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May 11, 2009
« Les camisards » : rewind to April 30, 1598. (1/9)
Not all French films are equally foreign audience friendly. What about one which hopes to lure moviegoers with « The French Calvinists » as its international English title ?
Truth be told, René Allio’s « Les camisards » also scared away many French viewers under its original name.
As the film begins, things do not get any better : words start to roll down the screen. Who goes to the movies to read ?
Particularly about old French History lessons : « la révocation de l’édit de Nantes » ? Hopefully, if you are French, the words ring a distant bell and awake vague memories.
If you are not, you have no memories to awake, but an education to be made : French History shall rewind further, from revoking the Nantes edict to signing it first.
The « édit de Nantes » was signed on April 30, 1598. Topping negotiations between Henri IV, a former Protestant who had converted to Catholicism to become king, and Protestant leaders, it put an end to the French religious wars and guaranteed French Protestants religious freedom in the kingdom.
The « édit de Nantes » was revoked nearly one century later, in 1685, by another « édit » -« de Fontainebleau »- which outlawed Protestantism in France and followed twenty five years of increasingly forced conversions of Protestants to Catholicism.
Most historians agree the revocation had disastrous economic consequences for France : about 300,000 Protestants, or « hugenots », among them a majority of « bourgeois » and craftsmen, left for Switzerland, England and its American colonies, the Netherlands and their own colonies of New Amsterdam (soon to be lost to England and renamed New York) and Cape Town : South African vineyards and Springboks rugby players called Du Prez or De Villiers are the « revocation » distant offspring.
Why was the « édit de Nantes » revoked ? For geopolitical reasons, having to do with the changing tides of France alliances with or against the Protestant countries of Europe -England and the Netherlands- and its relationships with the Pope.
Also because Louis XIV was then king, his motto was « L’état c’est moi » : « I Am the State », and a Paragon of absolute power could hardly accept that some of his subjects professed a different religion than his.
« Les camisards » starts seventeen years after the « édit de Nantes » was revoked, in 1702, when Protestants revolted in Gévaudan and les Cévennes, on the south-eastern flank of Massif Central.
(Are « les camisards » « French Calvinists » as per the film English international title or French Protestants, and what is the difference ? The words « Protestants » and « Protestantism » shall here refer to any religious cult deriving from Luther’s Reformation.)
The film was mostly shot around the city of Florac, which today belongs to Lozère, the least populated « département » in France after Creuse and the location for Pierre Jolivet’s « Le frère du guerrier ».
The mostly wild and mountainous region was hundreds of kilometres from Versailles and Louis XIV’s supposed absolute power : the southern outskirts of Massif Central had traditionally been home to many revolts and heresies, including the famous -or notorious- « Cathares ».
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