5/27/2016 Oxford DNB article: Marion, Elie Marion, Elie (1678–1713), Camisard prophet by Lionel Laborie © Oxford University Press 2004–16 All rights reserved Marion, Elie (1678–1713), Camisard prophet, was born on 30 May 1678, at Barre des Cévennes, Lozère, in the Cévennes mountains, southern France, the eldest of the eight children of Jean Marion (d. 1709/10), a prosperous protestant farmer, and his wife, Louise, née Parlier (d. 1704). He was baptized by the local minister on 26 June 1678. Following the revocation of the edict of Nantes, which abolished freedom of worship for French protestants after years of restricted toleration, his family faced growing pressure from the authorities; four of Marion's siblings, born after 1685, were baptized as Catholics as the law demanded. Little is known about Marion's childhood, except that his parents continued to raise him in the protestant faith at home. Between October 1695 and July 1698 he trained as a clerk for a notary in Nîmes, and studied law in Toulouse for a further three years. Towards the end of 1701 clandestine protestant assemblies began to meet in the woods and mountains surrounding Barre. They were led by young prophets and lay preachers who, having replaced exiled ministers, called for an armed rising against the Catholic authorities and instilled apocalyptic beliefs in martyrdom. Two of Marion's brothers—Pierre (b. 1685) and Antoine (1689–1769)—started to prophesy or to participate in ecstatic utterances in early 1702, even though their father showed little sympathy for this prophetic outbreak. Elie Marion returned to the Cévennes in early July 1702 and was at first shocked by these manifestations. Three weeks later a group of rebels murdered the abbé du Chaila, a notorious Catholic priest who persecuted protestants. His death sparked the Camisard rising, when local Calvinist peasants, led by ‘Roland’ (Pierre Laporte) and Jean Cavalier of Ribaute, took up arms against the Catholic authorities to restore their freedom of religion. The war of the Cévennes opposed no more than 3000 Camisards against 20,000 dragoons over a period of two years. Though he too began to prophesy messages from God in January 1703, Marion did not play an active part in the Camisard rising. Rather his education and charisma led him to become a secretary and spokesman for his largely illiterate co- religionists. This exposed his family to targeted oppression: his father was imprisoned, his mother killed, and the family house was burnt down. Marion condemned Jean Cavalier's surrender in May 1704 as a betrayal of the French protestant cause, but was forced to negotiate a first truce with Marshall Claude- Louis-Hector de Villars upon the rebels' defeat. He stayed with a band of Camisards in Geneva between November 1704 and February 1705. Expecting foreign support, he returned to Alès in March, but the rebellion ended in bloodshed the following month, when several prominent Camisards were executed. Marion negotiated a second truce in July and fled again—this time to Lausanne via Geneva—in the following month. While in Lausanne, Marion had met David Flotard, agent to the marquis de Miremont. Both men now travelled to London where they arrived on 16 September 1706. Marion joined two other Camisard prophets—Durand Fage and Jean Cavalier of Sauve, who had arrived in June and July respectively—and rapidly imposed himself as the leader of the group. Because of their rebellion against Louis XIV, and their claims to prophecy, the Camisards immediately faced opposition from the ministers of the French-speaking churches of London, who sought to contain the http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/printable/109569 1/3 5/27/2016 Oxford DNB article: Marion, Elie threat of a millenarian movement within their community. The two parties met on several occasions in autumn 1706, but failed to compromise: the Camisards accused the London ministers of deserting their flock at the revocation of the edict of Nantes, while the French church of the Savoy publicly condemned Marion, Fage, and Cavalier as impostors in January 1707, and excommunicated them in March. Since his arrival in London, Marion had exhorted to repentance and sacrifice, and had delivered apocalyptic predictions of the fall of Rome. He sought initially to raise a Huguenot regiment to revive the rebellion in the Cévennes. However, the Camisards began to attract a number of British millenarians—of whom the most prominent included Sir Richard Bulkeley and John Lacy—as well as Richard Roach and other members of the Philadelphian Society. In response Marion adopted an irenic discourse intended to reconcile protestant denominations ahead of the second coming. His predictions appeared in April 1707 as Avertissemens prophétiques d'Élie Marion, l'un des chefs des Protestans, qui avoient pris les armes dans les Cévennes, and the book was simultaneously translated into English as Prophetical Warnings of Elias Marion. Marion's prophecies, which included the destruction of London, soon sparked protests from the local Huguenot community against those they labelled the ‘French Prophets’. Early in May 1707 French ministers initiated the trial of Marion and his two scribes, the mathematician Nicolas Fatio, of Duillier, and Jean Daudé, before the queen's bench for blasphemy and sedition. The three men were found guilty on 22 November: they were each fined 20 nobles and exposed on the scaffold at Charing Cross on 1 December and at the Royal Exchange on the following day. The trial—which may have served as a precedent for that of the Brotherite Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, in 1795—was recorded as one of only four noteworthy events for the year 1707 in John Noorthouck's New History of London (1773). By the date of his trial Marion had become the central figure of the rapprochement between the Camisards and the Philadelphian Society, whose ecumenical assemblies celebrated the Act of Union as a symbol of peace and reconciliation between protestant nations and denominations. The Philadelphian Richard Roach even regarded Marion as the new Elias who would usher in the millennium. Together they celebrated ecumenical agapes or ‘love feasts’ in private and performed alleged miracles. On 25 May 1708 one such miracle—the planned resurrection of Thomas Emes, an English follower of the French Prophets—ended in failure. In the wake of this disappointment, between August and December, Marion and the prophetess Jeanne Raoux named twelve missionary tribes within the French Prophets. Marion's father died some time between 16 December 1709, when he drafted his will, and 11 February 1710, when the will was registered. Marion was bequeathed 500 livres, which was a debt due from named persons, and the remaining estate was divided between his three brothers. For the rest of his life Marion travelled between London and the continent, meeting eminent theologians such as Pierre Jurieu in Rotterdam and August Hermann Francke in Halle. His missions took him to Berlin and Vienna in 1711, where he was to prophesy against the Holy Roman empire. Shortly after his return to London in 1712, he embarked with three brethren on the Prophets' greatest continental mission for nearly two years. They reached Stockholm in July and were arrested in Danzig in September, having been mistaken for Swedish spies. After eight months in prison, during which Marion fell ill and suffered abundant nosebleeds, the four men were released in May 1713. They returned to Halle, where they made converts in both Huguenot and pietist circles. By August the prophets had reached Constantinople, but—seized by a strong fever —were unable to prophesy to the Ottoman sultan, Ahmed III. They departed from Smyrna to Leghorn, Italy, a week later, where Marion died on 29 November 1713, while on the way to Rome. Like other prominent prophets, Marion did not marry, which has been considered as an inspiration for the French Prophets' celibate http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/printable/109569 2/3 5/27/2016 Oxford DNB article: Marion, Elie descendants, the Shakers (Chabrol). LIONEL LABORIE Sources F.-M. Misson, Le théâtre sacré des Cévennes: ou, Récit de diverses merveilles nouvellement opérées dans cette partie de la province de Languedoc (1707) · Discernement des ténèbres d'avec la lumière; afin d'inciter les hommes à chercher la lumière, l'esprit de l'Eternel, pour les instruire et les enseigner dans les droites voies (1710) · Eclair de lumière, descendant des cieux, pour découvrir, sur la nuit des peuples de la terre, la corruption qui se trouve dans leurs ténèbres; afin de les inciter à la repentance avant que le tonnere [sic] gronde de la justice de l'agneau (1711) · Cri d'alarme, en avertissement aux nations, qu'ils sortent de Babylon, des tenebres, pour entrer dans le repos de Christ (1712) · Plan de la justice de Dieu sur la terre, dans ces derniers jours et du relèvement de la chute de l'homme par son péché (1714) · Quand vous aurez saccagé, vous serez saccagés: car la lumière est apparue dans les ténèbres, pour les détruire (1714) · J. Noorthouck, A new history of London: including Westminster and Southwark (1773) · C. Bost, ed., Memoires inédits d'Abraham Mazel et d'Elie Marion sur la guerre des Cévennes, 1701–1708 (1931) · H. Schwartz, The French Prophets: the history of a millenarian group in eighteenth-century England (1980) · J.-P. Chabrol, Élie Marion, le vagabond de Dieu (1678–1713): prophétisme et millénarisme protestants en Europe à l'aube des Lumières (1999) · L. Laborie, Enlightening enthusiasm: prophecy and religious experience in early-eighteenth century England (2015) Archives Archives Cantonales Vaudoises, Lausanne, Switzerland, Bg 13bis/2, fols. 219–219v · Bibliothèque de Genève, Geneva, Switzerland, MS Fr. 605/7a, Fatio MSS · Bodl. Oxf., MS Rawlinson D1152 · priv.