the circumstance that dragoons were quartered upon the Protestant families, with full permission to annoy and persecute them in every way "short of violation and death," to the end that the victims of these outrages might be constrained to recant, which multitudes did.
Under the fierce persecutions of the Dragonnades, probably as many as three hundred thousand of the most skilful and industrious of the subjects of Louis were driven out of the kingdom. Several of the most important and flourishing of the French industries were ruined, while the manufacturing interests of other countries, particularly those of Holland and England, were correspondingly benefited by the energy, skill, and capital which the exiles carried to them. Many of the fugitive Huguenots found ultimately a refuge in America; and no other class of emigrants, save the Puritans of England, cast
"Such healthful leaven 'mid the elements
That peopled the new world."[1]
The War of the Palatinate (1689–1697).—The indirect results of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes were quite as calamitous to France as were the direct results. The indignation that the barbarous measure awakened among the Protestant nations of Europe enabled William of Orange to organize a formidable confederacy against Louis, known as the League of Augsburg (1686).
Louis resolved to attack the confederates. Seeking a pretext for beginning hostilities, he laid claim, in the name of his sister-inlaw, to portions of the Palatinate, and hurried a large army into the country, which was quickly overrun. But being unable to hold the conquests he had made, Louis ordered that the country be turned into a desert. The Huns of an Attila could not have carried out more relentlessly the command than did the soldiers of Louis. Churches and abbeys, palaces and cottages, villas and cities, were all given to the flames.
- ↑ See Baird, History of the Huguenot Emigration to America.
