Local activities | Gastronomy | Sightseeing | History | Links
History
Learn French… in the country
Camisard Country
This peaceful landscape over the hills of Saint-Germain-de-Calberte and up to the Mount Aigoual typifies the area the Camisard Rebels roamed in the early 18th century, singing psalms and propheletising, ambushing King Louis XIV dragoons, burning churches and gathering for prayers in huge "Assemblées du Désert". Men, women and children were massacred or tortured and executed, or sent to the galleys or to the Tour de Constance in Aigues-Mortes. Religious conflicts are still bitterly remembered today. Many 'lieux de mémoire' commemorate the persecution of the Huguenots by Louis XIVth and subsequent bitter Guerre des Camisards.
"Terre de Refuge"
From the first Gabale tribes to WW2 Résistance fighters, the whole region abounds in historical sites: dinosaur footprints at St Laurent de Trèves, vestiges of the Roman Empire (Pont du Gard), the Templar fortress of La Couvertoirade (12c), Romanesque churches, castles built on cliffs like eagle nests, medieval villages (Ste Enimie, La Garde Guérin). Country of dissenters, rebels, fugitives and nonconformists, over the centuries the Cévennes mountains and secrets valleys gave shelter to many fleeing from persecution or intolerance, from Protestants to French maquisards, anti-Nazi Germans, Jewish refugees, and eventually hippies in the 1970s.
The Dragoons had left their hoof-marks over all the countryside...
The murder of the ferocious Abbé du Chayla (who led the persecution of the Huguenots) at Pont de Montvert sparked off the Camisard war in 1702. 177 years later, Robert Louis Stevenson (above) travelling with his donkey across the Cévennes, muses on this event: : ''The persecution on the one hand, the febrile enthusiasm on the other, are almost equally difficult to understand in these quiet modern days, and with our easy modern beliefs and disbeliefs..."
L'Abbé du Chayla was buried in the church of Saint-Germain-de-Calberte, where he lived at the time in his "prison house". Stevenson had probably heard about the Camisard revolt well before his journey, as the "Cévennes War" fascinated the whole of Europe. Let him described the murder of Du Chayla from what he heard:
"The next night, 24th July 1702, a sound disturbed the Inspector of Missions as he sat in his prison-house at Pont de Montvert: the voices of many men upraised in psalmody drew nearer and nearer through the town. It was ten at night…. But the psalm-singers were already at his door, fifty strong, led by the inspired Seguier, and breathing death.
The fire caught readily. Out of an upper window Du Chayla and his men lowered themselves into the garden by means of knotted sheets; some escaped across the river under the bullets of the insurgents; but the archpriest himself fell, broke his thigh, and could only crawl into the hedge.
One by one, Seguier first, the Camisards drew near and stabbed him. 'This,' they said, 'is for my father broken on the wheel. This for my brother in the galleys. That for my mother or my sister imprisoned in your cursed convents.' Each gave his blow and his reason; and then all kneeled and sang psalms around the body till the " Condemned to death, the leader of the uprising Esprit Séguier told his judges : "My soul is a garden full of shelter and of fountains." And Stevenson concludes the chapter with these words : "At Pont de Montvert, on the 12th of August, he had his right hand stricken from his body, and was burned alive. And his soul was like a garden? So perhaps was the soul of Du Chayla, the Christian martyr. And perhaps if you could read in my soul, or I could read in yours, our own composure might seem little less surprising.
You can read the whole of Stevenson 'Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes'
