A Journey through Space and Time to the Quakers of France Judy Pocock We travelled in the print of olden wars; Yet all the land was green; And love we found, and peace, Where fire and war had been. They pass and smile, the children of the sword— No more the sword they wield; An O, how deep the corn Along the battle field! By Robert Louis Stevenson writing as W.P. Bannatyne, epigraph to Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes, 1879. Introduction to visit the Quakers of Congénies in the south of France. I had learned about this As I travelled on the high speed train small Quaker group from a fellow student south from Paris, I really had no idea the in my internet Quaker Studies course, and I world I was entering. If I had, I would have was on my way to visit him and his Meeting. looked more closely and found memories To me, the south of France was more of and words to capture the feeling. I do an exotic legend than a reality. Two Euros remember speeding near and sometimes got me on the local bus from Nimes and, as through craggy untamed mountains and it wound south from one tiny medieval stretches of green fields. I was on my way village to the next, I hung on to my suitcase Canadian Quaker History Journal 81 (2016) 99 The Quakers of France worried that I really didn’t have a clue if I requisite shutters. Off they went for their was going in the right direction to the right mid-afternoon nap and I was left alone to place. Finally the driver, nodding, pointed explore. Wearing my lightest clothes, I to the door and, dragging my suitcase, out I ventured into the sauna-like outside world dropped. Watching the bus pull away, I and explored the walled compound—the found myself on a crocked uneven road little graveyard with its warn stones bereft lined by walls of ancient houses. The street of names in the old Quaker tradition, the was empty, the little shop closed up tight, garden full of colourful flowers--all and the windows shuttered. As I stood on dominated by the large simple meeting the street I was completely alone—no house. The streets beyond the wall were people, no cars, and no bikes— in a silence still empty and the houses closed up and as broken only by the sounds of birds. The I wandered I felt like I had stepped back in houses, all shuttered and silent, seemed time with nothing but the odd parked car to unlived in. The air was heavy with heat, remind me of the twenty-first century. moisture, and exotic smells. The sun was beating down and the sky was the most Where did these Quakers come from? beautiful blue I had ever seen. Which way to turn and where to go? Truly dazed and French Quakers seem like an oxymoron. confused and beginning to panic, I finally France, nominally secular yet steeped in its looked up and saw a sign on the corner of Catholic history, seemed a strange place to an old stone house, Avenue des Quakers, and find a group of Quakers, especially in the struggling up and down the steep coble hedonistic South. Where did they come stone street, I arrived at number eleven, my from and how long had they been in this destination. Mediterranean valley bordered by the High walls enclosed a tiny graveyard, a mountains of the Cevennes? What I had sprawling garden, and a Meeting House-- learned of their story from my fellow making up The Quaker Centre of student and internet friend Denis was Congénies. I was welcomed into the intriguing. During the American Revolution Meeting House, built in 1822, by the (1775-83), France and England, always at Resident Friends and settled into an upstairs each other’s throats, found themselves on bedroom, kept cool by thick walls and the different sides once again. French aid for Canadian Quaker History Journal 81 (2016) 100 The Quakers of France the American rebels provided the perfect privateers fitted out by his father’s pretext for Britain to declare open season house, and desires the owners or their on French ships travelling back and forth agents to apply to Dr. Edward Long across the Atlantic. British ships were Fox, Hotel d’Yorek, Rue Jacob, a encouraged to attack and loot the French Paris.2 ships they encountered on the high seas with impunity. The owners of three ships The notice caught the imagination of took advantage of the policy, armed their many in France. Piracy was such an integral trading ships, and plundered any French part of the culture of sea, war, and empire ship they came across amassing a huge that the idea of an individual foregoing the fortune in the process. One of the owners spoils of war and volunteering to of the ships, a Quaker Joseph Fox,1 was compensate an “enemy” for the damage appalled when he discovered what his done was a novelty worth gossiping about. partners had done. As an objector to both So, not only the French ship owners directly war and theft, Fox first tried to stop his involved responded to the news, but the partners’ piracy, and when he was unable to story spread, including into the Southern accomplish that, he determined to make area of Languedoc. whatever amends he could. In 1785 he A community of religious like minds who placed the following full page ad in the called themselves Les Couflaires had existed official Gazette de France and sent his son to in and around the village of Congénies Paris. since at least the late 17th Century. When members of the group heard about the ad Paris, Feb.24. The principles of peace and the pacifist Quakers they immediately and quietness which characterize the became curious. They too were pacifists, Society of Quakers forbid them from and soon they found about other taking any part in wars, and does not similarities between themselves and the even suffer them to partake of any Quakers. Like the Quakers they did not profits which may arise from such a have professional paid ministers and meet source. One of these peaceable in unprogramed worship, quietly waiting people was inevitably concerned in direct inspiration from God. They too some privateers, which his partners believed that God dwelt within each would fit out during the late war, individual and communicated directly notwithstanding all his remonstrances without the need of ministers, creeds, or and opposition, and having received books to facilitate communication. Feeling his share of the profits, has sent his that they had stumbled on a group with son to this city to endeavour to find which they had much in common, five of out the owners of the vessels taken the Couflaires were designated by their […] and restore to them the part he community to contact Fox and learn more has received of those prizes, for about the Quakers. Letters were written but which purpose he has published the war intervened once again and when the names of all the vessels taken by the Congénies community heard nothing back 1 No relation to George Fox, a founder of the Society of Friends. 2 Charles Taylor, “Appendix: The Quakers of Congéniès” in The Camisards (London: Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., 1893), 442-43. Canadian Quaker History Journal 81 (2016) 101 The Quakers of France they set out for London to meet these like- minded strangers. Experience confirmed the affinity between the Couflaires and the Quakers, and in 1788 the first Quaker Meeting in France was established at Congéneis and, through the ups and downs of the last 230 years, exists there today.3 But where did these French Quakers come from? Were they influenced by a travelling Quaker missionary—after all early English Quakers did send missionaries all over the world carrying their message? Or did this little group spontaneously develop a theology so close to British Friends that on first contact they recognized their soul mates in every sense of the word? What forces shaped these Quakers and from what milieu did they spring? Were they part of a larger movement like their English compatriots, or were they unique, developing in isolation? story by insisting on placing it in the midst The Bigger Picture: Dark Times in the of the chaotic English Revolution. If Larger World English Quakers emerged in the midst of what Hill called the world turned upside These questions sent me on another down, then French Quakers emerged in a journey—a journey to understand the world turned topsy turvy. In the sixteenth, essence of the world that I was entering seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and the Quaker presence in that world. Europe was rocked by crises—in religion, Too often we spin narratives we call history, politics, the economy, and social relations. in isolation. Without context, without taken The world of Couflaires and their ancestors into consideration the forces at play was ravaged by war, famine, social surrounding and shaping the Quaker disruption, and disease, as fragmented experience, I could never begin to feudal regimes painfully coalesced into understand it. Context may not be nation states. Historians Andrew everything in creating history, but, without Cunningham and Ole Peter Grell, describe taking context into consideration, history the period as one “characterised by can just become stories. apocalyptic expectations, eschatological My model is historian Christopher Hill speculations and millenarian dreams.”4 who captured the early English Quaker Suddenly, with Luther’s points nailed on the 3 “Quakers and the non-conformist tradition in the south of France,” Centre Quaker de Congénies: Quakers in France, http://www.maison-quaker-congenies.org/origins-of-maison-quaker (Accessed 10 July 2017).