Marie Durand — Part 2: Daughter of the French Reformation
Jeanne Lombard (1865-1945); Prisonnières huguenotes à la Tour de Constance, par ; image from Wikimedia Commons.
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Editor’s note: This is part two of a BCL series on Marie Durand by pastor and author Campbell Markham. Campbell’s translations of Durand's letters are included at the end of each installment. Click here to read part one.
We must come to His Word and be ordered by it. — John Calvin, 1536
An intelligent and educated nineteen-year old woman like Marie Durand (1711–1776) does not give up her freedom and the best years of her life—when she would hope to marry, raise children, and manage a home and farm amid the chestnut groves of Bouchet-de-Pranles—and choose instead to stick to her convictions and endure the brutal conditions of a stone dungeon for nearly four decades, without those convictions being rooted in a long, deep, and rich faith heritage.
In this chapter, I begin to lay the historical foundation for understanding Marie Durand and her words and decisions. I describe the French Reformation of the sixteenth century, that great work of Christ that freed some one-and-a-half million men and women from the shackles of medieval Catholicism. I trace, in particular, its geographical, historical, political, and linguistic roots before sketching some of its most important figures and some of the key events which shaped its first half-century. This is Marie Durand’s heritage, and her life and letters cannot be understood apart from it.
Likewise, we cannot understand the Reformation in France without understanding its own social and geographical roots.
Although Paris played a leading role in the Reformation, in the main the movement traced a crescent far distant from the capital, down the Atlantic coast from La Rochelle, across the Pyrenees, and north-east into the wild Cévennes, Ardèche, and the Dauphiné. This is the le croissant Huguenot, and it was no accident that Reform took hold there.
At the dawn of the sixteenth century a great deal about the south of France was distinct from the north, including its languages. Even today, France harbours many distinct dialects, and a Parisian will hardly understand a single word of the Celtic language spoken in Breton. Things were even more diverse in the sixteenth century. Roughly speaking, those in the south spoke Languedocien dialects, the langue d’oc: the tongue or language of oc, which was the word for “yes” in that region. This was unlike the northern langue d’oïl, oïl being the word for “yes” north of the Loire. (Oïl became the modern oui). It is a law unchanged since the Tower of Babel that different languages underlay different identities and cultures, and for those in the south of France northerners may as well have been from Scotland for all the social affinity they felt with them.
It is no surprise then that during the Middle Ages some distinct religious communities found a foothold in some of those same southern and south-western parts of France. These included the Cathars and Waldensians. Although their beliefs are difficult to circumscribe, the Cathars—the “Pure ones”—attempted in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to recover a more sincere and inward form of Christian life. They were strong in Provence, in the south of France, where they were known as the Albigenses.
The Albigenses spoke Languedocien dialects and developed a distinct and elaborate social culture centered on their own ideals of courtly manners. Their autonomy and their sometimes peculiarly unorthodox doctrines caused grave concern among the Latin Catholic powers and the Pope himself. They were targeted by Dominican missionaries, threatened with the fire of Inquisition, and were ultimately assailed by knights in armour with crosses on their tunics and the massed violent hordes that accompanied them. The Albigensian Crusade (1209–29) spilled over into a general civil war that eventually brought Languedoc under the rule of the northern French kings and left a bitter separatism in the heart of the southern regions.
The Waldensians likewise sprang from a reform movement. They arose around Lyons in the twelfth century and spread into southern France and north-western Italy. They too ran afoul of the Inquisition. (Waldensian Protestants continue to live and worship in northern Italy. The Italian author Bruna Peyrot, who in 1997 wrote an historical novel about Durand, Prigioniere della Torre, is a Waldensian.)
All of this means that long before the Reformation, the Vivarais, the Durands’ home region in the south which roughly corresponds to modern-day Ardèche, bore a strong bent towards cultural separation from the north, religious non-conformity, and political autonomy.
If the south of France felt a sense of proud geographical and cultural autonomy from the north, a great many in France as a whole felt a proud sense of religious autonomy from the Pope and Italy. This divided the late-medieval French church into two groups. The Ultramontanes—literally “over the mountains”were fiercely loyal to the Pope, who resided across the alps in Italy. The opposing Gallicans resented the church being ruled by distant Italians and preferred all things Gallic, French. (Gaul is an ancient name for France.) Needless to say, French monarchs were proud Gallicans, and in 1516 Francis I secured the Concordat of Bologna, which removed the right to appoint senior church positions in the French church from the Pope to the French kings.
The other big social movement that played such a key role in the rise of French Protestantism was the fourteenth and fifteenth-century European Renaissance, which means “re-birth.” Beginning in northern Italy, great minds and artists looked to recover and build upon the achievements of Classical Greece and Rome. This brought tremendous developments in painting, sculpture, music, architecture, historical and textual scholarship, literature, mechanical invention, and political theory.
Renaissance flowered in fifteenth-century Europe into Humanism, a scholarly movement which looked ad fontes, “back to the sources.” From the time of the Crusades, ancient books and parchments flowed into western Europe from Palestine and southern Europe. Scholars strove to grasp the thought of the ancients by mastering their languages—especially Greek, Hebrew, and classical Latinand by searching for and copying and comparing the oldest manuscripts that they could get their hands on.
Gutenberg’s development of the printing press around 1436 supercharged the whole Humanist project. It permitted the cheap, massive, and rapid multiplication of books and pamphlets and the ideas they carried. Western European scholarship was shaken by the content of this tidal wave of fresh thought and the exhilarating spirit of personal intellectual responsibility, of searching out the truth for oneself.
The re-examination of the biblical texts in their original languages sparked a major rethink of Christian thought and practice. A German Augustinian monk at the University of Wittenberg, who was lecturing in the early sixteenth century on the Psalms, Galatians, and Romans, rediscovered the Bible’s teaching about the way of salvation. The teachings of Martin Luther, and especially his recovery of the biblical doctrine of salvation by grace alone through faith in Christ alone, began to be debated in France in the 1520s. Luther’s critique of the papacy and all things Rome appealed to those with Gallican tendencies. They also appealed to a growing intelligentsia with a newly acquired taste for self-education and the new humanism.
Reformation in France was sparked in Paris in the 1520s in the diocese of Meaux around bishop Guillaume Briçonnet (1472–1534), the humanist Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples (1455–1536), and the brilliant author Marguerite de Navarre (1492–1549), sister of the French King Francis I. There was however one great figure who would far eclipse them all.
Visit the 1909 Monument international de la réformation, built into the wall of Geneva’s Old Town, and you will see among the granite statues of such Reformers as Guillaume Farel, Theodore Beza, and John Knox, a five-meter-tall representation of John Calvin. Calvin’s figure stands slightly forward of the others and dominates the monument. Calvin is indeed a giant in the Western intellectual tradition, and by far the greatest single figure of the French Reformation.
John Calvin was born in 1509 in Noyon, to the north of Paris. He trained in Latin and was destined, with his manifest intellectual gifts, for the riches and honour of a career in the law. In his early twenties he was exposed to humanist studies and learned New Testament Greek. By 1530 he had converted to the Protestant faith, the exact timing and precise causes of which remain obscure. In 1532 he published his first book, a commentary on the first-century philosopher Seneca’s De Clementia. Calvin hoped to make his name as a humanist scholar. In 1533, however, he came under the influence of the Swiss Protestant Reformer Nicolas Cop (1501–1540) at the Sorbonne, and Calvin’s career as a not-so-rich-and-honoured Reformer and theologian was set.
Calvin and Cop were forced to flee France after a notorious pro-Lutheran sermon by Cop in 1533 and the Affaire de placards of 1534, when stridently anti-clerical and anti-Mass posters appeared throughout Paris and other French cities. One poster was said even to have been tacked onto the apoplectic King’s bedchamber. Scores of Protestants were burned at the stake during the ensuing crackdown. Yet, by the time Calvin first arrived in Geneva, which would come to be his home city until his death in 1564, the seeds of Reformation had been scattered upon the variously stony, weed-choked, and fertile soils of France.
Look at a map of France and you will see Lake Geneva pointing like an arrow into the heart of France. From Calvin’s pen flowed a torrent of letters, sermons, biblical commentaries, and his Institutes of the Christian Religion. The Institutes, the fifth and final edition of which Calvin published in 1559 and which runs to some 230,000 words, lays out a complete explanation of Christian thought and life. Theologian J. I. Packer called it one of “the wonders of the literary world,” and it became the scholarly theological bedrock of Reformed Protestantism.
Yet though we identify the great achievements of John Calvin with Geneva, Calvin identified himself with France. Calvin, who was born and educated in France, spoke and wrote in French when he wasn’t communicating in Latin. He laboured with a passionate love and yearning for the religious Reformation and salvation of his own people. That’s why Calvin corresponded incessantly with French political and church leaders; that’s why he trained a corps of hundreds of native French pastors to build a Reformed church in France; and that’s why he personally translated his Institutes from Latin into French.
In 1559, Reformed churches in France formally linked themselves to Calvin’s doctrine by adopting a statement of faith, the Confessio Gallicana, which had been drafted by Calvin and his pupil Antoine de Chandieu (1534–1591). After Calvin’s death in 1564, his colleague Theodore Beza (1519–1605), a rarely gifted scholar in his own right, continued to develop and propagate his friend’s work in France. By the middle of the sixteenth century, an estimated one-and-a-half million people, more than seven percent of the French population, had converted to Protestantism. John Calvin’s books, letters, and trained pastors had made the single biggest human contribution to this.
This is a brief sketch of the deep historical background to the life and letters of Marie Durand. She would be born in 1711 in Bouchet-de-Pranles into a community with a hoary past of linguistic, cultural, political, and religious autonomy. She was born into a church whose beliefs and practices were deeply rooted in the sixteenth-century Reformation and the labours of John Calvin, one of France’s greatest sons and exiles. Though she never refers to Calvin in any of her surviving letters, his Reformed teaching of the Scripture underpins her theology, and indeed her decision to endure decades of imprisonment rather than abjure her Protestant faith.
We look next at the terrible events of the later sixteenth century that plagued French Protestants, the most appalling of which—the Saint Bartholomew’s Massacre—continued to reverberate and shape the lives of eighteenth-century Huguenots like Marie Durand.
Marie Durand Letter 4 — to Justine Peschaire
[After ten years of imprisonment.]
To Mademoiselle Justine Peschaire de Vallon
The Tour de Constance, May 21, 1740
Mademoiselle,
While I do not have the honour of knowing you, except by your worthy reputation, I take the liberty of writing to assure you of my most humble respects, to wish you perfect health, and that you be favoured with all kinds of blessings and prolonged prosperity.
The courier told me that you have charged him to tell you if we have need of anything. We are very much obliged to you for your care; but allow me to inform you that, being so far from our homes as we are, we can only have extreme need of the help of our brethren.
There are nine of us from the Vivarais, held captive in this sad place. Yet for the ten years that I have been here the people of the Vivarais have not sent anything. Those from other places have not behaved in this way, for they provided what was necessary to the women of their own lands, and even as much as they could manage for us.
Permit me please to say that I am not surprised if God makes his rod felt in so terrible a manner to those of the faith in our wretched province; for they do not follow the commands of the divine Master. He commands us to take care of prisoners, and they have not done this at all. Charity is the true principle of our religion and they do not carry out this duty. In a word, it seems that we are in the last days, for this divine virtue has very much cooled. True Christians will not be condemned for having abandoned the purity of the Gospel, since in effect they make constant profession of it; but they will be condemned for not visiting Jesus Christ in the prisons, in the person of his members.
I exhort them by the compassion of God to reignite their charitable zeal for the poor and suffering; that they will remember that the Lord Jesus promised to repay even the gift of a glass of cold water to his children. How much more will he recompense those who sustain his elect, who fight under the standard of the cross. Their alms will rise in memory before God, as have risen the alms sent from Corneille. In short, if they sow freely, they will reap freely, as the Apostle explains.
My own needs cause me to think of yours, especially because the prisoners of Languedoc reproach us that nothing ever comes from our land. They are absolutely right. They share with us from that which was given to them. In this way we have been abandoned by those who should have given us the most support, and who are now therefore considered as strangers.
If you would like, Mademoiselle, to have the blessing of sharing something with us we would be greatly in your debt. You could do this for both Mademoiselle de Rouvier, mother-in-law of my late brother, prisoner here with me, and to myself conjointly. She assures you of her respects, as does the wife of master Daniel Durand, and the wife of Jean Degoutet.
You can pass on our letter to the faithful who may want to contribute to this good work; I beg you to assure them of my deepest respect. I hope that you will prove your love for us by making your charity shine upon our sad situation.
I conclude by praying to the Supreme Being, that it will please him to satisfy you with all his earthly gifts and, one day, with his heavenly glory. These are the prayers made by the one who has the honour of being, with complete and respectful veneration,
Mademoiselle,
your very humble and very obedient servant,
La Durand.
Translation © 2022 Campbell Markham | All rights reserved
Marie Durand Letter 5 – to the Widow Guiraudet
[After sixteen years of imprisonment.]
To Mademoiselle the widow of the late Monsieur Guiraudet delivered by hand to Alais
The Tour de Constance, February 27, 1746
Mademoiselle,
If I thought that your feelings were captured by a worldly spirit, the fear of displeasing them by an overly protracted silence would have entirely withheld my hand. And I would not dare to justify myself by any motive except that of your generosity, since I made myself worthy of the harshest censures, worthy of being eternally forgotten, and unworthy to receive the least mercy from you, since, having received such genuine favours, it must seem to you that an assuredly most criminal negligence had caused me to forget such great benefits.
But as, Mademoiselle, you are so well instructed in the school of the One who has perfect charity, to have given himself for our ransom, and that the great Paraclete, who enlightens you by his bright lights and inflames you by that pure love and ardent zeal which sets ablaze the seraphs, this tenderness with which you are pleased to honour me, so much like that which a good mother has for her children, this exemplary piety which reigns in you, and which causes you to be admired not only by the faithful, but even by those who look at us with horror – this tenor of a consistently pure life, always unchanging, always self-consistent, where nothing fails, all these heroic virtues with which you are invested make me hope that your natural kindness will compensate for my delay, all the more because it was not the result of negligence.
I spoke of this subject to the venerable Mademoiselle de Noguier, and I am fully persuaded that your compassion will be moved by this. I am infinitely obliged to you for all your charitable kindness toward me. I ask you for the grace to continue your excellent protection to me, which I will try to maintain by submissive devotion. Support, please, my trembling hands as long as the will of the One who distributes good and ill chooses to inflict me with afflictions and ills.
In just recognition, I can only offer you my feeble but nonetheless sincerest prayers. God wants to satisfy you with his most particular blessings, to pour out on your worthy person and on all those who are dear to you the abundance of the sweet influences of his most life-giving grace, that you may experience all the sweetness of nature and the treasures of grace, until that time when the Supreme Being introduces you into sovereign happiness, where you will be crowned with glory and immortality to repay the sublime charity that you are pouring out upon those who suffer under the cross of Christ.
These are the sincere prayers and wishes that I make in all my prayers for the preservation and long and happy prosperity of your venerable person, and for all those who are dear to you. Be utterly convinced, Mademoiselle, and believe me to be, with deep submission and inviolable respect,
Mademoiselle,
your very humble and obedient servant,
La Durand.
All my suffering sisters assure you of their respectful submission and commend themselves, like me, to your good prayers and pious care.
Translation © 2022 Campbell Markham | All rights reserved
