Exile, Integration and European Perspectives: Huguenots in the Pays De Vaud*

CHAPTER NINE

EXILE, INTEGRATION AND EUROPEAN PERSPECTIVES: HUGUENOTS IN THE PAYS DE VAUD*

Vivienne Larminie

e Pays de Vaud, on the northern and eastern shores of Lake Geneva and on the east bank of the upper Rhône, might appear to have been the ideal land of exile for French Protestants.1 It was conveniently placed for Huguenots eeing their former strongholds in Languedoc and Dauphiné, yet protected by the Jura and the Alps. French-speaking yet Reformed, it was politically neutral and relatively free from the ckle favours of princes, with their unstable dynasties and shiing alli- ances. e front door-way to the Pays, the independent but vulnerable republic of Geneva at the western end of the lake, was of course a familiar destination as the training ground of their ministers; some families had established a bridgehead there early on through a son engaged in trade or banking. e back doorways, the mountain passes, provided well-trodden if hazardous escape routes in times of crisis. During the exoduses associated with the sixteenth century wars of religion and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV in 1685, many French Calvinists duly took these routes – but then trav- elled rapidly onwards.2 It has been estimated that, in the years around the revocation, about 200,000 of an estimated Reformed population of 850,000 opted to leave France. Between 1680 and 1700 just over half of this number – at

* e early stages of my research in Vaud (1996–1998), which underpin what fol- lows, were funded with assistance from the British Academy and from the Open University (where I was then an associate lecturer), for which I am most grateful. 1 e Pays became, with slight boundary adjustments, what is now the canton of Vaud when it joined the Confederation in 1803. 2 For an overview of the refuge, see: Le Refuge Huguenot en Suisse: Die Hugonotten in der Schweiz (Lausanne: Musée Historique de l’Ancien-Evêchê, 1985). See also: L. Gacond, ‘Bibliographie des Refugiés Huguenots en Suisse après la Révocation’, Revue Suisse d’Histoire 36 (1986), 368–91. 242 vivienne larminie least 450,000 – passed through the territories of the Swiss Confed eration.3 Protestant Bern, the largest and most powerful canton, bore the brunt of the traffic, followed by Zurich, its neighbour and rival for dominance. These city states of the northern plateau straddled the route to Germany and thence to the Netherlands, and for the vast majority of French emigrants they represented merely transit camps along the way. Only 6,000 at most made a permanent home on Swiss soil, most of them in Vaud, where they settled principally by the lake in Lausanne, Vevey and Morges, but also up the Rhône valley. The indis- pensable modern study of the statistics and structures of refuge in Vaud found that the number of refugees grew rapidly between 1685 and 1688, reaching a peak in 1690 and 1691. Little impact on figures was made by the so-called ‘Glorieuse Rentrée’ of 1689 which saw the return by Waldensian refugees in the Pays to their valleys in Piedmont, and these people (confusingly also termed ‘Vaudois’) were in any case a distinct religious community, Savoyard rather than French. On the other hand, the end of the war of the League of Augsburg in 1697 saw notable emigration of Huguenots to Germany and the Netherlands, but there was a renewed influx following further persecution in 1698, bringing numbers of refugees again up to about 9,000. More than half then moved on, but later crises like the revolt in the Cévennes again replenished the flow somewhat.4 Both economic and political pressures worked to limit severely permanent settlement in Switzerland. Agricultural productivity was barely sufficient to maintain the existing population and imports carried a heavy price of strategic dependency; industrial activity was very mod- est.5 This perhaps should not be exaggerated: even at the time observ- ers might detect defensive special pleading; and as one modern

3 M.–J. Ducommun and D. Quadroni, Le Refuge Protestant dans le Pays de Vaud (Fin XVIIe–début XVIIIe s.): Aspects d’une migration (Publications de l’Association Suisse pour l’Histoire du Refuge Huguenot, vol. 1/Bibliothèque Historique Vaudoise [hereafter BHV], vol. 1, Geneva: Droz, 1991), 11, 13. 4 ducommun and Quadroni, Le Refuge Protestant, chap. 2. 5 See e.g. F. de Capitani, ‘Vie et mort de l’ancien régime’, Nouvelle Histoire de la Suisse et des Suisses (Lausanne: Payot, 2nd edn. 1986), 423–39; R. Braun, Le Declin de l’Ancien Régime en Suisse: un tableau de l’histoire économique et sociale au 18e siècle (Paris: Editions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 1998); De l’Ours à la Cocarde: Ancien Régime et Révolution en Pays de Vaud, eds. F. Flouck, P.–R. Monbaron, M. Stubenvoll and D. Tosato-Rigo (Lausanne: Payot, 1998), parts 1 and 2; M. Blanchard, ‘Sel et diplomatie en Savoie et dans les Cantons suisses aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles’, Annales, 15 (1960).