The war undertaken under Louis XIV against the Camisards, or the
Tremblers of Cevennes, is without a doubt, one of the saddest and most moving episodes in the history of France. Renewing the all-too-common atrocities in the wars of religion, from a purely military point of view it is perhaps less remarkable than by the innumerable cases of spontaneous sleepwalking, ecstasy, double sight, forecasts, and other similar phenomena that occurred throughout the course of that unfortunate crusade. These events, that were then believed to be supernatural, gave courage to the Calvinists, hunted in the mountains like wild beasts, at the same time as they made them be considered as possessed by the devil by some, and as enlightened by others; since these were among the causes that provoked and sustained the persecution, they play a primary and not an ancillary role; but how could historians appreciate them, when they lacked all the necessary elements to shed light onto their nature and reality? They could only distort them and present them from a false standpoint.
The new knowledge provided by magnetism and Spiritism alone could shed light on the question; however, since one cannot speak with truth of what one does not understand, or of what one has an interest in concealing, such knowledge was as necessary to do a complete and unprejudiced work on this subject, as geology and astronomy were to comment on the Genesis.
By demonstrating the true cause of those phenomena, and by proving that they are not outside the natural order, such knowledge has restored their true character. They also give the key to phenomena of the same kind that have occurred in many other circumstances and make it possible to distinguish between the possible from the legendary exaggeration.
Mr. Bonnemère, by combining the talent of the writer, and the knowledge of the historian, with a serious and practical study of Spiritism and magnetism, is in the best conditions to deal with the subject he has undertaken, with full knowledge of the facts and impartiality. The Spiritist idea has more than once been used in works of fantasy, but this is the first time
that Spiritism appears
nominally and as an element of control in a serious historical work; that is how it gradually takes its place in the world, and the forecasts of the Spirits are fulfilled.
Mr. Bonnemère's book will only come out between February 5
th to 10
th, but
some proofs having been shown to us, from which we extract the following passages that we are happy to be able to reproduce in advance. However, we removed the indicative notes from the supporting documents. We must add that it differs from works on the same subject by new documents that had not yet been published in France, so that it can be considered the most complete.
It is therefore recommended to the attention of our readers by more than one reason, who will be able to judge it by the following fragments:
“
The world has never seen anything like this war in the Cevennes. God, men, and demons were on the side; bodies and Spirits joined the struggle, and much differently from the Old Testament, the prophets guided warriors into battle who themselves seemed delighted beyond the ordinary conditions of life. Skeptics and scorners find it easier to deny; defeated, science fears to compromise itself, looks away and refuses to issue opinion. But since there are no historical facts that are more indisputable than these, as there are none that have been attested by so many witnesses, the mockery, the reasons for not accepting them can no longer be admitted. It was before the serious English people that the statements were legally collected, in the most solemn forms, dictated by refugee Protestants, and they were published in London, in 1707, when the remambrance of all these things was still alive in all memories, and the denials could have crushed them under their number, if they were false. We want to talk about the Sacred Theatre of the Cevennes, or the Report of the various wonders newly operated in that part of the Languedoc, from which we will make borrow long citations. The strange phenomena reported there sought neither the shadow nor mystery to occur; they manifested before the intendants, before the generals, before the bishops, as well as before the ignorant and simple-minded. Whoever wanted to, could have witnessed, and studied them. On September 25th, 1704, Villars wrote to Chamillard: "I saw in that, things that I would never have believed, if they had not happened before my eyes: an entire city, of which all women, without exception, seemed possessed by the devil. They trembled and prophesied publicly in the streets. I arrested twenty of the wickedest, one of whom had the boldness to tremble and prophesy before me. I had her arrested for the example and confine the others into hospitals.” Such procedures were required under Louis XIV, and to arrest a poor woman because an unknown force made her say things that did not suit her, before a marshal of France, could then be a way of acting that revolted no one, for it was so simple and natural and in the habits of the time. Today, we must have the courage to face the difficulty and seek less brutal and more convincing solutions. We don't believe in the wonderful or in the miracles. We will therefore explain naturally, to the best of our ability, this serious historical problem, which has remained unsolved until now. We will do that with the help of the lights that magnetism and Spiritism make available to us today, without pretending to impose these beliefs on anyone. It is unfortunate that we can only devote a few lines to what we understand would require a whole volume of developments. We will only say, to reassure the timid minds, that this does not offend Christian ideas in any way; as proof, we only need these two verses of the Gospel of St. Matthew: “But when they deliver you up, do not worry about how or what you should speak. For it will be given to you in that hour what you should speak; for it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father who speaks in you.” (Matthew X, 19-20)We leave it to the commentators to decide what is, in truth, that spirit of our Father which, at times, replaces us, speaks for us, and inspires us. Perhaps it could be said that every generation that disappears is the father and mother of the one who succeeds it, and that the best among those who seem to be no more, rising rapidly when freed from the shackles of the material body, come to borrow the organs of those of their sons whom they consider worthy to serve as their interpreters, and who will one day atone dearly for the misuse they have made of the precious faculties delegated to them. Magnetism awakens, overexcites, and develops in some somnambulists the instinct that nature has given to all beings for their healing, and that our incomplete civilization has stifled in us, to have them replaced by the false glimmers of science. The natural somnambulist puts his dream into action, that's all. He borrows nothing from others, can do nothing for them. The fluidic somnambulist, on the contrary, the one in whom the contact of the fluid of the magnetizer causes a bizarre state, feels imperiously tormented by the desire to relieve his brothers. He sees the evil or comes to indicate the remedy. The inspired somnambulist, who can eventually be fluidic at the same time, is the most richly gifted, and in him inspiration is maintained in the high spheres when spontaneously manifested. He one alone is a revealer; it is in him alone that progress resides, because only he is the echo, the docile instrument of a different and more advanced Spirit than his own. The fluid is a magnet that attracts the beloved dead to those who remain. It emerges abundantly from the inspired ones, awakening the attention of the beings who left first, and who are sympathetic to them. The latter, for their part, purified and enlightened by a better life, judge better, and know better these primitive, honest, passive creatures, who can serve as intermediaries in the order of facts that they believe useful to be revealed to them. In the previous century they were called ecstatic. Today they are mediums.Spiritism is the correspondence of souls with one another. According to the followers of that belief, an invisible being puts himself in communication with another, enjoying a particular organization that makes him able to receive the thoughts of those who have lived, and to write them, either by an unconscious, mechanical impulse that drives the hand, or by direct transmission to the intelligence of the mediums. If, for a moment, one wishes to give some credibility to these ideas, it will be easy to understand that the outraged souls of those martyrs whom the great king immolated every day, by the hundreds, came to watch over their loved ones, from whom they had been violently separated; that they supported them, guided them, consoled them in the midst of their harsh trials, inspired by their spirit; that they had announced to them in advance – something that happened many times – the perils that threatened them. Only a small number was truly inspired. The fluidic release that came out of them, as from certain superior and privileged beings, acted on that deeply troubled crowd that surrounded them, but without being able to develop, in most of them, anything other than the coarse and largely fallible phenomena of hallucination. Inspired and hallucinated, all claimed to prophesy, but they made a host of mistakes among which one could no longer discern the truths that the Spirit truly whispered to the first ones. That mass of hallucinated reacted in turn on the inspired ones, casting trouble in the middle of their manifestations... It was necessary, said Father Pluquet, extraordinary resources, prodigies, to sustain the faith of the disperse remnants of Protestantism. They broke out from all sides among the Reformed, during the first four years following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Voices so perfectly like the songs of the psalms, as the Protestants sing them, could not be taken for anything else, in the vicinity of places where there had once been temples, that they could not be mistaken for anything else. That melody was heavenly, and those angelic voices sang the psalms according to the version of Clément Marot and Théodore de Bèze. Those voices were heard in the Béarn, in the Cevennes, in Vassy, etc. Fugitive ministers were escorted by that divine chant, and even the trumpet did not abandon them until after they had crossed the borders of the kingdom. Jurieu carefully collected the testimonies of these wonders and concluded that "God, having made mouths in the middle of the air, it was an indirect reproach that the Providence made to the Protestants of France, for having been silent too easily." He dared to predict that in 1689 Calvinism would be re-established in France... Jurieu said: “The Spirit of the Lord will be with you; he will speak through the mouths of children and women, instead of abandoning you.” It was more than enough for persecuted Protestants to expect women and children to prophesy. A man held at home, in a glasswork shop hidden at the top of the mountain of Peyrat, in Dauphiné, a real school of prophecy. He was an old gentleman named Du Serre, born in the village of Dieu-le-Fit. Here the origins are a little obscure. It is said that he was initiated in Geneva into the practices of a mysterious art of which a small number of people passed on the secret. Gathering at home some young boys and some young girls, whose sensitivity and nervous system he had undoubtedly observed, he first subjected them to strict fasting; he acted powerfully on their imagination, stretched out his hands towards them as if to impose on them the Spirit of God, breathed on their foreheads, and made them fall as inanimate before him, eyes closed, asleep, limbs stiffened by catalepsy, insensitive to pain, not seeing or hearing anything of what was happening around them, but seeming to listen to inner voices speaking in them, and seeing splendid spectacles whose wonders they told. In that bizarre state, they spoke, they wrote, and then, returning to their ordinary state, they remembered nothing they had done, what they had said, what they had written. That is what Brueys says about those 'little sleeping prophets,' as he calls them. There we find the processes, well known today, of magnetism, and whoever wants to do so can reproduce the miracles of the old gentleman glassmaker in many ways... In 1701 there was a new explosion of prophets. They rained from the sky, they sprouted from the earth, and from the mountains of the Lozère to the shores of the Mediterranean, they counted in the thousands. The Catholics had taken their children away from the Calvinists: God used the children to protest such prodigious iniquity. The government of the great king only knew violence. Those prophet-children were arrested in mass, at random; the smallest were ruthlessly whipped, the bigger ones had the soles of their feet burned. Nothing helped, and there were more than three hundred in the prisons of Uzès, when the Faculty of Montpellier was ordered to move to that city to examine their condition. After careful consideration, the enlightened Faculty declared them "taken by fanaticism." Such beautiful solution of official science, that even today could not say much more on this issue, did not put an end to the overflowing wave of inspirations. Bâville then issued an ordinance (September 1701) to make parents responsible for the fanaticism of their children. Soldiers were placed at the discretion of all those who had not been able to divert their children from such dangerous profession, and they were condemned to arbitrary sentences. So, everything followed the complaints and clamors of those unfortunate parents. Violence was carried so far that to eliminate it, there were several people who denounced their own children or handed them over to the intendants and magistrates, telling them: "Here they are, we discharge them, make them lose the wish of prophesying, if possible." Vain efforts! The body was chained, tortured, but the Spirit remained free, and the prophets multiplied. In November, more than two hundred were removed from the Cévennes, "condemned to serve the king, some in his armies, others on the galleys" (Court de Gébelin). There were capital executions that did not spare even the women. A prophetess of Vivarais was hanged in Montpellier, because blood came out of her nose and eyes, which she called tears of blood, which she wept over the misfortunes of her co-religionists, over the crimes of Rome, and the papists... A dull irritation, a long-contained stream of anger had long been rumbling in all chests, at the end of those twenty years of intolerable iniquities. The patience of the victims did not stifle the fury of the executioners. Finally, they thought of repelling force by force... It was undoubtedly," said Brueys, "a very extraordinary and very new spectacle; we saw armed forces marching to fight small armies of prophets" (vol. I, p. 156). A strange sight, indeed, because the most dangerous among those little prophets defended themselves with stones, refugees on inaccessible heights. But most of the time they weren't even trying to defend their own lives. When the troops advanced to attack them, they boldly marched against them, shouting loudly: “Tartara! Tartara! Back Satan!” They believed, it was said, that the word “tartara”
should, like an exorcism, put their enemies on the run, that they themselves were invulnerable, or that they would be resurrected after three days if they were to succumb in the battle. Their illusions were not long-lasting on these various points, and soon they opposed the Catholics with more effective weapons. In two encounters, on the mountain of Chailaret, and not far from Saint-Genieys, a few hundred were killed, a good number were taken, and the rest seemed to disperse. Bâville judged the prisoners, had some of them hanged, and sent the rest to the galleys; and since none of this seemed to discourage the Reformed, they continued to chase the assemblies of the desert, to mercilessly slaughter those who went there, without them thinking of posing a serious resistance to their executioners still. According to the testimony of a prophetess named Isabeau Charras, recorded in the Sacred Theater of the Cevennes,
those unfortunate volunteer martyrs, forewarned by the revelations of the ecstatic, delivered themselves to the fate that awaited them; it reads: “The man named Jean Héraut, from our neighborhood, and four or five of his children with him, had inspirations. The two youngest were seven years old, the other five and a half years old, when they received the gift; I saw them many times in their ecstasies. Another of our neighbors, named Marliant, also had two sons and three daughters in the same situation. The eldest was married. Being about eight months pregnant, she went to a congregation with her siblings, and had her seven-year-old son with her. She was massacred there with her said child, one of her brothers and one of her sisters. The brother that was not killed, was wounded, but he healed; the youngest of the sisters was unharmed, left for dead with the slain bodies. The other sister was brought back to her father's house, still alive, but she died of the wounds a few days later. I was not in the assembly, but I saw the spectacle of those dead and wounded. What is most notable is that all these martyrs had been warned by the Spirit of what was to happen to them. They had told their father as they took leave of him and asked for his blessing, the same evening they left the house to be in the assembly to be held the following night. When the father saw all those deplorable events, he did not succumb to his pain, but on the contrary, he said with pious resignation: "The Lord has given it, the Lord has taken it away; may the name of the Lord be blessed!" It was from the son-in-law's brother, the two injured children and the whole family that I learned that all this had been predicted.” Eugène Bonnemère
[1] One volume, in-12, 3.5 francs, by mail 4 francs. Paris, Bookstores Décembre-Allonier.
