Tour Huguenot sights April 23-May 4, 2012

How are they alike?  Alabama historian Frye Gaillard. Kentucky actor-musician Johnny Depp. Mississippi dramatist Tennessee Williams. Volunteer-State pioneer Davy Crockett.

Hint:  include Paul Revere, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the earliest Swiss watch and Fabergé porcelain egg crafters, Judy Garland, Tom Brokaw, and Warren Buffett.

All descended from the Huguenots, our French Presbyterian cousins!  Join me April 23-May 4, 2012, on a “Huguenot Heritage Tour” to some of their major historical sites.

Historic Reformed Church, La Rochelle

Sixteenth-century Gallic Calvinists were mainly bourgeoisie and nobles: shopkeepers, educators, medics, former priests and bishops, financiers, gold- and silversmiths, potters, vintners, civil servants, scientists, architects, military officers.

After a 1559 national synod the French Reformed soon adopted a confession and catechism that still warm Presbyterian hearts.   Their rhymed, vernacular psalms—most familiar is our “Old Hundredth” doxology tune—became instant hits even among Roman Catholics.

Eventually numbering a million, Huguenots named Admiral Gaspard de Coligny their early champion. In 1562, with royal approval, he sent to northeast Florida the first French colonists to what is today’s U.S.A.  St. Augustine’s nearby Spanish soon annihilated the Protestant settlement as heretical.  Many Huguenots, unarmed, while being butchered, sang their beloved psalms. The adjacent inlet and river became and remain “Matanzas”–“Massacre” in Spanish.

Often surprising to 21^st-century Americans, most European nations in the 1500s branded as traitors those of a religion different from the monarch. In the tragic French “Wars of Religion” (1562-98) thousands of both denominations and sexes, and of all ages, perished.  On St. Bartholomew’s Eve, August 23-24, 1572, the Seine in Paris ran red with the blood of slaughtered Coligny and hundreds of other Huguenots.  It would do so again over 200 years later, when draining effusion from the guillotines of the Revolution.

At last Huguenot monarch Henry IV conquered Paris and, to make peace, turned nominal Roman Catholic.  In 1598 he issued the Edict of Nantes, granting a degree of freedom to Protestants for nearly a century.  They began again to flourish.

But Louis XIV, the “Sun King,” revoked the edict (1685).  His agents destroyed Protestants’ churches, kidnapped their children, forced “conversions” at sword-point, jailed and killed adults who resisted.  Brutal dragoons barracked in their homes.

During this persecution, dubbed by Huguenots their time in the “Desert,” up to  250,000 emigrated to Switzerland, North America, England, Ireland, Lutheran and Reformed areas of Germany, even to South Africa.  After the French Revolution Protestants gained full liberty.  Influential today beyond their numbers, they are about 350,000.

Museum director Isabelle Graessle

Our tour will begin in Geneva.  At the award-winning, interactive International Museum of Protestantism the Rev. Dr. Isabelle Graesslé, director, will greet us.  We’ll visit Calvin’s St. Pierre’s Cathedral and adjacent Auditoire, where the reformer taught and “thundering Scot” John Knox preached to an expatriate English congregation during Queen “Bloody Mary” Tudor’s reign.

In nearby southeast France we stop at Le Chambon, mountainous Reformed village whose pastors, in the 1940s, persuaded their members, at great risk, to shelter thousands of mainly Jewish fugitives from the Nazis.  Other stops include the medieval Tower of Constance, on the Mediterranean, where Huguenot women were imprisoned, often for decades, while their surviving menfolk served as galley slaves.

We’ll visit art and wine chateaux, take a fast French train to La Rochelle, once the major Huguenot seaport, where we can attend Sunday worship at the city’s historic Reformed Church.  Further stops include Normandy’s D-Day beaches, the Bayeux Tapestry, and Caen’s international peace memorial to all who died in the Allied struggle against the Nazis.

Three nights in springtime Paris, where we can explore major center-city Calvin sites, and visit museums, shops, and medieval palaces and churches, will conclude our time abroad.

For full details contact me at 501 Prescott Way, Knoxville, TN 37919.  (865) 249-7731.  dwynmounger@gmail.com.  Or visit www.reformationtours.com and scroll “Current Tours.”

–Dwyn Mounger, M.Div., Ph.D. (church history)