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The French Huguenots: A Reformed Reader’s Guide

~ 25 minute read

The Huguenots were the French branch of the Reformed church. They received their doctrine from Scripture, confessed it publicly in 1559, ordered their churches through pastors and elders, and sang the Psalms in their own language.

This guide introduces that church from the first French evangelicals through persecution, exile, and the Refuge. The historical sections are brief by design, and they don’t replace the fuller histories linked below. The quotations, confessions, primary texts, and reading list are the heart of the guide.

Two companion articles tell the most important episodes in greater depth: Faith Under Fire covers the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, while The American Huguenot follows Louis DuBois from Europe to New Paltz.

The Church never triumphs except under the cross.¹

Theodore Bezaquoted in Christian History, Issue 71

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Who Were the Huguenots?

The name Huguenot appeared in French sources during the 1550s, usually as a term used against the Reformed. We can’t settle its origin. One explanation connects it to the German Eidgenossen, the oath-companions of the Swiss cantons; another links it to a story about King Huguon and a gate at Tours where Protestants supposedly gathered at night.²

The people themselves usually spoke of the Religion or called themselves Reformed. They were Calvinist in doctrine, Presbyterian in government, and French in language. Their churches were governed by consistories, colloquies, provincial synods, and a national synod. The French Confession of 1559 stated their faith in the same Reformed family as the Belgic Confession and the Heidelberg Catechism.

At their height around 1560, the Huguenots may have numbered about two million in a kingdom of eighteen to twenty million people. They were strongest in parts of the south and west, including Poitou, La Rochelle, Languedoc, the Cévennes, the Dauphiné, and Béarn. Paris remained overwhelmingly Roman Catholic and close to royal power.

The Reformed faith reached artisans, printers, merchants, lawyers, university teachers, and members of the nobility. That breadth gave the churches unusual strength, but it also pulled them into the political struggles of the French crown. The Huguenots were a church before they were a political cause, and their worship shows what they meant to preserve.

A congregation gathered around the preached Word and the Lord’s Table. Believers sang metrical Psalms in French, brought their children for baptism, received the Supper, and lived under the care of pastors and elders. Church buildings were called temples and were arranged so the congregation could hear the Word plainly.

Persecution began early. The Affair of the Placards in 1534 hardened King Francis I against the evangelicals, and the special court later called the chambre ardente, the burning chamber, prosecuted alleged heresy. Jean Crespin preserved the names and testimony of the early martyrs in the book that became the great martyrology of French Protestantism.³

The Huguenot cross later gave the scattered church a recognizable emblem. Its Maltese form, descending dove, and remembered association with persecution made it a confession that could be worn quietly when public Reformed worship was forbidden.⁴

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Before Calvin: The First French Evangelicals

The French Reformation did not begin with Calvin. In the early 1520s, Bishop Guillaume Briçonnet gathered a circle of scholars and preachers at Meaux, east of Paris. The most important was Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, an older biblical scholar who had already taught justification by grace through faith in his commentary on Paul.

It is God alone, who by his grace through faith justifies unto eternal life.⁵

Jacques Lefèvre d’ÉtaplesCommentary on the Epistles of St. Paul (1512)

Lefèvre pressed the point further in his exposition of Ephesians. Salvation, including the faith by which the sinner receives Christ, belongs to God’s gift.

By grace alone can we be saved. For we are saved by his grace through faith, saved not because of ourselves, but by God’s grace. For grace is a gift, not a work. And lest we should think that the faith by means of which we are justified is ours, even this is God’s gift. Therefore we should attribute everything to God and nothing to ourselves.⁶

Jacques Lefèvre d’ÉtaplesCommentary on The Epistles of St. Paul (1512)

He translated the New Testament into French in 1523 and the Psalms the following year. Briçonnet paid to have the books printed and distributed among ordinary people. Lefèvre rejoiced to see the knowledge of Christ spreading beyond the schools and into the churches.

O gracious God, how great is my joy to see this grace of the pure knowledge of Christ now spreading through so much of Europe!⁷

Jacques Lefèvre d’ÉtaplesLetter to Guillaume Farel (1524)

Guillaume Farel carried the same gospel into the French-speaking lands as a forceful preacher who called hearers away from every refuge but Christ.

Trust in him and you will be assured, and come to him only and no other.⁸

Guillaume FarelA Summary and Brief Declaration (1529)

Farel is best remembered for confronting Calvin at Geneva in 1536, when he warned the reluctant scholar against refusing the church’s call.

He proceeded to utter the imprecation, that God would curse my retirement, and the tranquillity of the studies which I sought, if I should withdraw and refuse to give assistance, when the necessity was so urgent.⁹

John Calvin, on FarelPreface to the Commentary on the Psalms (Beveridge)

Pierre Viret supplied a different temperament. He was known for patient argument, clear French prose, and a pastoral gentleness that made difficult doctrine accessible to ordinary readers.

No, I will not believe because of Tertullian or Cyprian, or Origen, or Chrysostom, or Peter Lombard, or Thomas Aquinas, not even because of Erasmus or Luther… If I did so, I should be the disciple of men… I will believe only Jesus Christ my Shepherd.¹⁰

Pierre Viretquoted in J. H. Merle d’Aubigné, History of the Reformation in Europe in the Time of Calvin, vol. 3 (London, 1864), 263-265

Viret also taught that magistrates remain servants of God’s law. That conviction would become urgent when the French crown treated Reformed worship as a crime.

For prince and magistrate must be subject to the laws of the land and conform their rule to them. For they are not rulers of the law but servants thereof, as they are servants of God from whom all good laws proceed.¹¹

Pierre ViretLe monde à l’empire et le monde démoniacle

Persecution scattered the Meaux circle. Nicholas Cop’s evangelical address at the University of Paris in 1533 brought arrests, Calvin fled, and the Affair of the Placards ended what remained of royal patience. Yet the movement had already given France a vernacular New Testament and a generation of preachers.

Farel, Calvin, and Viret remained bound in friendship and ministry. Calvin later dedicated his commentary on Titus to the other two.

I think there has never been in ordinary life a circle of friends so heartily bound to each other as we have been in our ministry.¹²

John CalvinCommentary on Titus, dedicatory epistle

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Calvin, Geneva, and the French Churches

John Calvin was a Frenchman born at Noyon in 1509. Geneva became his home, but France remained the chief field of his missionary concern. The city received refugees, printed French books, trained pastors, and sent those pastors back across the border under the threat of prison and death.

During Calvin’s Strasbourg exile, Geneva asked him to answer Cardinal Sadoleto’s appeal to return to Rome. His 1539 Reply to Cardinal Sadoleto became a compact defense of the Reformation he had helped establish.

Geneva’s Company of Pastors examined and ordained French-speaking ministers for this work. Some traveled under false names and carried Bibles, letters, and orders of worship into France. When pastors were arrested, others followed them. Small congregations became organized churches with regular preaching and discipline.

The preface to the Institutes of the Christian Religion addressed King Francis I directly. Calvin asked the king to hear the case of believers whom the crown had condemned as rebels and heretics.

Your duty, most serene Prince, is, not to shut either your ears or mind against a cause involving such mighty interests as these: how the glory of God is to be maintained on the earth inviolate, how the truth of God is to preserve its dignity, how the kingdom of Christ is to continue amongst us compact and secure. The cause is worthy of your ear, worthy of your investigation, worthy of your throne.¹³

John CalvinInstitutes of the Christian Religion, Prefatory Address to King Francis I

The preface joined doctrine to pastoral defense. Calvin was not writing an abstract system for scholars. He was defending hunted congregations and explaining the faith for which French believers were suffering.

The work required more than one theologian. Farel preached, Viret taught, Clément Marot and Theodore Beza completed the French metrical Psalter, and Antoine de la Roche Chandieu helped shape the French Confession. Other pastors served French refugee churches in London, the Low Countries, and the Swiss cities.

Beza succeeded Calvin in Geneva and served the French churches as theologian, diplomat, and pastor. His account of Calvin’s life recorded the character of the man he had known closely.

I feel myself justly warranted to declare, that in him was presented to all men, one of the most beautiful and illustrious examples of the pious life and triumphant death of a real Christian; and as it is easy for malevolence to calumniate his character, so the most exalted virtue will find it difficult to imitate his conduct.¹⁴

Theodore BezaThe Life of John Calvin

The French churches also founded academies at Saumur, Sedan, Montauban, Nîmes, and Die. Those schools trained pastors and produced theologians whose works appear in the library below. The academies gave the Huguenot church trained ministers and a settled confessional order.

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A National Reformed Church

The growth of the French churches was rapid. By 1562, perhaps two million people worshiped in more than a thousand congregations.¹⁵ French Bibles, Psalters, catechisms, and inexpensive tracts carried doctrine into homes, while pastors trained in Geneva gave the movement regular preaching and church order.

Women played a significant part in this growth, teaching the catechism and Psalms within their households and sometimes using noble rank to protect congregations and ministers.¹⁶ The conversions of Jeanne d’Albret, Queen of Navarre, Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, and other nobles gave the Huguenots temporary political protection.

The decisive ecclesiastical act came in 1559, when delegates met secretly at Paris for the first national synod. They adopted the Gallican, or French, Confession and a book of discipline. The discipline ordered the churches through local consistories, regional colloquies, provincial synods, and a national synod.

The confession taught the authority of Scripture, election, human inability, justification by faith alone, the sacraments, and Christ’s government of his church. It also insisted that Christians belong to the visible church even when the magistrate forbids its assemblies.

We believe that no one ought to seclude himself and be contented to be alone; but that all jointly should keep and maintain the union of the Church, and submit to the public teaching, and to the yoke of Jesus Christ, wherever God shall have established a true order of the Church, even if the magistrates and their edicts are contrary to it. For if they do not take part in it, or if they separate themselves from it, they do contrary to the Word of God.¹⁷

The French Confession of Faith

Articles XXXIX and XL affirmed lawful civil authority while refusing the magistrate power over the conscience or worship of the church.¹⁸ The Huguenots therefore opposed both private lawlessness and royal commands that required them to deny their confession.

The Colloquy of Poissy in 1561 briefly brought Catholic and Reformed representatives together. Beza spoke for the Huguenots and defended the Reformed doctrine of salvation without softening its claims.

Faith necessarily depends on election. Faith lays hold of Christ, by which, being justified and sanctified, we have the enjoyment of the glory to which we have been destined before the foundation of the world.¹⁹

Theodore Beza

The churches were also united by the Genevan Psalter, completed in 1562. Huguenots sang the Psalms in worship, at work, in prison, and at the scaffold. Their confession could be read, their order could be practiced, and their Psalms could be carried wherever persecution drove them.

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The Wars of Religion and St. Bartholomew’s Day

The Massacre of Vassy in March 1562 began the first of eight French Wars of Religion. Huguenots formed armies and held fortified towns, while the Catholic crown alternated between limited concessions and renewed suppression. The wars drew doctrine, noble rivalry, foreign intervention, and royal weakness into the same conflict.

The crisis reached Paris in August 1572. The marriage of Henry of Navarre to Marguerite de Valois brought many Huguenot leaders into the city. After an attempt on Admiral Coligny’s life, the royal council ordered the killing of Huguenot leaders. Coligny was murdered in his lodgings and his body thrown into the street. The violence escaped the court’s control and spread through Paris and then to other cities.

Huguenot writers responded by asking when lawful officers could resist a ruler who violated the laws of the kingdom and persecuted the church. Beza’s The Right of Magistrates and the anonymous Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos argued for resistance through lawful lower magistrates, not private revenge.²⁰

The painting at the head of this guide was made by François Dubois, a Huguenot who fled France after the massacre. It is his only known surviving work and one of the few contemporary images of the killing produced by a Protestant witness.²¹

The death toll cannot be fixed with confidence. Estimates range from several thousand in Paris to ten thousand or more across France.²² The political effect was clearer: much of the Huguenot leadership was dead, and the hope that France might become Reformed ended.

Pope Gregory XIII received the news with a Te Deum, a Golden Rose for Charles IX, and a commemorative medal bearing the words Ugonottorum strages 1572, the slaughter of the Huguenots.²³

Calvin had already written to French believers facing execution and taught them to look beyond the power of their persecutors to the kingdom of Christ.

Remember to lift up your eyes to that everlasting kingdom of Jesus Christ, and to think of whose cause it is in which you fight; for that glance will not only make you overcome all temptations which may spring from the infirmity of your flesh, but will also render you invincible by all the wiles of Satan.²⁴

John CalvinLetters of John Calvin

Faith Under Fire gives the fuller account of the massacre, its political setting, and its place in Reformed reflection on the civil magistrate.

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Nantes, Revocation, and the Church of the Desert

The wars ended after Henry of Navarre inherited the throne as Henry IV and converted to Roman Catholicism. In 1598 he issued the Edict of Nantes, granting the Huguenots limited worship, access to public office, and fortified towns that served as guarantees of their safety.²⁵

The settlement never gave France full religious liberty, but it allowed the Reformed churches to worship, hold synods, operate academies, and publish. Those protections weakened during the seventeenth century. Huguenot towns lost their military guarantees, temples were closed, and professions were gradually barred to Protestants.

Under Louis XIV, soldiers were quartered in Huguenot homes and encouraged to force conversion through intimidation and abuse. These dragonnades produced mass outward conversions and prepared the crown to declare that Protestantism had nearly disappeared.

In October 1685, the Edict of Fontainebleau revoked the Edict of Nantes. Reformed worship was prohibited, pastors were expelled, and laypeople were forbidden to leave France on pain of imprisonment or the galleys.²⁶

Many fled anyway. Those who remained worshiped secretly in forests and mountain valleys in what became known as the Church of the Desert. Pierre Durand was hanged for preaching, and his sister Marie Durand spent thirty-eight years in the Tower of Constance rather than renounce the Reformed faith. Tradition associates her imprisonment with the word RÉSISTER, resist, carved into the prison stone.²⁷

In the eighteenth century, Antoine Court gathered scattered congregations, restored synods and discipline, and founded a seminary outside France to train pastors for the Desert. Some returned knowing that arrest and death were possible.²⁸ When Protestants regained civil recognition in 1787, a French Reformed church still existed to receive it.

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The Refuge: Scattered Across the Reformed World

The exodus after 1685 is known as le Refuge. Roughly two hundred thousand Huguenots escaped to the Dutch Republic, England, Switzerland, the German states, Ireland, the Cape of Good Hope, and English and Dutch colonies in North America.

They generally went where Reformed churches could receive them. French-speaking Walloon congregations in the Dutch Republic offered familiar worship and doctrine. London already had a French Reformed church, while German rulers welcomed refugees who could strengthen towns damaged by war.

Huguenots brought skills in printing, weaving, finance, military service, scholarship, and the ministry. Those contributions mattered to their new countries, but the church was the center of their resettlement. Pastors found pulpits, families found congregations, and French books continued to be printed beyond the reach of Louis XIV.

Separate French identity often faded after two or three generations. Huguenots joined Dutch Reformed, German Reformed, English Reformed, Congregational, and sometimes Anglican churches. Their assimilation was not always a loss of faith. In many places they recognized their confession in another Reformed church and made it home.

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Louis DuBois and New Paltz

One branch of the Refuge reached the Hudson Valley. Louis DuBois was born in 1626 at Wicres in French Flanders and belonged to the French-speaking Reformed world. He moved first to the Palatinate, where he married Catherine Blanchan, and later carried his family to New Netherland.²⁹

The family settled near Esopus, now Kingston. A French Reformed household could worship among the Dutch Reformed without surrendering its doctrine or church order. A remembered episode from this period concerns the captivity of members of the DuBois family during the Second Esopus War.³⁰

That captivity belonged to a real and brutal episode. In 1663, during the Second Esopus War between the Dutch settlers and the Esopus people, a raid on the new village near Wiltwyck carried off Catherine Blanchan, her children, and other women and children into the wilderness. A Dutch expedition tracked the captives for weeks and brought most of them back alive. The detail the DuBois family preserved, and that no record can confirm or deny, is that as the rescue party drew near, the captives were heard singing a Psalm. Whether or not it happened exactly so, it is the kind of story a Psalm-singing people would tell about themselves, and it is true to who they were.

In 1677, DuBois and eleven other Huguenot patentees acquired land from the Esopus people and established New Paltz. Their surviving deed, church records, stone houses, and signatures preserve an unusually clear record of a refugee community.

The congregation worshiped first in French and then increasingly in Dutch. It came under the care of the Reformed Dutch Church, the denomination later known as the Reformed Church in America.³¹ The choice reflected confessional kinship more than language.

The DuBois and Hasbrouck families became deeply rooted in the Hudson Valley. Other refugees followed different roads. Gabriel Bernon helped establish Huguenot communities in New England after arriving in 1688.³² Huguenot families in the Carolinas often entered Anglican churches, while those in New Netherland joined the Dutch Reformed.

The pattern was consistent: refugees sought the strongest Protestant church available and gradually entered the language and life of their new country. That doesn’t mean every family retained the confession. At New Paltz, however, the Reformed connection remained especially clear because the settlement, congregation, and surviving records grew together.³³

This history is personal for me. My own line runs through the DuBois and Hasbrouck families. The confession eventually disappeared from that branch of the family, and it took generations before another Reformed believer appeared. That history is one reason I wanted the sources gathered here.

The American Huguenot tells the fuller story of Louis DuBois, the journey to New Netherland, and the founding families of New Paltz.

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In Their Own Words

These selections state their faith in their own words.

To conclude in one word, the cross of Christ then only triumphs in the breasts of believers over the devil and the flesh, sin and sinners, when their eyes are directed to the power of his resurrection.³⁴

John CalvinInstitutes of the Christian Religion 3.9.6

Ignorance of this distinction between Law and Gospel is one of the principal sources of the abuses which corrupted and still corrupt Christianity.³⁵

Theodore Beza

The secrets of God are to be highly reverenced, rather than to be searched into deeply…We may go no farther than God’s Word limits us in setting forth a doctrine of Scripture in a spirit of edification.³⁶

Theodore Beza

It would be no more possible for us even to wish to believe than it would be for a dead man to fly.³⁷

Theodore BezaThe Christian Faith

It is established that to be assured of one’s salvation, through faith, is not only neither presumption nor arrogance, but, on the contrary, is the sole means of stripping oneself of all pride, to give all glory to God.³⁸

Theodore BezaThe Christian Faith

My iniquities can no longer bring me to ruin; they are already blotted out and washed out of my account by the blood of Jesus Christ who was made a curse for me, and who righteous, died for the unrighteous.³⁹

Theodore BezaThe Christian Faith

Nevertheless we believe that it is important to discern with care and prudence which is the true Church, for this title has been much abused. We say, then, according to the Word of God, that it is the company of the faithful who agree to follow his Word, and the pure religion which it teaches.⁴⁰

The French Confession of Faith

We believe that God wishes to have the world governed by laws and magistrates, so that some restraint may be put upon its disordered appetites. And as he has established kingdoms, republics, and all sorts of principalities, either hereditary or otherwise, and all that belongs to a just government, and wishes to be considered as their Author, so he has put the sword into the hands of magistrates to suppress crimes.⁴¹

The French Confession of Faith

These texts show a church concerned with Christ’s resurrection, law and gospel, election, assurance, the marks of the true church, and the proper work of the magistrate.

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A Huguenot Library: Works and Where to Find Them

The French Reformed left confessions, martyrologies, biblical scholarship, political theology, sermons, and devotional books. This working library groups the most useful texts by era and links to a free edition when one is available.

Start here

Begin with the French Confession of 1559 for the church’s doctrine, Theodore Beza’s The Right of Magistrates for its political theology, and Geoffrey Treasure’s The Huguenots for a modern narrative of the whole movement.

Confessional foundations

The French (Gallican) Confession of 1559 and the Belgic Confession of 1561 are the doctrinal bedrock; both are self-hosted here on Reformed Dogmatika. Read alongside them the Book of Discipline of the French churches, which set up the synodal order.

The founding generation

Theodore Beza, The Right of Magistrates (1574), a foundational text of Reformed resistance theory. Beza, Icones (1580), his illustrated lives of the Reformers. Jean Crespin, Histoire des martyrs (1554 and later editions), the great French Protestant martyrology. Pierre Viret, A Christian Instruction (English, 1573). The Genevan Psalter of Clément Marot and Beza (1562). Théodore Agrippa d’Aubigné, Les Tragiques (1616), the great poem of the Wars of Religion by a soldier who fought them.

The French church’s theologians

Philippe du Plessis-Mornay, A Woorke concerning the Trewnesse of the Christian Religion (English, 1587). Antoine de la Roche Chandieu, Opera theologica (Latin), with his complete output indexed at PRDL. Lambert Daneau, A Treatise Touching Antichrist (English, 1589). The Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos (1579), the era’s most famous Huguenot political tract, in the 1689 English as A Defence of Liberty against Tyrants.

The academy era: Saumur, Sedan, Montauban

Pierre Du Moulin, The Anatomy of Arminianism (English, 1620) and The Buckler of the Faith. André Rivet, biblical and theological works, indexed at PRDL. Moïse Amyraut, Brief traitté de la prédestination (French). Amyraut was a major French Reformed theologian, but his teaching of a hypothetical universalism in the order of the divine decrees was disputed in his own day, and the Helvetic Consensus Formula of 1675 was framed in part to answer the Saumur school. He belongs in any honest Huguenot library, with that controversy named rather than hidden. Jean Daillé, A Treatise on the Right Use of the Fathers (English). Louis Cappel, Critica Sacra (Latin).

The Refuge and the Church of the Desert

Pierre Jurieu, The Accomplishment of the Scripture Prophecies (English, 1687). Jean Claude, A Defence of the Reformation (English, 2 vols.: vol. 1, vol. 2) and his classic Essay on the Composition of a Sermon. Charles Drelincourt, The Christian’s Defence against the Fears of Death (English), the great Huguenot consolation book. Jacques Saurin, Sermons (English, multivolume: vol. 1, vol. 2), the finest preaching of the Refuge. Élie Benoist, The History of the Famous Edict of Nantes (English, 2 vols.: vol. 1, vol. 2), the contemporary history of the toleration and its destruction. Antoine Court, the “Restorer of French Protestantism,” whose Memoirs and histories tell how the Church of the Desert was rebuilt under persecution.

Modern histories worth owning

For the scholarly backbone, Philip Benedict, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism (Yale University Press, 2002), is indispensable. For the American leg, Charles W. Baird, History of the Huguenot Emigration to America (2 vols., 1885), and Ralph LeFevre, History of New Paltz, New York and Its Old Families (1903), both public domain and both on your shelf.

For the wider history

For the movement as a whole, Geoffrey Treasure, The Huguenots (Yale University Press, 2013), is the best single-volume narrative. Mack P. Holt, The French Wars of Religion, 1562 to 1629 (Cambridge University Press, 1995), and Barbara B. Diefendorf, Beneath the Cross: Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth-Century Paris (Oxford University Press, 1991), are the standard accounts of the wars and the massacre. On the synodal church specifically, see Glenn S. Sunshine, Reforming French Protestantism: The Development of Huguenot Ecclesiastical Institutions, 1557 to 1572 (Truman State University Press, 2003).

For the American diaspora, Jon Butler, The Huguenots in America (Harvard University Press, 1983), Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, From New Babylon to Eden (University of South Carolina Press, 2006), and Owen Stanwood, The Global Refuge: Huguenots in the Age of Empire (Oxford University Press, 2020). From a Reformed publisher, Janet Glenn Gray, The French Huguenots: Anatomy of Courage (Baker Book House, 1981), remains a warm popular survey. A fuller bibliography, much of it linked to free scans, is maintained by the National Huguenot Society.

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A Closing Word

The Huguenots lost churches, homes, schools, legal protection, and many lives. Yet their confession crossed borders with them. It entered Dutch, German, Swiss, English, Scottish, South African, and American churches because the refugees recognized the same Reformed faith beyond France.

That inheritance reaches Reformed believers through more than family names. We meet it in the French Confession, the Genevan Psalter, Beza’s theology, the books of the Refuge, and congregations that survived the Desert. Their history gives these resources their setting.

For me, the family connection makes the history close, but the confession matters more than ancestry. The Huguenots belong to the history of the Reformed church, and their books still deserve to be read.

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Footnotes