Sir, – Miriam Lord quotes a "scholarly report", prepared for the Intercultural Working Group of the North West Inner City Network, which states that the "Huguenots were expelled from France" (Miriam Lord's Week, March 28th).
Not so. When the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (October 17th, 1685) ended the legal existence of the French Reformed Churches, their ministers were given two weeks to leave the kingdom, but the jus emigrandi (the right to emigrate for religious reasons) was denied to all other French Protestants. Men who were apprehended trying to leave France were sent to the galleys, a fate deemed worse than death; women received life sentences in prisons or convents; but all charges were dropped if those captured consented to abjure their Reformed faith. Despite the risks, an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 French Protestants managed to flee the kingdom for other European countries; some of them came to Ireland, but usually by circuitous routes; they settled in the Liberties but also elsewhere. It was the largest mass movement of population in early modern Europe, and its first “refugee crisis”, inasmuch as the word “refugee” was imported from French into English and first listed by the Oxford English Dictionary in the 1680s.
So, to quote Eavan Boland (The Huguenot Graveyard at the Heart of the City), “grant to them the least love asks of/the living. Say: they had another life once”, but let’s get the details of that life right. – Yours, etc,
Prof RUTH WHELAN,
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French Studies,
Maynooth University.