Camisards

Camisards, the insurgent Huguenots of the Cévennes, so called from the camise or blouse worn by the peasants. The revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV. in 1685 fired their zeal, which the employment of 'Dragonnades' (q.v.) to enforce the doctrines of the monks despatched as missionaries to the heretical district fanned to fanaticism; prophets and seers arose, who roused the people to a religious frenzy in which death was courted and torture was despised. At first their rage was directed against the tax-collectors, several of whom were murdered and their houses razed; but after an armed rising as early as 1689, a wider movement was brought on in 1702 by the cruelty of the Abbé du Chaila, who tracked out the retreats of the persecuted people, surprised them at worship, and hung some and imprisoned others. His murder gave the signal for a general insurrection; the Camisards' ranks swelled to thousands, and their mountain retreats enabled them to hold the royal forces at bay, while Louis' difficulties were increased by the commencement of the War of the Spanish Succession, and by the encouragement afforded to the insurgents by his enemies. Several detachments of soldiers had already been beaten back or cut off when in 1703 Marshal Montrevel was sent into the district at the head of 60,000 men. This man, once a Huguenot, now fiercely persecuted his former co-religionists; large numbers were shot down or executed, and 436 villages were destroyed. The Camisards retaliated with equal ferocity; in the diocese of Nîmes alone 84 priests were strangled, and some 200 churches burned down. The skill of their principal leader, Jean Cavalier (q.v.), his plan to pass into Dauphiné and unite with the Duke of Savoy, and the undoubted spread of the revolt, caused great anxiety; moreover, the burghers of Nîmes, Montpellier, Orange, &c., were in sympathy with the people and supplied them with all necessaries, and even cast the bells of the burned churches into cannon for them. In April 1704 Montrevel was superseded by Marshal Villars, who followed a wiser course; he promised a free pardon to all who might surrender, and released all prisoners who were willing to swear allegiance, while he had every person taken in arms shot on the spot, and broke up his army into flying columns, which scoured the country on all sides. One band after another submitted; on the 10th May Cavalier accepted the amnesty; and by the end of 1704 the zealots who persevered in the war had all been taken and shot. The severity of the Duke of Berwick, however, who succeeded Villars in 1705, occasioned a fresh outbreak; but this was put down in April of that year, the contest ter- minating in an entire desolation of the province, and the destruction or banishment of a great portion of the inhabitants. Many of these followed Cavalier into the service of the British in Spain, where most of them found a grave at Almansa, 25th April 1707. See Mrs Bray's Revolt of the Protestants of the Cévennes (1870).