Catholic Magistrates and Protestant Marriage in the French Enlightenment

The French Huguenot justly indicted his country's laws on many counts during the eighteenth century. But of all the disabilities from which he suffered, the one on marriage troubled him most. When the state proscribed his sect and banished his pastors, he could stay at home and worship Calvin's God in private. With marriage it was different. Marriage carried with it legal consequences pertaining especially to inheritance, and had always to be marked by public display and recognition by law. But the law in France knew only the Roman Catholic marriage. The Protestant's only choice was between perjuring himself in a Catholic ceremony or being married surreptitiously by an outlawed pastor whose blessing had no legal effect. The Catholic judges and administrators who guarded and enforced the laws did not question the law on marriage until later in the century. At intervals they tried hard to root out the Protestants who consorted with pastors; they did not hesitate to attack Protestant families, to separate husbands from wives, and to deny the inheritance to their children. What we shall be concerned with here, however, is not the persecution itself, but the abandonment of persecution later in the century. If the law on marriage remained on the books until 1787, the judges refused from the mid-1760's to prosecute Protestants for its violation. Why should this have happened? The magistrates, spokesmen for the nobility though they were, will be seen in this instance to have been fully within the current of contemporary enlightened thought. The changes in the application of the marriage law afford a barometer which is sensitive to the general changes in the mentality of the judges during the Enlightenment. It is not our intent to rehabilitate the memories of conservatives or to

Ancient history · Enlightenment · Political science · Protestantism · Theology · European Political History Analysis · Historical Art and Culture Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Philosophy · Religious studies · Religious Studies

• A Contested Inheritance

  Open Access•Hannah Callaway•Law and History Review•2018

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