Jean Claude (1619–1687)

The French Protestant pastor and polemical author Jean Claude was one of the most prominent Huguenot leaders of the second half of the seventeenth century, who gained notoriety because of his unrelenting defense of the Calvinist faith in France. Born in 1619 in Sauvetat-du-Dropt in Aquitaine, he studied philosophy and theology at the Protestant academy of Montauban. After graduating in 1645 he served multiple communities in the Huguenot heartland of southern France, in particular Nîmes and Montauban, until in 1666 he was called to Charenton, the famous Huguenot temple outside Paris. Claude only left this post in October 1685, when Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes and issued a special warrant against him, ordering the pastor to leave the kingdom within twenty-four hours. Together with his wife Elisabeth, he settled in The Hague, rejoining his son Isaac who had already left France in 1682. After preaching a sermon on Christmas morning in 1686, Claude fell ill, passing away just a few weeks later on 13 January 1687.

Jean Claude’s reputation stemmed from his efforts to explain and defend the Calvinist religion in sermons, learned treatises, and disputations. Claude’s sermons were a source of inspiration for generations of Huguenot pastors and laypeople: according to his biographer Abel Rotolp de la Devèze, theology students already flocked to Claude for homiletic advice when he was preaching at Nîmes in the later 1650s, while he also published many sermons throughout his long career. Claude’s Traité de la composition d’un sermon appeared posthumously in 1688, containing useful advice on composing and delivering sermons.

Yet it was above all Claude’s defence of Calvinist theology that bolstered his reputation. Early on in his career, his opposition to a proposed accommodation between Calvinism and the Church of Rome prompted the king to ban him from preaching in Languedoc. In 1664 Claude also became enmeshed in a long-lasting dispute on the Eucharist with the Jansenist theologians Pierre Nicole and Antoine Arnauld. The debate focused on a treatise entitled La perpetuité de la foy de l’Eglise catholique touchant l’Eucharistie, in which Nicole had claimed that from the earliest years of its existence the Christian Church had accepted the miraculous transformation of host and wine into the body and blood of Christ, known as transubstantiation. In a series of treatises Claude refuted this assertion, arguing that the doctrine of transubstantiation was a later invention that lacked all biblical foundation; Protestants had therefore justly rejected this notion during the Reformation in order to return the Christian religion to its untainted form. Claude’s writings led to another royal ban, however, and he was forced to leave his church in Montauban.

Once installed in Charenton in 1666, Claude gained further notoriety. In 1678 he entered into a debate with the influential Catholic bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet on the the authority of the Church. Bossuet accused the Protestants of hypocrisy: despite their rejection of the pope’s infallibility and the authority exercised by the Church of Rome, Protestants had created synods to settle doctrinal disputes and maintain orthodoxy among their members. Claude firmly rejected this comparison. Huguenot synods, consistories, and pastors had only limited power, he argued, because every decision they took had to be in accordance with God’s will. Believers likewise had a solemn duty to monitor that ministers did not stray from the Gospel — only then were they obliged to acquiesce in the synod’s decisions. In other words, pastors were not infallible, let alone entitled to claim absolute power over believers. Yet as Claude pointed out, the Church of Rome had done exactly that, with the result that Protestants were persecuted as heretics.

Claude’s religious activism also earned him respect beyond the borders of the French kingdom, in particular in the Dutch Republic. The University of Groningen offered him a professorship in theology, which Claude declined because he refused to abandon his church in the face of growing persecution. When the Revocation forced him to leave France and settle in The Hague in 1685, he quickly received the protection of the Prince of Orange and the States of Holland, who granted him a secret pension and hired him as their historiographer. Although Claude never published a formal history, he did produce a virulent booklet against the religious policies of Louis XIV, published in 1686 as Les plaintes des Protestans, cruellement opprimez dans le Royaume de France. It contained an exhaustive list of all the methods employed by the French state to convert the Huguenots in the run-up to the Revocation, and made the case for the restoration of the Edict of Nantes. The French ambassador to The Hague, Count d’Avaux, perceptibly warned that this book was nothing less than ‘a manifest to begin a religious war’. Jean Claude would pass away before this coalition of Protestant states would actually take shape in 1688.