Marquis de Lafayette, we are here!
The following is an excerpt from Transactions No. 43, 1938
THE EDICT OF TOLERATION 1787 : Address delivered in the French Protestant (Huguenot) Church on Sunday, October 24, 1937 by The Rev. John N. Thomas, PhD., Pastor of the Second Presbyterian Church, Charleston, SC.
General John J. Pershing at the Tomb of Lafayette by Percy Moran, 1923
“Shall not we who are of Huguenot blood or Huguenot spirit, stand in imagination likewise beside that tomb, and remembering his fight for freedom and its challenge to us at this day, say, with the same high resolve, "Marquis de Lafayette, we are here"!”
No one could fail to be moved at the opportunity of addressing this venerable body in this historic place. My sense of the honor your invitation has conferred upon me - an honor I acknowledge with deep appreciation -- has been, if possible, even enhanced as the significance of this particular commemoration service has borne itself in upon my consciousness. I have found my feeling of appreciation gathering into itself a strange blend of obligation toward this occasion. For as one contemplates the Edict of Toleration, whose sesquicentennial we celebrate today, one is re-impressed with the fact that it is not only clothed with unique importance for the past, but also pregnant with urgent challenge for the future. It has been twenty-three years since this Society observed an anniversary of the Edict of Toleration. At the last commemoration occasion an able and inspiring address was delivered by the Reverend Florian Vurpillot, Pastor of this church. Two things about that service, as it is recorded in your Transactions, are highly significant. One is the date - April 13, 1914 - exactly seventy-six days before that fateful pistol shot in Sarajevo, at the sound of which the curtain was rung up upon the awful drama of world war. Another significant feature is the mood of the address. It was a mood of rejoicing over the establishment of toleration among men. The relationship between the date and the mood is very close. That was a day of comfort for idealism. A great president was ministering to the innate resilience of the American spirit. High-minded men and women looked forward with confidence to even further moral and social progress. Thinking people were convinced that the principle of evolution, already established in the physical world, was regnant likewise in the moral and social realm. Evolution had become the regulative concept for the interpretation of history, and undergirded a buoyant faith in the inevitability of human progress.
Against such a background of assurance, it was perfectly natural in 1914 to commemorate the Edict of Toleration in a mood of confident rejoicing. Nursed at the ample breast of Democracy, toleration had attained adulthood. It seemed firmly ensconced in the world. Nay more its eventual conquest of all the world seemed as certain as did the "manifest destiny" of America in the days of our facile optimism. And so the Edict was celebrated as the symbol of a fait accompli - Henry IV had granted religious freedom at Nantes in 1598, Louis XIV had abolished it in 1685, but Louis XVI had permanently restored it in 1787. To confess, as we must, that we cannot possibly recapture today the confident mood of 1914 is not for a moment to minimize the significance of that great event in Huguenot and world history which we are met together to celebrate. We are rightly assembled to salute its memory and to proclaim its lasting importance. Time will ever be proud to throw upon the screen of history that dramatic scene in the assembly of the Notables in 1787 when a young man, dear to the heart of every American school child, arose and moved that the king be petitioned to grant civil rights to Protestants. It was a taut moment. For 102 years - since the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 - Protestants had lived an outlaw's life in France. Their assemblies had been attacked; their martyrs had made of the scaffold and dungeon symbols of fidelity; others, giving up home for faith, had sought heroic exile in Holland, Prussia, England, South Africa, Carolina. But the leaven of toleration was working in the hearts and minds of people. Men prominent in affairs of state such as Joly de Fleury, Gilbert de Voisins; leaders of thought like Rousseau and Voltaire; and even some members of the established clergy, such as the Bishop of Langres, began to speak in behalf of the Protestants. Finally, when the assembly of the Notables convened in 1787 the hour seemed ripe for reinstituting the religious freedom granted nearly two centuries before by Henry IV, and termed by him in unwitting irony, "perpetual and irrevocable." To us in America it is something more than a coincidence that the man who proposed the motion that Louis XVI be petitioned to restore religious freedom to the French Huguenots was none other than he who had fought for the freedom of the American colonies, Marquis de Lafayette. The atmosphere was tense as the Count d'Artois led the opposition to the proposal, but when the vote was taken, it was unanimous for Lafayette's motion. The matter was presented to the king, and the Edict of Toleration was at last signed by Louis XVI on November 17, 1787, one hundred and two years after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
The new Edict granted to non-Catholics only four things: (1) the right to live in France and practice a profession or trade; (2) the right to marry legally before civil officers; (3) the right of legitimate birth; and (4) permission to dispense with Catholic rites at burials. Nevertheless, although the concessions were so limited, in practice the Protestants were allowed much greater liberty, and the Edict of Toleration stands as a landmark of religious freedom.
Today we look back upon that event with gratitude and pride; we reckon it as a milestone in the history of religious and cultural progress. But as we have already suggested, we cannot duplicate today the mood of 1914. The world war has intervened, and the world is a different place. The spirit of toleration has not continued an uninterrupted conquest of all people and nations. The will to live and let live stands with its back to the wall, fighting a losing fight, and that not only in religion, but all along the line - in economics, in politics, in education, and even in art.
The reverses suffered by the spirit of toleration have been due in large measure to the fact that, in the modern propaganda machine, perfected during and since the war, intolerance has found a new and consummate weapon. With this weapon intolerance has been enabled to unite suasion with force to impose a ready-made ideology upon the masses. Let one man gain supreme power over a nation today, and he will not only control the outward conduct of his subjects, but he will create the very intellectual and spiritual atmosphere in which they live, move and have their being. In the 17th century, Louis XIV could persecute the Huguenots, but he could not regiment their thinking. A modern dictatorship, however, is not limited to the revocation of edicts, and the breaking up of assemblies, and the hanging of martyrs, nor even to its sporadic "purges." It means also the domination of every thought-moulding institution: the press, the radio, the screen, even the university, and, if possible, the pulpit. No military blockade was ever more effective than the cultural blockade in the dictator - ridden countries. While science is freeing man's body from the thraldom of drudgery, it is likewise making possible, through the abuse of its creations, the enslavement of his mind to the tyranny of the demagogue. Time only can tell what intolerance with its new weapon, the propaganda machine, will do for the minds and hearts of men.
Perhaps no less significant and ominous than the actual spread of intolerance in the post war era is the breakdown of faith in the certainty of human progress. No change in contemporary social philosophy is more striking than the swing from an optimistic to a pessimistic view of history. The attitude is epitomized in a statement by Reinhold Niebuhr, a brilliant writer in social ethics, who says in a recent article: "We are no longer certain that we are climbing 'onward and upward forever.' We are beginning to suspect that what was regarded as a discovery of science may turn out to be an illusion. "Thus as we view the Edict of Toleration from the perspective of our post war retrogressions and disillusionments, it no longer symbolizes a fait accompli, it no longer appears as the culminating victory in the long fight for freedom, even in France itself, but only as one episode in a continuing struggle whose end is not yet, and whose final issue is shrouded in uncertainty. One would like to be more complacent, but this is a day for realisms, not sentimentality; resolution, not gratulation. Ours is more than the task of enshrining a glorious memory; it is the challenge to perpetuate a vital heritage.
As we accept this obligation, let us not overlook one encouraging factor which we may set over against the somewhat melancholy picture we have been forced to paint. It is the fact that religion, at long last, is asserting its claim as the true champion of toleration. There is not much in the past to support this claim. Even Protestantism, which always clamored for a policy of religious freedom when it was not in the saddle, sometimes stooped to repression where it was in power. History will remember Calvin and Servetus just as long as it will Louis XIV and the martyrs to the Huguenot cause. Let us acknowledge this to our shame. Let us acknowledge likewise that the church has often been taught the Christian virtue of tolerance at the feet of men like Voltaire, whom we call infidel. But it is nevertheless true today that religion is the most active protagonist of toleration in western civilization. In Germany and Russia everything seems to have been swept from its moorings by the avalanche of totalitarianism except a few intrepid remnants of the Christian church. Nor are these religious groups fighting solely for their own life - they are fighting for the right of other groups to differ with them, for the right of every man to worship according to the dictates of his own conscience, for the elemental human right of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." In this fight for toleration religion is exercising a genius peculiar to itself. For a good many years we have been told that religious conviction is hostile to the spirit of toleration. We are being told today by writers all the way from Dewey and his instrumentalist school of philosophy to the popularizer who feeds philosophic crumbs to the public through the columns of our magazines, that only the man whose beliefs remain in a fluid state, not crystalizing into convictions, is capable of genuine tolerance. But man must live by something, and when we take away his convictions, he will resort to prejudice. We are realizing today, through men like Hitler, who are the spiritual heirs of agnostic thought, that when we hew down the great oak of belief in God, we prepare the soil of our hearts for the rank weeds of prejudice, and hence for the advent of intolerance. Agnosticism in one generation is mother to prejudice in the next, and the grandmother of intolerance in the next. Intolerant religion is bad religion; but intolerant agnosticism is running true to its nature. As for me, I had rather take my chances with Servetus and his fellow heretics in the Geneva of Calvin's day than with Martin Niemollar and his fellow Christians in the Germany of 1937 - the Germany where a people without conviction are ready to follow the lead of a dictator without conscience.
And so, inspired with a firm belief in the fatherhood of God, let us go forward with faith into the struggle for the liberty, equality, and fraternity of man. We go forth, indeed, encompassed with a great cloud of witnesses. I like to think of that one who has placed both the American colonies and the French Protestants in his debt. In one of the most dramatic moments of recent history, General Pershing, leading the American expeditionary forces, stood at Lafayette's tomb and uttered one eloquent sentence, fraught at once with historic comment and poetic justice:
"Marquis de Lafayette, we are here." Thus the Colonies repaid their debt. But another remains to be paid. Shall not we who are of Huguenot blood or Huguenot spirit, stand in imagination likewise beside that tomb, and remembering his fight for freedom and its challenge to us at this day, say, with the same high resolve, "Marquis de Lafayette, we are here"!