some two hundred thousand of these Calvinists fled France after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, with a small number of them coming to America. Yet, despite a deep religious faith and the searing experience of a forced exodus, these migrants assimilated fairly quickly into a British-dominated society, with many abandoning the church they had fought to protect in Catholic France.

Several modern scholars have attempted to solve this puzzle, most notably Jon Butler in his seminal 1985 book, The Huguenots in America: A Refugee People in New World Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1985). Bertrand Van Ruymbeke is the latest historian to revisit the Huguenot story, but with two twists. From New Babylon to Eden: The Huguenots and Their Migration to Colonial South Carolina narrows the focus to a case study of the French refugee community in South Carolina, and it argues that the Huguenots did not really assimilate as quickly as believed.

Van Ruymbeke's book describes the marginalization that Huguenots faced in their native France, their migration to England and South Carolina, and their "eventual" integration into the religious, political, and social fabric of this southern colony. The book's title is not only rich in biblical imagery. It also gives a nod to the historiographical debates of the past thirty years. "The terms 'New Babylon' and 'Eden,'" Van Ruymbeke writes, "purposely refer to a simplistic dichotomy that contrasts an oppressive France to a paradisiacal Carolina.... However, the book paradoxically argues that France was not for every refugee the hated and feared New Babylon and that Carolina was deceivingly Eden-like" (p. xv). Eight chapters flesh out this theme. The author describes Huguenot life in France, the Huguenots' persecution at the hands of a Catholic king, their migration to South Carolina, and their adaptation to a new land.

He deftly places the South Carolina story in its wider context, following a well-researched chapter on developments in Catholic France with one on the aggressive efforts of South Carolina proprietors to recruit these French Protestants for their new colony. Despite the proprietors' campaign, the migrants' numbers were tiny. Some fifty thousand Huguenots fled to England in the late seventeenth century, but only six hundred of these refugees pushed on to South Carolina between 1680 and 1700.

Van Ruymbeke disputes the long-held belief that the Huguenots assimilated rapidly into South Carolina society. Although this finding is in line with Paula Wheeler Carlo's recent case study of a northern colony, Huguenot Refugees in Colonial New York: Becoming American in the Hudson Valley (Brighton, Eng., and Portland, 2005), it is not particularly persuasive. For one, his evidence seems to show that these French Protestants did assimilate fairly rapidly after arriving in South Carolina. The migrants quickly purchased land, acquired slaves, dropped plans to follow Old World trades, and conformed to the Anglican Church. A deeper problem is that the author never defines assimilation and identity. Historians of ethnicity and immigration have long distinguished between such troublesome concepts as "structural assimilation," "pluralism," and "acculturation." These terms become even more troublesome when applied to ethnic religious groups like the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians and German-speaking Moravians. For many groups, religion was an integral part of their ethnic identity. Because he fails to define these terms, Van Ruymbeke labors to prove that the Huguenots "assimilated" only slowly in the New World. He is at his best showing the complexity of the Huguenots' decision to conform to the Anglican Church. But he neglects to examine such standard markers of assimilation as the persistence of native language and the evolution of marital and baptismal practices, and he can offer only educated guesses on exogamy rates because of weaknesses in primary sources.

Van Ruymbeke chose to do a case study for a tiny group in a colony with major gaps in the historical record. Missing records were troublesome on several levels. It made it difficult to answer just how fast the Huguenots assimilated. It made it hard to capture the flavor of a local community--the raison d'etre for a case study (Van Ruymbeke's flat writing in places did not help matters). And it left the author to lament in the epilogue, "After more than a decade of research and writing on the subject, I still do not have definitive answers [on why the Huguenots were so important to the colony], only possible explanations" (p. 221). The reader may well share his frustration.

S. SCOTT ROHRER

Arlington, Virginia