he French Academy, though originally founded by a Huguenot,
publicly approved the deed of Revocation. In a discourse uttered
before it, the Abbe Tallemand exclaimed, when speaking of the Huguenot
temple at Charenton, which had just been destroyed by the mob, "Happy
ruins, the finest trophy France ever beheld!" La Fontaine described
heresy as now "reduced to the last gasp." Thomas Corneille also
eulogized the zeal of the King in "throttling the Reformation."
Barbier D'Aucourt heedlessly, but truly, compared the emigration of
the Protestants "to the departure of the Israelites from Egypt." The
Academy afterwards proposed, as the subject of a poem, the Revocation
of the Edict of Nantes, and Fontenelle had the fortune, good or bad,
of winning the prize.

The philosophic La Bruyere contributed a maxim in praise of the
Revocation. Quinault wrote a poem on the subject; and Madame
Deshoulieres felt inspired to sing "The Destruction of Heresy." The
Abbe de Rance spoke of the whole affair as a prodigy: "The Temple of
Charenton destroyed, and no exercise of Protestantism, within the
kingdom; it is a kind of miracle, such as we had never hoped to have
seen in our day."

The Revocation was popular with the lower class, who went about
sacking and pulling down the Protestant churches. They also tracked
the Huguenots and their pastors, where they found them evading or
breaking the Edict of Revocation; thus earning the praises of the
Church and the fines offered by the King for their apprehension. The
provosts and sheriffs of Paris represented the popular feeling, by
erecting a brazen statue of the King who had rooted out heresy; and
they struck and distributed medals in honour of the great event.

The Revocation was also popular with the dragoons. In order to
"convert" the Protestants, the dragoons were unduly billeted upon
them. As both officers and soldiers were then very badly paid, they
were thereby enabled to live at free quarters. They treated everything
in the houses they occupied as if it were their own, and an assignment
of billets was little loss than the consignment of the premises to the
military, to use for their own purposes, during the time they occupied
them.[4]

[Footnote 4: Sir John Reresby's Travels and Memoirs.]

The Revocation was also approved by those who wished to buy land
cheap. As the Huguenots were prevented holding their estates unless
they conformed to the Catholic religion, and as many estat