Page:General History of Europe 1921.djvu/498

370 General History of Europe the prosecution of disastrous wars. The Huguenots, deprived of their former military and political power, had turned to manufac- ture, trade, and banking; "as rich as a Huguenot" had become a proverb in France. There were perhaps a million of them among fifteen million Frenchmen, and they undoubtedly formed by far the most thrifty and enterprising part of the nation. The Catholic clergy, however, did not cease to urge the complete suppression of heresy. 637. Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and its Results. Louis XIV had scarcely taken the reins of government into his own hands before the perpetual nagging and injustice to which the Protestants had been subjected at all times took a more serious form. Upon one pretense or another their churches were demolished. Children were permitted to renounce Protestant- ism when they reached the age of seven. Rough dragoons were quartered upon the Huguenots with the hope that the insulting behavior of the soldiers might frighten them into accepting the religion of the king. At last Louis XIV was led by his officials to believe that prac- tically all the Huguenots had been converted by these harsh measures. In 1685, therefore, he revoked the Edict of Nantes, and the Protestants thereby became outlaws and their ministers subject to the death penalty. Thousands of the Huguenots suc- ceeded in eluding the vigilance of the royal officials and fled, some to England, some to Prussia, some to America, carrying with them their skill and industry to strengthen France's rivals. This was the last great and terrible example in western Europe of that fierce religious intolerance which had produced the Albi- gensian Crusade, the Spanish Inquisition, and the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. 638. Louis's Operations in the Rhenish Palatinate. Louis XIV now set his heart upon conquering the Palatinate, a Protestant land, to which he easily discovered that he had a claim. The rumor of his intention and the indignation occasioned in Protes- tant countries by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes resulted in an alliance against the French king headed by William of