The Making of a Hero

It's always staggering when I go back and realize that the Huguenots were persecuted in France until only ten years before the American Revolution! While men were blazing trails in my home country and recovering from the French and Indian War, brave men still sat chained to the galleys of France in groups of six, not even allowed to lie down to sleep for years on end merely for refusing to attend Mass or for daring to read the New Testament.

The Protestants were hung, tortured, robbed, killed, and enslaved for matters of conscience for well over two hundred years. For longer than the USA has been a nation. There was a break in the 1600s, but it wasn't the sort of religious freedom we expect now.

Languedoc in particular was so “infested” that a general in the early 1700s posited “to destroy every town and village in Languedoc, and reduce the whole province to a desert, in order to exterminate the Camisards.” (P. 48) Before wiser counsel prevailed, 466 villages and hamlets “were reduced to mere heaps of blackened ruins.”

We don't want to recall history like this when we talk about human rights, do we?

Anyway, this is the story of Antoine Court, one of the Huguenots in the 1700s.