Those who stayed behind, then, were those who could not leave: The poor, the weak, the ones who lacked social connections. Already beset with hardship, their lives were about to become immeasurably worse—decades of brutal persecution were on the way. I remember hearing, as a child, stories that had been passed down for almost three centuries about how the king’s loutish soldiers—the Dragons—would occupy a village and garrison the most brutal beasts of the regiment in Huguenot homes. The Dragons frequently brutalized young and old, raped girls and women, and coaxed or beat small children into “conversions,” which resulted in their being carted off to Catholic institutions. Able-bodied men were arrested at whim and forced to serve in the king’s galleys, where they were treated no better than slaves.

All this, however, ceased immediately for those who accepted the benevolent authority of the Roman Catholic Church. Indeed, the dragonnades were highly effective in this regard: Once comprising more than 10 percent of the French population, Protestants gradually decreased to their current level of only 1 to 2 percent. But just as persecutions of the Jews always ended in a regrouping of survivors and a defiant shout of “Am Israel Chai” (“The people of Israel lives”), Protestant life, too, regrouped and carried on, although often away from the public eye. In the cities of the North, for example, the destruction of our temples led to a life of secrecy and dissimulation, not dissimilar to the case of the Spanish Marranos. Thus did Protestants lead an openly Catholic life, but privately educate their children in the ways of their true religion, meeting secretly at one another’s homes to conduct religious services. This tradition of “family services,” complete with private harmoniums, continued long after the persecutions ended, well into the twentieth century.

In the mountainous region of the Cévennes in southern France, the Protestants took valiant measures in response to Catholic torment. Inspired by the story of Judah Maccabee, the leader of the Jewish revolt against the Greeks in the first century B.C.E., the Camisards, or Protestant peasants, took up arms against the king’s armies and retreated to hideouts in remote places. There, they held large religious services called “assemblies in the desert.” To these southern Huguenots—for whom the study of the Jewish and Christian Bibles was often the only education they ever received—it was natural to understand their own fate through the eyes of ancient Jewish history. Calling themselves “the people of the desert,” they preached about the corruption of Babylon (Louis’ France) and Joshua’s victories.

The libels that were used to justify anti-Protestantism were also often inspired by old anti-Semitic canards. Whereas Jews were accused of murdering Christian children, Protestants were said to abide by a religious obligation to kill their own children if they expressed interest in conversion. In 1762, Jean Calas, a Toulouse Protestant, was executed on these grounds after his son’s suicide. It took a three-year campaign by Voltaire, then Europe’s most prominent intellectual, for the courts to acknowledge that evidence in the case against Calas had been forged, and that he was, in fact, innocent.

The persecution of French Protestants ended shortly before the French Revolution and never returned again, except for a short, chaotic period in 1815, when Catholics sought revenge against all forces associated with the Revolution. The Huguenots’ emphasis on education, their positive attitude towards work, their strong business ethics, and the survival skills they learned during the times of persecution all ensured that, from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards, we have been significantly over-represented in the French economic and political establishment. Yet the memories of our ill-treatment at the hands of the Catholics persist. During the long decades of quiet, Protestants would reflect on their troubled past by emphasizing the parallels with Jewish history. Interestingly, French Jews had the same reaction; they, too, tended to view the age-old persecution of Jews in other European countries through the lens of France’s treatment of the Huguenots.

The feeling of parallel destinies between French Protestants and Jews has informed a considerable amount of literature in both communities.¹⁶ The similarity, for example, between the 1492 Spanish expulsion and the 1685 French Revocation is striking: Both events not only created catastrophic suffering, but also impoverished the persecuting country through the forced exile of a talented elite. Thus did nineteenth-century French Jewish historians such as Jassuda Bedarride and Léon Halévy explain Jewish suffering to their readers by means of a comparison with the treatment of the Huguenots, and, after France was defeated by Germany in the war of 1870, the French Jewish scholar Michel Bréal published the book A Few Words on Primary Education in France, in which he explained France’s recent defeat by the country’s failure to adopt the Protestant faith and the high value that this faith places on education.¹⁷ Huguenot writers had likewise sympathized with the Jewish people since the Revocation in 1685. Jacques Basnage, for example, a victim of the Revocation forced to leave France, published in Rotterdam in 1706 the first comprehensive History of the Jews, which describes the 1492 Spanish expulsion of the Jews in terms so moving they could only stem from the feeling of shared experience: “Thousands of banished Jews whom starvation and poverty destroyed… who had to leave everything and incur manifest threats to life.”¹⁸

The feeling of solidarity created by parallel histories explains why many Protestants spontaneously sided with the Jews when anti-Semitism returned to haunt France, first during the Dreyfus affair at the end of the nineteenth century and then, most tragically, after the French surrender to Nazi Germany in 1940 and the subsequent dark times of Philippe Pétain’s collaborationist, anti-Semitic, and murderous regime.

The Dreyfus affair was a singularly traumatic event for French Jews, who realized that even in France—a country that had not persecuted them actively for centuries, and where all professions were open to them—public sentiment could turn against them in a moment. Yet the Dreyfus affair was not, as some Jews at the time believed it to be, the result of a brutal reversal in French attitudes. Rather, it was the culmination of an anti-modernity movement that had been spurred by France’s defeat by Germany in 1870.

This defeat took place after four decades of peace and modernization, during which the industrial revolution had finally reached France, infrastructures had grown dramatically, and a modern financial system had been created. When this process of modernization ended in an unprecedented and humiliating defeat, it gave a new lease on life to the whole gamut of reactionary, anti-modernist hatreds that had long been brewing in the depths of rural Catholic France. Of course, anti-Semitism was one of these hatreds. But anti-Semitism, in nineteenth-century France, was still systematically coupled with anti-Protestantism. Both communities were accused of placing money above national loyalty and entertaining dubious links with foreign countries. Both epitomized the modern world of capitalism and open societies, a world that France’s reactionary writers loved to hate. As the great thinker Ernest Renan wrote in 1883, “The enemies of Judaism are, generally speaking, enemies of the modern mind.”¹⁹ The anti-Semitic writers who flourished at the turn of the century-Edouard Drumont, Auguste Chirac,²⁰ Charles Maurras—all included in their obsessive hatred not only the Jews, but also capitalism, the Freemasons, and the Huguenots. In 1899, a minor writer in this bile-spewing school, Ernest Renault, focused his loathing on the anti-Protestant niche, authoring a pamphlet called The Protestant Danger.