R is for Refuge – A place of safety
A contribution to the #AtoZchallenge 2024
Background
After the Wars of Religion, and as Protestants in many parts of France were deliberately terrorised and pressurised to abjure their faith, many tried desperately to escape.
Le refuge
About 200,000 Huguenots settled in non-Catholic Europe: the United Provinces (Netherlands), Germany, especially Prussia, Switzerland, Scandinavia; and even as far as Russia, where Huguenot craftsmen found customers at the court of the Czars. The Dutch East India Company sent a few hundred to the Cape to develop the vineyards in southern Africa. About 50,000 fled to England, the Channel Islands and Ireland, where they were on the whole welcomed. And many escaped to the New World.
Any country that welcomed fleeing Huguenots was known as le refuge. This forced emigration introduced the word ‘refugee’ into the English language. Those who remained and refused to renounce their faith went into hiding in what they called le désert.
What neither the King nor anyone else anticipated, apparently, was that the hasty exodus of so many skilled craftsmen and educated people would leave much of the French social and commercial infrastructure floundering. Coupled with the poverty resulting from extortionate taxes to support the wars, this led to severe hardship for much of the population.
Adapted from The Huguenot Refuge
‘Greet Suzon for me’, a book about a Huguenot family’s perilous escape from France to Jersey, will be published in 2024.
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I recall visiting a museum in Berlin which made much of how that city had benefitted from taking in Huguenot refugees who brought skills and industry with them.