Heart and Soul of the Huguenot Faith

It has been testified to by many that psalmody was at the heart and soul of the French Huguenot faith. The singing of French psalms was outlawed by the Sorbonne in 1543, but to be a Huguenot was to be a psalm-singer, and vice-versa. They were sung while working around the house, walking through the street, in battle as well as in the sacred assembly, and at all times the words of David were upon the lips of the French faithful. It was a mark, a badge, of identity as a Protestant, and it was a reflection of one's covenant relationship to God and his people. If it is true as Andrew Fletcher said, that "if a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation," then the French Huguenot "état dans l'état" ("state within a state"), built as it was upon the foundation of God's Word, was a little Zoar, where l'Eternel (Pierre Robert Olivétan's term for the Tetragrammaton) was praised at all times, whether amidst hard providences or sweet.

Matthew Henry wrote in his Essay on Psalmody that:

And, to come nearer in our own day, that is worthy our notice which Mr. Quick, in the Introduction to his Synodicon, tells us, Vol. I. p. 5. That the singing of Psalms in families, even those of the best rank, not only at their morning and evening worship, but at their meals, conduced very much to the strength and growth of the reformed religion in France, in its first and best days.

John Quick, Synodicon in Gallia Reformata, Vol. 1, p. 5:

Clement Marot a Courtier, and a great Wit, was advised by Mr. Vatablus, Regius Professor of the Hebrew Tongue in the University of Paris, to consecrate his Muse unto God; which Counsel he embraceth, and translateth fifty of David's Psalms into French Meeter. Mr. Beza did the other hundred, and all the Scripture-Songs. Lewis Guadimel, another Asaph, or Jedathun, a most Skillful Master of Musick, set those sweet and melodious Tunes unto which they are sung even unto this day. This holy Ordinance charmed the Ears, Hearts and Affections of Court and City, Town and Country. They were sung in the Louvre, as well as in the Pres des Clerks, by the Ladies, Princes, yea and by Henry the Second himself. This one Ordinance only contributed mightily to the downfall of Popery, and the propagation of the Gospel. It took so much with the genius of the Nation, That all ranks and degrees of Men practiced it in the Temples and in their Families. No Gentleman professing the Reformed Religion, would sit down at his Table without praising God by singing. Yea it was a special part of their Morning and Evening Worship, in their several Houses, to sing God's Praises. The Popish Clergy raged, and to prevent the growth and spreading of the Gospel by it, that mischievous Cardinal of Lorrain, another Elymus the Sorcerer, got the Odes of Horace, and the filthy obscene Poems of Tibullus and Catallus to be turn'd into French, and sung in the Court. Ribaldry was his Piety, and the means used by him to expel and banish the singing of divine Psalms out of the prophane Court of France.

Great Lion of God

Pastor Jean Léger (1615-1670), Histoire générale des églises évangéliques des vallées de Piémont ou Vaudoises (1669):

...though [Joshua Gianavel] possessed the courage of a lion, he was as humble as a lamb, always giving to God the glory of his victories; well versed in Scripture, and understanding controversy, and of great natural talent.

Rora (2001) is a fictionalized account by James Byron Huggins of the remarkable true story of Joshua Gianavel (Giosuè Gianavello), a farmer-warrior who led the resistance to the famous 1655 Waldensian Massacre in the Valley of Piedmont at a little place called Rorà, Italy. I have enjoyed reading it and commend it highly.

Gianavel, whose story is told in John Foxe's Book of Martyrs, first spied soldiers attempting to attack his valley of Rorà as the Massacre was underway. Charles Emmanuel II, Duke of Savoy, had given the order for a general massacre of Waldensians to begin at 4:00 am, April 24, 1655. It was an unprovoked attack, the culmination of centuries of hostilities by French Catholics against peaceful Waldensians.

The Waldensians had borne witness to the true gospel for hundreds of years, and when the Reformation began, they sent emissaries to meet with German Reformers in 1526 and 1530. On behalf of the Swiss and German Reformed Churches, William Farel attended the Waldensian Synod of Chanforan in 1532, at which time the Waldensians officially joined the Reformation. That same year, John Calvin's cousin, Pierre Robert Olivétan, was charged with writing a translating of the Bible to be used by the Waldensians, which was published in 1535 as the French Olivétan Bible. King Francis I soon exterminated the Waldensians of France in 1545, but in 1561, the Treaty of Cavour permitted religious liberty to the Waldensians of Piedmont.

A century later, as hatred of the Waldensian "heretics" mounted amongst the Catholics who surrounded their homeland in the Alps, the Duke of Savoy launched his attack on the Valley, intending to wipe them out once and for all. When Gianavel spied the soldiers coming towards his village, he gathered together six other men, and successfully employed guerrilla warfare tactics to repel the invaders. Increasing waves of soldiers attacked the vastly outnumbered men of Rora but were consistently thwarted in their efforts to subdue the inhabitants, often returning to their base with many casualties of their own and no dead Waldensians to show for it. Thousands of Waldensians were slaughtered in other parts of the Valley, to be sure, men, women and children, but Rora was defended by a militia captain who trusted not in weapons or numbers, but in the Lord God. After each victorious skirmish, Gianavel and his men would kneel and worship God, returning thanks to him in prayer and often singing the eleventh Psalm.

The general commanding the Duke's forces, the Marquis de Pianessa, was enraged that his tactics were being thwarted by a handful of farmer peasants.

Foxe's Book of Martyrs 6.3-4:

The marquis of Pianessa was greatly enraged at being so much baffled by the few inhabitants of Roras: he, therefore, determined to attempt their expulsion in such a manner as could hardly fail of success.

With this view he ordered all the Roman, catholic militia of Piedmont to be raised and disciplined. When these orders were completed, he joined to the militia eight thousand regular troops, and dividing the whole into three distinct bodies, he designed that three formidable attacks should be made at the same time, unless the people of Roras, to whom he sent an account of his great preparations, would comply with the following conditions:

1. To ask pardon for taking up arms. 2. To pay the expenses of all the expeditions sent against them. 3. To acknowledge the infallibility of the pope. 4. To go to mass. 5. To pray to the saints. 6. To wear beards. 7. To deliver up their ministers. 8. To deliver up their schoolmasters. 9. To go to confession. 10. To pay loans for the delivery of souls from purgatory. 11. To give up captain Gianavel at discretion. 12. To give up the elders of their church at discretion.

The inhabitants of Roras, on being acquainted with these conditions, were filled with aa honest indignation; and, in answer, sent word to the marquis, that sooner than comply with them they would suffer three things, which, of all others, were the most obnoxious to mankind, viz,

1. Their estates to be seized. 2. Their houses to be burnt.— 3. Themselves to be murdered.

Exasperated at this message, the marquis sent them this laconic epistle.

To the obstinate Heretics inhabiting Roras. You shall have your request, for the troops sent against you have strict injunctions to plunder, burn, and kill.

PIANESSA.

The three armies were then put in motion, and the attacks ordered to be made thus: the first by the rocks of Vilaro; the second by the pass of Bagnol; and the third by the defile of Lucerne.

The troops forced their way by the superiority of numbers, and having gained the rocks, pass, and defile, began to make the most horrid depredations and exercise the greatest cruelties. Men they hanged, burnt, racked to death. or cut to pieces; women they ripped open, crucified, drowned, or threw from the precipices; and children they tossed upon spears, minced, cut their throats, or dashed out their brains. One hundred and twenty-six suffered in this manner, on the first day of their gaining the town.

Agreeable to the marquis of Pianessa's orders, they likewise plundered the estates, and burnt the houses of the people. Several protestants, however, made their escape, under the conduct of Captain Gianavel, whose wife and children were unfortunately made prisoners, and sent under a strong guard to Turin.

The marquis of Pianessa wrote a letter to captain Gianavel, and released a protestant prisoner that he might carry it him. The contents were, that if the captain would embrace the Roman catholic religion, he should be indemnified for all his losses since the commencement of the war; his wife and children should be immediately released, and himself honourably promoted in the duke of Savoy's army; but if he refused to accede to the proposals made him, his wife and children should be to put death; and so large a reward should be given to take him, dead or alive, that even some of his own confidential friends should be tempted to betray him, from the greatness of the sum.

To this epistle, the brave Gianavel sent the following answer.

My Lord Marquis,

There is no torment so great or death so cruel, but what I would prefer to the abjuration of my religion: so that promises lose their effects, and menaces only strengthen me in my faith.

With respect to my wife and children, my lord, nothing can be more afflicting to me than the thoughts of their confinement, or more dreadful to my imagination, that their suffering a violent and cruel death. I keenly feel all the tender sensations of husband and parent; my heart is replete with every sentiment of humanity; I would suffer any torment to rescue them from danger; I would die to preserve them.

But having said thus much, my lord, I assure you that the purchase of their lives must not be the price of my salvation. You have them in your power it is true; but my consolation is, that your power is only a temporary authority over their bodies: you may destroy the mortal part, but their immortal souls are out of your reach, and will live hereafter to bear testimony against you for your cruelties. I therefore recommend them and myself to God, and pray for a reformation in your heart. Joshua Gianavel.

Gianavel was able to save his young son from the ruins of his village, and brought him north to be cared for by relatives, but in fact, his wife and three daughters were burned alive.

Oliver Cromwell and his diplomats, including John Milton, as well as other Protestant nations, pressured the French and Savoy governments to cease persecution of the Waldensians, but the war continued until relative peace was achieved by the Patente de Turin of 1664, which, however, excluded Gianavel from the terms of amnesty. He retired to Geneva, where he served the Waldensian cause in other indirect ways. After the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, Victor Amadeus II, Duke of Savoy was pressured into violating the peace terms and renewing the effort to exterminate the Waldensians of the Valley. When Waldensian refugees entered Geneva in 1686, the aged militia captain was there to greet them in a memorable, emotional embrace.

One of Milton's most famous sonnets was written in 1655 in response to the Massacre.

John Milton, Sonnet XVIII: On the Late Massacre in Piedmont:

Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughter'd saints, whose bones

Lie scatter'd on the Alpine mountains cold,

Ev'n them who kept thy truth so pure of old,

When all our fathers worshipp'd stocks and stones;

Forget not: in thy book record their groans

Who were thy sheep and in their ancient fold

Slain by the bloody Piemontese that roll'd

Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans

The vales redoubl'd to the hills, and they

To Heav'n. Their martyr'd blood and ashes sow

O'er all th' Italian fields where still doth sway

The triple tyrant; that from these may grow

A hundred-fold, who having learnt thy way

Early may fly the Babylonian woe.

The Accusative Case

Among the stories told of John Calvin, it is often stated, by his friends and enemies, that in his youth, as a student, he was nicknamed accusativus, or, The Accusative Case, for his severe censoriousness of others' morals. In fact, to set the record straight, it was not a contemporary label for him but one that was first employed a century later by a hostile biographer (see in particular the research of Abel Lefranc, La Jeunesse de Calvin; and Emilé Doumergue, Jean Calvin, Vol. 1, pp. 73-75).

John Thomas McNeill, The History and Character of Calvinism, pp. 98-99:

The College de Montaigu proved, indeed, a suitable nursery for Calvin's mind. It is usual to suggest that he was at this stage an unsocial being, austere and harshly critical and condemnatory of his fellow students. The statement is attributed his opponent, Francois Baudouin, that as an undergraduate Calvin was commonly called 'the accusative case.' Actually Baudouin wrote nothing to this effect. The statement apparently originated with another hostile writer, Lavasseur [Jacques Le Vasseur], more than a century later (1633). It has been gleefully repeated as history many times, even since the facts were exposed by Emile Doumergue. It is an example of how misstatements gain credence. Actually what it probably rests upon is a remark by Baudouin that Calvin's cousin, Olivétan, was nicknamed 'the ablative case' because of his eagerness to 'throw off' his academic gown after lecture. Beza, however, in his Life of Calvin states that as a student Calvin was a censor of the vices of his fellows, and we may well believe this. Perhaps what Gregory the Great said of St. Benedict might truly be said of Calvin also: 'From his younger years he carried always the mind of an old man.' He gave an impression not only of studiousness but of maturity.

But there is no evidence that young Calvin was uncompanionable: much, indeed, to the contrary. He maintained good relations with his former schoolfellows of the de Heangest familes, with three of whom, and their tutor, he had come to Paris. He was closely associated with his scholarly cousin, Pierre Robert Olivier (Olivétan), three years his senior, whom he had known also in Noyon. He became a welcome guest in the homes of two of the greatest men of the university, Guillaume Cop, a medical scholar and the king's physician, and Guillaume Budé, the most learned Hellenist of France and the most effective liberal opponent of Beza. Calvin formed close ties with the sons of both these distinguished men, and later both families were represented among French religious refugees to Geneva. Through his influence a number of the de Hangest family also later became Protestants; but not his best companion among them, Claude. All the facts belie the picture of young Calvin as morose. It would be difficult, indeed, to discover a teen-age student of his time who attracted so many choice friends. The fact that his friends were not of the rank and file, and that they were all older than he, has no doubt some significance. We may suppose that as a student he felt no attraction toward intellectual mediocrity.