Gordon Clark: The French Huguenots (Foreword)

1979. The French Huguenots: Anatomy of Courage. Janet Glenn Gray, Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1981.

One Sunday morning, sitting in a church in Tours, France, I saw a plaque on the wall which read, "In memory of Catherine Marechal, first martyr of this parish, burned alive in 1532." The next day we visited Amboise where the Catholics hanged about a hundred Huguenot men and drowned their wives and children in the Loire.

Most Christians who call themselves evangelicals know little about the Reformation. They know something about Luther. They have heard of Calvin. Know was somebody or other, wasn't he? They may even have heard of St. Bartholomew's massacre. But who knows anything about the Huguenots? And what was the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes? Or, what was the Edict of Nantes? Besides, it is all ancient history - today we are interested in ecumenism and ordination of homosexuals.

American evangelicals are likely to know more about the Reformation in England and Scotland than in France, naturally. They ought to know much more. But France should not be ignored. Why is France today 49 percent Catholics and 49 percent atheist, and maybe not even 2 percent Protestant? What did the Huguenots contribute to the principles of church government, the administration of the sacraments, and hymnology? What do the words Camisards and Cevennes conjure up? Is La Rochelle simply a lovely seaport? 

Granted, the French Reformation (if we omit Calvin and Geneva) is not the first and most important thing a Protestant should learn about. But it is not the last and least important either. Do evangelical congregations realize that they sing French music nearly every Sunday morning?

Now Janet Gray has written this book about the Huguenots. In it she centers on "the faithful men, women, and children who labored, endured torture, imprisonment, the galleys, and death to be allowed to worship God according to the Scriptures." She tells of eighty-eight pastors who were smuggled into France in the 1550s and eight-eight deaths account for by the "Church of the Desert." Then after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, Claude Brousson was captured, broken on the wheel, and died singing the thirty-fourth Psalm. The grandparents of Paul Turquand fled at the revocation of the Edict; his parents left for England in the early 1700s. Paul was born in London but emigrated to South Carolina. He gave the opening prayer in the Provincial Congress of South Carolina, and fled for his life from the British.

I hope many people read this book. And when they sing the Doxology, let them give a thought to Louis Bourgeois.

Gordon H. Clark