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The Huguenot Exodus after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes

c. 1681–1700 · Europe & Northern Eurasia

Displacement Abduction (Children)

Displaced

180,000

Estimated rather than counted, because emigration was illegal and clandestine. France's Protestant population before the Revocation is usually put at 700,000-900,000. Departures are conventionally estimated at 140,000-200,000 over roughly two decades, reconstructed from the registers of the receiving churches and relief funds in the Dutch Republic, England, Brandenburg-Prussia, Switzerland and the Cape, which recorded refugees for charitable and settlement purposes. Contemporary French official figures were suppressed and contemporary Protestant claims of 400,000 or more are not supported by the receiving records.

Share of the population affected

21%

of the Protestant population of France before the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, 1681

Open on the interactive map →

What happened

From the late 1670s the French Crown escalated pressure on the Protestant minority protected since 1598 by the Edict of Nantes: churches were demolished, professions closed, and from 1681 dragoons were billeted on Protestant households with licence to coerce conversions. The Edict of Fontainebleau of October 1685 revoked toleration entirely, ordered ministers into exile within a fortnight and forbade lay Protestants to leave the kingdom. Perhaps 140,000-200,000 left in defiance of that ban, most to the Dutch Republic, England, the Swiss cantons and Brandenburg-Prussia, whose Edict of Potsdam invited them; smaller groups reached Ireland, Scandinavia, North America and the Dutch Cape Colony. The refugees were disproportionately urban, skilled and literate, and the receiving states competed for them, which is why their arrival is comparatively well recorded. Those who stayed were legally Catholic; clandestine worship in the Cevennes and elsewhere led to the Camisard war of 1702-10.

Parties

Louis XIV outlawed Protestantism in France, quartered dragoons on Protestant households to force conversion, and banned emigration; between one in five and one in three Huguenots fled anyway

Disputed

The total number of emigrants is estimated from receiving-country records rather than counted, and ranges from about 140,000 to over 200,000; the older claim that the exodus caused France's relative economic decline is disputed by economic historians.

The denominator

French Protestants are usually estimated at 800,000-900,000 in the early 1680s, out of a French population of about 20 million, concentrated in Languedoc, the Cévennes, Poitou, Béarn and Normandy. Estimates of the emigration to the Dutch Republic, England, Brandenburg-Prussia, Switzerland and the colonies range from about 140,000 to 200,000, that is roughly one in five of the Protestant population.

Where the baseline comes from

Edict of Fontainebleau — Wikipediaopen-edited
Huguenots — Wikipediaopen-edited

On the death toll

There was no mass killing. Deaths arose from the dragonnades, from imprisonment and galley sentences imposed on those caught attempting to leave, and from the hazards of clandestine flight; the numbers are small relative to the displacement and are not reliably totalled.

Documented forms of violence

TortureArbitrary DetentionForced LabourCultural DestructionAbduction of Children

The dragonnades' use of billeting, beatings and sleep deprivation to compel abjuration, the sentencing of intercepted emigrants to the galleys and of women to prisons such as the Tour de Constance, the demolition of temples, and the removal of Protestant children to Catholic instruction are set out in the Revocation edict and its enforcement orders and in the refugee testimonies collected in the receiving countries.

Movements mapped

France → Geneva and the Swiss cantons
La Rochelle and the west → England and Ireland50,000
France → the Dutch Republic60,000
France → Brandenburg-Prussia20,000
France → the Cape of Good Hope200

Countries touched, on present-day borders

France, Switzerland, Jersey, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Germany, South Africa

Sources

This entry rests only on reference, press or open-edited sources. Treat its figures as indicative and follow the links before relying on them.