Industry Reviews
"Building her book on decades of research and the unflagging pursuit of family papers, Lougee offers a detailed account of the varied responses of one extended family of Huguenot nobles to Louis XIV's revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The author effectively blends an intimate family portrait of the Robillard de Champagné with a broader historical account that offers a new perspective on the fate of the Huguenots and the limitations of the Sun King's
power....In the end, each individual wrestled with the choice to convert or flee with considerations of family, property, class consciousness, and faith. Local officials appeared reluctant to enforce the royal
prohibition against flight. The Champagné joined communities of Huguenot expatriates to rebuild their social network....Highly recommended."--CHOICE
"This a compelling, if complicated history. Lougee conveys it with compassion and purpose, all the while maintaining an enquiring eye and critical distanceâShe relates with care and nuance the story of Marie de La Rochefoucauld, a Reformed matriarch whose determination and dedication combined with careful planning and financial acumen to not simply save, but in fact advance her family amid the appalling circumstances of religious oppression. The result is
a highly original set of insights into the uncertainties and burdens that French Protestants encountered as they confronted the royal proscription of their ancestral religion....Throughout her study, Lougee
reveals and investigates the female voice, which has so long been muted (though not entirely absent) in accounts of the Revocation and the Refuge." -- Raymond Mentzer, Reviews in History
"Carolyn Chappell Lougee's book sheds light on the complex experiences which led one French noble family to fragment in response to the Revocation, compelling many of them to start new lives (or end them) in the Netherlands, England and Ireland...The afterword, where Lougee tells the reader how she came across the first fragments of the archive that she has so lovingly reconstructed...is an absorbing narrative which wins the reader's admiration for her
persistence in tracking down the papers, which had become as scattered as the Huguenots themselves." -- Diarmaid MacCulloch, London Review of Books
"Thanks to Lougee's relentless archival digging this book succeeds like no other in capturing the human voice of the Huguenot exile experience...Lougee's deeply moving account of their decisions and experiences provides an unparalleled and personal insight into the complexities faced by Huguenots that is so often lacking in current scholarship on early modern refugees" -- David van der Linden, Journal of Modern History
"A masterful study of a provincial nobility and a Protestant communityâLougee's tracing of the Champagnés into exile rewrites our understanding of the RefugeâReading this excellent book in the midst of the world's current refugee crisis gives it a particular resonance. Of course, addressing that issue is not Lougee's purpose, but one can only hope that, in time, modern refugees will find as thorough and gifted an historian as she." -- Keith
P. Luria, Journal of Social History
"A significant scholarly contribution that holds rich rewards for readers, and a compelling account of the experiences of one family among so many confronting a pivotal moment in early modern French history." -- Susan Broomhall, H-France
"The Champagné family are unusually well documented. This is partly the luck of survival, but finding this material and interpreting it required truly remarkable scholarship. Lougee's dissection of both Protestant and Catholic narratives is brilliant. Both technically and stylistically, this is superb historical writing....The story is wonderfully told, skillfully combining historical empathy with incisive, no-nonsense analysis of motives and of the
consequences of individual decisions. Lougee challenges or nuances a number of myths that remain current in Huguenot memory and in some scholarly works: the emphasis on state persecution and on purely religious
motivations for departure from France; the belief that the Protestant nobility massively abandoned the Reformed religion; and the idea that emigration marked a complete break with the past." -- David Garrioch, American Historical Review
"With rare sensitivity, Carolyn Lougee has pieced together from scattered and difficult sources the remarkable and previously unknown story of one extended aristocratic family confronted with the wrenching choice between migration and accommodation that faced nearly a million French Huguenots when Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes. Authoritatively situating the story of the Champagné family within local, national, and international contexts, Lougee
entirely recasts our understanding of the character and human experience of the Revocation and the wider world of the Huguenot diaspora."--Philip Benedict, University of Geneva
"A triumphant blend of meticulous archival research and storytelling. Lougee has sleuthed her way through European archives and dazzles with the results, yet she also captures the poignancy of a tale of one noble Protestant family riven by indecision, conflict, and betrayal, whose experience provides a more complex picture of the Huguenots' reaction to the Revocation. This is the story of a history-making family in a history-making book."--Ruth Whelan, National
University of Ireland Maynooth
"In this remarkable book, Carolyn Chappell Lougee explores the complexities of exile through the lens of one Huguenot family. Her story illuminates the messy, mixed-up reality in which individuals made complicated decisions, and the ambiguous and ambivalent experience of exile, from how it was lived to how it was remembered. This is history at its most human, its most dispassionate, and its most compelling."--Mark Greengrass, author of Christendom
Destroyed
"Combining the scope of a microhistory with the investigative tension of a thriller, Carolyn Lougee's book dramatically challenges accepted ideas about the impact of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes on the French Protestant milieu. By reconstructing the destiny of the Champagnés, a Protestant noble family, Lougee reveals the plurality of choices made within the same household, demonstrating that those who chose abjuration were no less attached to
their faith than those who decided to flee abroad."--André Burguière, École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales
"To flee or not to flee? Carolyn Chappell Lougee's deeply personal and learned quest to recover the fates of Huguenot noble families in the Saintonge is an exemplary study of the consequences of terrorizing persecution for those who were being defined as heretical. Lougee depicts an embarrassingly poignant moment in French history that henceforth must always be remembered."--Orest Ranum, The Johns Hopkins University
