The Prophetic Faith of Our Fathers, vol. 1

VII. The “Glorious Return” of 1689-90

Upon the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, Louis XIV demanded that his neighbor, the duke of Savoy, eliminate the Waldensian church. When the Waldenses resisted the edict to destroy their churches and banish the pastors and teachers, they were crushed by a combined force of troops from France and Savoy. Thousands were slain, and thousands of the imprisoned men, women, and children died. The surviving three thousand were allowed to take refuge in the Protestant cantons of Switzerland. In 1689 about a thousand of the exiles, led by their pastor and military commander, Henri Arnaud, set out to return to Savoy. They drove off the French troops who attacked them, wintered on a mountain at the end of the San Martino valley, and continued the warfare. By the spring of 1690 most of the Waldenses had recovered their homes, and many other exiles returned. ⁸⁹ The duke of Savoy made peace with them, and in 1694 granted them religious liberty. PFF1 858.4

These seventeenth-century tribulations of the Waldenses are outside the range of this volume, but a brief account of them has been included in order to round out the story, to show how the earlier training of these people bore the fruit of constancy under the most terrible persecutions which inspired the Protestant world. From the time of the Reformation they have formed a branch of the Calvinistic Protestants, and in modern times they have acquired the full rights of Italian citizenship. PFF1 859.1