Reviewed by Christopher Hodson | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.1

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Reviewed by Christopher Hodson | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.1 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Christopher Hodson, McNeil Center for Early American Studies

Memory and Identity: The Huguenots in France and the Atlantic Diaspora. Edited by Bertrand Van Ruymbeke and Randy J. Sparks. The Carolina Lowcountry and the Atlantic World. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003. 352 pages. $39.95 (cloth).
Americans with French surnames sometimes speak of the Huguenot exodus from France in terms not unlike those used by zealous baby boomers to describe Woodstock. They exaggerate the number of participants, endow them with an implausibly uniform sense of purpose, and, making allowances for loss of faith in the original cause, credit them with almost everything good that happened in subsequent decades. The essays in Memory and Identity seek to deflate and complicate this persistent mythology, locating French Protestants within the hard-edged world of kingdoms, colonies, and economies that shaped their migrations, yet remaining attuned to the shades of meaning they attached to the unfolding diaspora. As is often the case with edited volumes, the results are mixed. Some authors present repetitious overviews, whereas others fail to connect local minutiae to broader contexts. That said the book is valuable, even provocative, as much for what it suggests about the forces that structured Huguenot movement as for its revelations about the Huguenots themselves.	1
The volume's fifteen essays span three centuries and most of the western hemisphere. Bertrand Van Ruymbeke's introduction frames the study as a comparative history of Huguenot communities during the eras of the first refuge (really a series of Protestant flights from France from 1530 to 1660, mostly to destinations within Europe) and the second refuge, the better known migration of two hundred thousand refugees to England, the Netherlands, the Americas, and Africa following Louis XIV's Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Among the four essays on the first refuge, Willem Frijhoff's contribution on the Dutch Republic and Charles Littleton's study of the French Huguenot Church on London's Threadneedle Street merit special mention. In the wake of Spanish aggression in the late sixteenth century, as many as one hundred fifty thousand French-speaking Walloons (Calvinists, Lutherans, and Anabaptists from the southern Low Countries) escaped to the rebelling northern provinces, where they created French congregations, trolled for Dutch funds to support future refugees, and secured footholds in the Dutch East and West India Companies. Likewise, ten thousand Protestants who arrived in England from France and the Low Countries managed to found "Stranger churches" (90), of which the French Huguenot Church was the most robust. These early refugees created institutional contexts not only for their own benefit but also with the expectation, or fear, that Protestant exile would become a multigenerational affair. Their negotiations with religious culture, state power, and the engines of Atlantic empire in England and the Netherlands shaped later patterns of Huguenot migration and acculturation.	. . .

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