The Roads to Exile

Jean-Paul Augier

Translation Canon Tony Dickinson

For several months the huge influx of migrants, fleeing war and coming to seek refuge in Europe has provoked several comment pieces in the media. Protestants, at least, ought to remember that they too were compelled to leave their country at the end of the 17^th century.

The European Union has been shaken by the arrival of hundreds of thousands of immigrants, chiefly coming from Syria and Iraq. While in France, the population is very divided about welcoming these exiles, the FPF has called to mind the injunction of the biblical verse: “you shall love the alien as a brother” (Leviticus 19:34). The importance of welcoming the stranger is not only expressed in the words of the Bible, it is also engraved on the Huguenot memory.

The revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 caused the departure of 200,000 Protestants towards the countries of refuge, despite the prohibition on leaving the Kingdom of France. German, Swiss, and French organisations have wished to commemorate this dark history by re-tracing the road to exile taken by the Huguenots. This links the Museum of Protestantism in the Dauphiné, which is in the village of Poët-Laval, near Dieulefit in the Drôme, to the Huguenot Museum in Bad Karlshafen in Hesse. 1,800 kilometres in length, this road to exile goes through Geneva which, between 1680 and 1715 received 60,000 members of the Reformed Church: up to 350 people each day. The aim of the French organisation “Sur les pas des Huguenots” [“in the steps of the Huguenots”] is not simply to commemorate a distant history, but to arouse ramblers to reflect on the themes of political or religious intolerance, the welcome or rejection of immigrants, their economic contribution… On the French side another path was inaugurated in August, that of the Camisards, which leaves from the Museum of the Desert to join the path of the Huguenots at Die in the Drôme. The way of the Camisards is the route which seven young people had to take in July 1702. But they were denounced and arrested at Pont-de-Montvert. It was the imprisonment of these exiles and of their guide, Massip, which triggered the assassination of the Abbot of Chayla and the beginning of the War of the Camisards. The aim of this new path is to associate exile and resistance, between those who chose to leave in order to avoid rejecting their conscience, and those who preferred to resist in order to be free.

These routes which meet at Geneva are not the only ways into exile. The Waldensians of Italian Piedmont also knew about leaving. These disciples of Peter Waldo, victims of violent persecutions during the Middle Ages, attached themselves to the Reformation in 1532. While only three groups of Waldensians survived, in the Luberon, in Calabria and in the Alpine Valleys, they were subjected to new persecutions, because they wished to join up with Reformed Protestantism. In 1686, after a series of edicts, the Waldensian subjects of the Duke of Savoy, Victor Amadeus II, experienced a terrible repression which might have wiped them out. The entire Waldensian population of the Alpine Valleys was captured or killed. 8,000 Waldensians were imprisoned in 13 prisons. But the cost of their imprisonment turned out to be too high. When the Venetians would not agree to buy them as galley slaves, the Waldensians, flanked by the Duke of Savoy’s soldiers, left for refuge in Germany via Geneva. In 1689, some Waldensians left to re-conquer their valleys; the Glorious Return. This is a journey home which follows the alpine crests, undoubtedly unique in history. This path of a specific and brutal exodus, whose history is unknown to Italians, is one of the Protestant routes into exile which links Italy to the other three countries.

These roads to exile have a meaning because they summon up a history of exclusion and of resistance. They remind us that there are no frontiers to intolerance and barbarism. But neither are there frontiers to welcome and to justice.

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