CAMISARDS. - The revocation of the Edict of Nantes, carried out by decree of Louis XIV on 18 October 1685, by which freedom of worship was taken away and French Protestants were forced to accept Catholicism, created in France a reaction that degenerated into ferocious episodes. The English, the Dutch, the German Lutherans and the Calvinists of Geneva lent a hand to it for their own political interests.
The war of the Spanish Succession, which began in 1701, offered a new occasion for the Protestants to rebel. A great number of "seers," "prophets, sons of God, soldiers of the Eternal," began to announce the triumph of the persecuted and the destruction of the Roman Church and to gather in defiance of the royal prohibitions. The revolutionary movement spread especially in certain rural districts of the Vivarais, of Languedoc and particularly in the Cévennes, and in vain did the royal officials try to oppose it with force and with repressions. The killing of François de Langlade de Chayla, archpriest of Lont-de-Montvert (Logère), who had shown himself particularly harsh against the rebels, which took place on 24 July 1702, was the signal for a general revolt under the command of two young men: Cavalier and Roland. The name of c., by which the rebels were designated, derived from the shirt that they alone wore in certain night attacks; never was a religious war so cruel as this one, in terms of massacres of persons, sackings, burnings of churches, acts of ferocity, and it was kept alive by the fanatical preachings of their prophets. For their part, the royal troops became, by way of reaction, progressively more cruel in the repression; above all in 1703-1704, when they were under the command of the marshal de Montrevel, a converted Calvinist. Thanks to the energy and the clemency of the marshal de Villars, the movement could be repressed; Cavalier submitted to him, while Roland was killed on 14 August 1704; however, disturbances and struggles continued to manifest themselves here and there until 1715, when many c. left France and the support of the Protestant powers was lacking.