Study of the Huguenot diaspora of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries remains vibrant as scholars explore the many questions surrounding human migration, refugee populations, exile integration into host societies, and collective identity among emigrants. The ten contributors to this Festschrift in honor of Walter C. Utt, himself a specialist on Claude Brousson and Huguenot resistance to Louis XIV, take up these issues and more as they examine the Huguenot experience from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries. The essays aim, according to their editor David J. B. Trim, to elucidate the role of history and memory in shaping the transnational Huguenot community.
Trim’s introductory chapter is a model of its kind, providing not merely an outline of the essays that follow, but a rich discussion of the theoretical elements associated with current scholarly conversations on transnationalism and memory. He also explores the specific applicability of these categories of analysis to Huguenot historical memory and distinctive character. Of the various chapters, only two deal explicitly with events in France. Even then, it is the enduring recollection of the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre as much as the horrific events themselves that interest H. H. Leonard. Similarly dependent upon French developments yet ultimately focused elsewhere is Andrew Thompson’s assessment of the effect of Louis XIV’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes upon British and Hanoverian foreign relations. A majority of the contributors dwell on activities in England. There is a seemingly inevitable tendency among these sorts of anthologies to concentrate on the Huguenot presence within a particular cultural, linguistic, or political tradition, whether British, German, or North American. Thus, the transnational generally has more to do with French emigrants to a specific locale — in this case, England — than to a comparative study across the range of host territories. Still, several essays in this collection are exceptions.
Trim’s own chapter on Huguenot soldiers in the service of non-French masters looks at their experience within a multinational context. These prized mercenaries, who fought most everywhere in Northern Europe, had developed leadership cadres and fighting skills in their native France, possessed longstanding ties to foreign Protestant communities, and found inspiration in their confessional commitment. Vivienne Larminie also takes on a non-British subject in surveying the plight of refugees to the French-speaking Pays de Vaud. Her essay builds upon individual histories and personal testimony. As such, it effectively conveys the uneasiness and misgivings, courage and aspirations of ordinary, if exceedingly miserable displaced persons. Finally, David Onnekink tackles issues within an Anglo-Dutch milieu when he details the various models — Hebrew, pastoral, and apocalyptic — to which Huguenot apologists turned in their attempts to construct an “imagined community” that might confer identity and guide policy.
Most essays attend in one fashion or another to the refugees who settled in England or within an English orbit. This tight geographic convergence offers the benefit of intense multifaceted examination within a single setting of the issues and concerns that touch most any exile population. Gregory Dobbs carefully dissects the many threads in the fabric of a now classic question: how and to what extent did the situation of French Protestants add to an animated debate over religious toleration in Restoration England? Lisa Clark Diller poses an even more timeless query: did these immigrants threaten national identity, in this case British? Assimilation, whether in early modern or contemporary times, is ever an ambiguous process. The religious dynamic, which was ultimately at the heart of this migration, receives precise and sympathetic treatment in Robin Gwynn’s essay on worship and initial Huguenot resistance to conformity with Anglican practices. Randolph Vigne continues along this trajectory in his exploration of the play of faith and memory in the eighteenth-century wills of Huguenots residing in England. The volume concludes with Paul McGraw’s essay on the transatlantic dimension to the memory of the Huguenots in the writings of New English Puritans such as John Cotton and his grandson Cotton Mather as well as the much later Seventh-Day Adventist Ellen G. White.
In the end, the contributors, while addressing largely traditional themes, have advanced new and valuable perspectives. The emerging portrait of this substantial and well-known early modern refugee community is in some ways familiar, in others unanticipated. The findings are invariably nuanced and discerning.
