The Faith and Fortunes of France's Huguenots, 1600-1685. (Reviews).

Philip Benedict, The Faith and Fortunes of France's Huguenots, 1600-1685

St. Andrews Studies in Reformation History, 24. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001. xv + 336 pp. $94.95. ISBN: 0-7546-0225-7.

While a great deal has been published in both English and French in the last decade on the Reformation and Wars of Religion in the sixteenth century, there has been a relative dearth of materials on the fortunes of French Protestants between the Edict of Nantes in 1598 and its revocation by Louis XIV in 1685. Philip Benedict's collection of essays published here is thus a very welcome addition to the scholarly literature on the Huguenots in the seventeenth century. While eight of these ten essays have previously appeared in print elsewhere, the whole is definitely greater than the sum of its parts. And until someone tackles the almost impossible challenge of a broad, monographic overview of the Huguenots in the seventeenth century, Benedict's collection of essays is as close as we are likely to get to such a work.

The ten essays are all motivated by a single question: "How, and how profoundly, did being Calvinist in a preponderantly Catholic country shape their behaviour, outlook and experience [after 1598]?" (1). Although it is regrettable that there is no conclusion that addresses this large question explicitly and directly, if the reader is willing to do a minimal amount of work, Benedict provides a wealth of detailed and rich material upon which to construct such an answer. Indeed, it is the variety of source materials used, the author's innovative methodological approaches reverberating between social and cultural history, and the ultimate depth of research in archives across France that give these essays such credence and resonance. Unfortunately, the scope of a short review can do no more than hit the highlights of this volume.

One of Benedict's strengths is his understanding of the demographic history of the Huguenots in the seventeenth century. This research, originally published in 1991 and reproduced here without the supporting statistical data based on baptismal records, makes it clear that Protestant numbers did not decline significantly after 1598 as some earlier historians had suggested. In fact, although there were losses of maybe up to 25 percent between 1598 and 1685, "the overall impression that emerges is of a confessional community which successfully retained the attachment of a majority of its members" in these eight decades (119).

Another strength of this collection is Benedict's effort to test some of the older cliches about Calvinism with more rigorous evidence, and his analysis of the Weber thesis is a good example. The idea that there was an affinity between Calvinism and a dynamic pursuit of wealth was a commonplace even before the German sociologist Max Weber offered at the beginning of the twentieth century his famous explanation for why such a link existed. In two separate essays, Benedict offers a new look at this question in innovative ways. His examination of hundreds of marriage contracts in seventeenth-century Montpellier, for example, makes it clear that Huguenots in the city did tend to be wealthier than their Catholic counterparts in the city. He shows, however, that "contingent historical circumstances, not habits of behaviour stimulated by the devotional culture of Protestantism, produced the pattern of greater wealth per head observable among Montpellier's Huguenots in the seventeenth century" (149).

Benedict has also analyzed probate inventories to see what books and paintings French Huguenots owned in the city of Metz. The results shed a great deal of light on the religious culture of the period. Metz Protestants in the legal and medical professions tended to own more religious books and fewer books that focused on their profession than their Catholic counterparts. While Metz Protestants and Catholics tended to own a lot of religious paintings and portraits, most of the Huguenots' paintings tended to focus on the Old Testament, while Catholics' paintings tended to emphasis New Testament scenes: the Virgin Mary, the Christ child, the crucifixion, the saints, etc. Not surprisingly, portraits of the royal family, Cardinal Richelieu, or Metz's governors turned up much more frequently in Catholic households, since Catholics held most of the military and judicial offices whose holders were likely to own such portraits.

This brief survey comprises just a few highlights of this interesting and rewarding collection. It is thus too bad that the publisher has not priced it within the means of most interested scholars.