Protestantism in France From Death of Henry IV to the Revolution - James Aitken Wylie

Though but the crowning act of a treacherous,
cruel, and most tyrannical policy under which they
had groaned for years, the Revocation fell upon the
Huguenots like a thunder-bolt. Their eyes opened
on blank desolation ! Not a single safe-guard had
been left them; not a single right of conscience, or
of property, or of body of which they had not been
stripped. The fact seemed too terrible to be real; the
crime -- the folly -- too stupendous for any king to
commit! The Protestants amounted to between one
and two millions; their factories and workshops
were to be found in nearly all parts of France; their
commerce and merchandise upheld its great cities,
their energy and enterprise were the life of the
nation; and to be all at once flung beyond the, pale
of law, beyond the pale of humanity! They were
stupefied.
But they soon found that the first blow was far
indeed from exhausting the calamities with which
this measure was pregnant. The edict opened out in
a series of oppressions to which they could see
neither limit nor end. Troops were sent into the
provinces to execute it. As an inundation breaks in,
85