Enlightening Enthusiasm

In early 1708, the religious group known as the ‘French Prophets’ sensationally announced in the London newspapers that they would effect the resurrection of one of their number, Thomas Emes, on 25 May that year. About 20,000 people attended the event in Bunhill Fields burial ground, representing 4 per cent of the population of London. When Emes failed to rise from his grave, the ‘Prophets’ were the object of widespread derision and satire. The previous scholarly literature on the ‘French Prophets’ has treated 1708 as the high point of their activity; thereafter they are thought to have declined sharply and disappeared. Now, in Lionel Laborie’s outstanding book, the significance of the ‘Prophets’ can be fully appreciated. Laborie shows how the ‘French Prophets’ originated in the oral traditions of the Cevenole resistance to Louis XVI. The Camisards, as they were known in France, formed a distinctive Protestant group who fled from the persecution following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Laborie argues that the ‘Prophets’ succeeded in Britain because they were transplanted to the fertile millenarian soil of later Stuart England. Millenarianism and prophetic religion were popular in the final quarter of the seventeenth century and the Camisards found London an auspicious base

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