Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 28:3 (Fall 2024)
Article: The Nineteenth-Century Genevan "Réveil" And Religious Awakening In France
Author: Stephen M. Davis

The Nineteenth-Century Genevan Réveil And Religious Awakening In France

Stephen M. Davis

Stephen M. Davis is an elder at Grace Church, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He earned his PhD in Intercultural Studies from Columbia International University, Columbia, South Carolina and a DMin in Missiology from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He has written numerous books including four books on French history: Rise of French Laïcité in the Evangelical Missiological Society Monograph Series (2020); The French Huguenots and Wars of Religion (2021); French Protestantism’s Struggle for Survival and Legitimacy, 1517–1905 (2023); and The War of the Camisards (1702–1704): Huguenot Insurrection during the Reign of Louis XIV (2024). He has his wife, Kathy, have been involved in church planting in the United States, France, and Romania since 1982.

Since the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation, French Protestantism’s fortunes had always been connected with Geneva and with the French political order, or disorder. France witnessed the initial inroads of Protestantism during the reign of Francis I (1494–1547). The first synod of the Reformed Church took place in 1559 with a confession of faith written by Calvin who lived in exile in Geneva until his death in 1564. The conversion of the Huguenot Henry IV to Catholicism ended the Wars of Religion (1562–1598) and resulted in the 1598 Edict of Nantes with protections for Protestants. After Henry’s assassination in 1610, his son Louis XIII (1601–1643) began to unravel the Edict of Nantes. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes under Henry’s grandson Louis XIV (1638–1715) in 1685 outlawed the Protestant religion, and led to the devastating War of the Camisards (1702–1704) in the Cévennes region.1 Finally, the Edict of Toleration under

SBJT 28:3 (Fall 2024) 61

Louis XVI in 1787 granted individual religious and civil rights to Protestants but was “written in a way to prevent Protestants from seeking a return to their situation before the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685.”2

The 1789 French Revolution ended the monopoly of the Catholic Church and was in principle embraced by most Protestants. After Napoleon Bonaparte seized power in 1799, French Protestantism enjoyed greater freedom than at any time of its precarious existence. Yet many people freed from obligatory religious duties and rituals fell away from organized religion that no longer wielded political power. At the dawn of the nineteenth century, a religious awakening took place in the Reformed churches of Geneva and France, whose history ...