1762: Francois Rochette and the Grenier brothes, the last Huguenot martyrs in France

In September 1761, a man named Francois Rochette was detained in Toulouse, France, having been arrested traversing the nearby countryside on suspicion of being one of that area’s robbers.

Rochette was not a robber.

He was much, much worse: a Huguenot minister.

Interrogation soon made the situation clear. Technically, his heretical calling could subject Rochette to the death penalty, but the authorities weren’t going to be unreasonable about this — and “as Rochette was not surprised in the exercise of his function, he might easily have escaped by concealing his profession. Those, who interrogated him went even so far as to point out to him this means of acquittal.”

Every legal regime needs a bit of discretion, a bit of look-the-other-wayism, lest the letter of the law excite a judicial slaughter that public sentiment could never support.

Francois Rochette wasn’t interested in signing himself off a clerk or a cloth-merchant and being on his cagey way. He would not elide his calling: would not abet an other-way look.

Rochette’s obstinately overt Protestantism and the prospect of juridical proceedings against him put the whole city on edge. Catholics and Huguenots armed themselves, bracing for a horrid St. Bartholomew’s Day replay. Three brothers named Grenier hastened to Toulouse to aid their fellow-Huguenots, and were arrested; miraculously, the feared citywide bloodbath never quite materialized.

But now Francois Rochette and his Grenier backers would stand trial, in an environment where authorities were disposed to view their offense as one not merely of wrongthink but of stirring up a civic disturbance and endangering the city itself. They were accordingly condemned to death by a now-stringent court for their literally dangerous heresy on February 18, 1762.

That night, the Huguenots’ last on earth, inevitably featured a visitation of Catholic priests come to save their souls.

“It is for your salvation,” said they, “that we are here.” The answer of one of the prisoners was, “If you were at Geneva, ready to die in your bed (for no one is slain there on account of his religion), would you be pleased if four ministers came, under the pretence of zeal, to persecute you until your last breath? Do not, then unto others that which you would not wish to be done unto yourselves.”

This is from the public-domain History of the Protestants of France, to whom we turn the fatal narration.

On the 19th of February, at two o’clock in the afternoon, the mournful procession started on its way. Rochette was, according to the terms of the sentence, bare-headed, bare-footed, with a halter hung about his neck, from which, before and behind, labels were suspended, with these words, Minister of the pretended Reformed religion.

When the array passed before the church of Saint Etienne, an attempt was made to force him, in pursuance of the terms of the Parliament’s condemnation, to kneel with a torch of yellow wax in his hand, and to ask pardon of God, the king, and justice, for all his crimes and misdeeds.

Rochette stepped down from the tumbril, and instead of abjuring or making a confession which his heart denied, he pronounced on his knees the following words: “I beseech God to pardon me for all my sins, and I firmly believe that they have been washed away by the blood of Jesus Christ, who has redeemed us so dearly. I have no pardon to ask of the king, whom I have ever honoured as the Lord’s annointed, and loved as the father of my native land; I have ever been a good and faithful subject, and of this I believe my judges to be convinced. I have always preached to my flock patience, obedience, and submission; and my sermons, which you possess, are summed up in these words: ‘Fear God, honour the king.’ If I have contravened the law touching religious assemblies, it was by God’s commandments I contravened them; God must be obeyed before men. As for justice and the law, I am guilty of no offence against them, and I pray God may pardon my judges.”

Every door, balcony, window, roof, and approach near to the place of execution, was covered with spectators. “Toulouse,” says Count de Gebelin, an eye-witness, who related these circumstances, “Toulouse, that city drunk with the blood of martyrs, seemed a Protestant town. People asked what was the creed of these heretics; and when they heard our martyrs speak of Jesus Christ and of his death, every one was surprised and afflicted. They were infinitely touched, also, with the lofty, yet mild bearing of the three brothers, which compelled their admiration almost as much as the inexpressible serenity of the minister, whose graceful and spiritual physiognomy, whose words full of firmness and courage, and whose youth, filled every beholder with interest, knowing, as all did, that he only died because he disdained to save his life by a lie.”

Rochette was executed first. He exhorted his companions until the end, and sang the canticle of the Protestant martyrs: This is the blessed day. “Die a Catholic,” said the executioner, moved with pity. “Judge which is the better religion,” replied Rochette, “that which persecutes, or that which is persecuted.”

The youngest of the thre brothers (he was only twenty-two years of age), hid his face in his hands to shut out this tragic scene. The two others contemplated it with calmness. As they were gentlemen, their sentence was, to be beheaded. Tyembraced each other, recommending their souls to God. The eldest offered his head to the axe first. When it came to the turn of the last, the executioner said: “You have seen your brothers die; change, lest you perish like them.” “Do thy duty,” said the martyr, and his head rolled upon the scaffold.

Count de Gebelin adds, as he concludes his recital: “Everyone present returned home in silence, in a state of consternation, and unable to persuade themselves that there could be such courage and such cruelty in the world; and I, who describe it, cannot refrain from tears of joy and sadness, as I contemplate their blessed lot, and that our church should be still capable of affording examples of piety and firmness that will compare with the most illustrious monuments of the primitive church.”

It was only days later — March 10, 1762 — that Toulouse followed up this example of piety and firmness by breaking Jean Calas on the wheel in another prosecution of a Huguenot driven by sectarian sentiment (albeit not directly for heresy, in the Calas case).

Backlash against the Calas case, led by Voltaire, helped put to the fore the long-percolating Enlightenment values of tolerance. Official persecution of Protestants slackened greatly in the years to come and never again rose to a death penalty situation; the whole policy was officially revoked in 1787.

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1632: Henri II de Montmorency

On this date in 1632, French noble Henri II de Montmorency was beheaded at Toulouse for rebellion against Louis XIII.

The lordly Montmorency (English Wikipedia page | French), sister to a famous knockout whom Henri IV wooed, was a Grand Admiral for his achievements knocking heads during the 1620s’ Huguenot rebellions. (It was Montmorency who, in the naval battle to capture Re Island, commanded the English ships controversially supplied by the Duke of Buckingham.)

His undoing? He hated Cardinal Richelieu‘s guts.

The red eminence had just attained his rank as Louis XIII’s consigliere, and set about using it to centralize the state in the king’s hands.

Toward that end, Richelieu pressed Montmorency to give up his “grand admiral” title, fearing that “grand” military generals running around the realm were liable to become a locus of sedition sooner or later. Similarly, Richelieu reduced Montmorency’s power as governor of Languedoc.* He wanted, altogether, fewer stumbling-blocks of leftover feudal authority laying about his absolute monarchy.

A seething Montmorency finally jumped — or was he pushed? — into outright rebellion in the party (French) of treacherous royal brother Gaston, duc d’Orleans. The rebel force barely materialized, and was easily beaten at Castelnauday.

Orleans fled the country, not half so committed to his revolt as Montmorency — who assailed the king’s lines practically alone. The latter, captured wounded on the battlefield, was attested to have given a ferocious account of himself in a hopeless cause: “seeing a single man charge through seven ranks and still fight at the seventh, he judged that that man could be only M. de Motmorency.”

Jolly good show, and all the more reason for Richelieu to take his head, to make an example of the man to other powerful men who demanded clemency for the rebellion as if it were Montmorency’s birthright. Richelieu would argue in his memoirs that this pitiless act to pacify the realm at the risk of his own popularity was the height of patriotism.


Plaque at the spot of Montmorency’s execution in Toulouse. Image (c) [Cova] and used with permission.

The Montmorency title eventually became that of the Dukes of Enghien, in which guise it’s associated with an altogether more famous execution.

* Among Montmorency’s other titles, less obnoxious to Richelieu, was viceroy of New France — that mysterious land across the Atlantic. There’s a Montmorency Falls in Quebec, named for him by Champlain.

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1619: Lucilio Vanini, aka Giulio Cesare

On this date* in 1619, Italian freethinker Lucilio Vanini was adorned with a placard reading ‘Ateiste et blasphemateur du nom de Dieu’ and taken to Toulouse’s Place du Salin where he had his blasphemous tongue cut out,** then was strangled and burned at the stake.

You can think of Vanini as a sort of Giordano Bruno mini-me — a bit less intellectually distinguished, a bit less famous, but doing the same peripatetic, pantheistic act before orthodoxy ran him down.

Ordained a priest (like Bruno), Vanini’s 34 years were spent perambulating (like Bruno): France, Switzerland, the Low Countries, even England, where he briefly auditioned Anglicanism.

Alas, (like Bruno) the libertine monk’s occult philosophy had no real home; he fled Paris for Toulouse (the place Bruno earned his doctorate), and was there charged with blasphemy.

Vanini veiled his dangerous speculations in nominally pietistic cant, but he probably could have done better misdirection than a title like De Admirandis Naturae Reginae Deaeque Mortalium Arcanis (Of the Marvelous Secrets of the Queen and Goddess Nature — available in Latin from Google books).

Vanini was bold enough to suggest an equivalency between human and animal souls, and reckon both mortal. Though his works purported to prove the existence of God, and he even made to his accusers a version of the “first cause” argument, they thought (probably rightly) he wasn’t being serious.

They also thought (again, probably rightly) Vanini and his aristocratic patrons were debauched; Vanini’s execution kicked off a dangerous crisis for hedonists in France and elsewhere in the 1620s.

There’s much more about Vanini in French here, and in English in this chapter of the public-domain The Skeptics of the Italian Renaissance.

* Some sources report Feb. 19. The source of this discrepancy isn’t clear to me; the then-10-day gap between the Julian and Gregorian calendars is an obvious suspect, but as this execution took place in Catholic France, the modern Gregorian calendar had been adopted decades before.

In any event, primary documentation appears to me to support the 9th.

” le samedi neuvième du mois de février … fut donné arrêt au rapport de M. de Catel, conseiller au parlement, par lequel il [Vanini] fut condamné à être traîné sur une claie, droit à l’Eglise Saint-Etienne, où il serait dépouillé en chemise, tenant un flambeau ardent en main, la hart [la corde avec laquelle on étranglait les criminels.] au col, et, tout à genoux devant la grande porte de la dite église, demanderait pardon à Dieu, au roi, à la justice, et de là … serait conduit à la place du Salin où, assis sur un poteau, la langue lui serait coupée, puis serait étranglé, son corps brûlé et réduit en cendres; ce qui fut exécuté le même jour.”

** “Before putting fire to the stake, Vanini was ordered to put forth his sacrilegious tongue for the knife. He refused; it was necessary to employ pincers to draw it forth, and when the executioner’s instrument seized and cut it off never was heard a more horrible cry. One might have thought that he heard the bellowing of an ox which was being slaughtered.” (Source) This account of the magistrate Gramont has to be considered in view of his interest in showing the condemned inadequate to his jaunty resolve, “Let us go, let us go joyfully to die, as becomes a philosopher.”

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