DID YOU KNOW

After 1580 the French Protestants came to be known as Huguenots, a name signifying a distinctive mark of honor among the French Calvinistic Protestants. Huguenot predecessors included the pro-reform and Gallican Roman Catholics, like Jacques Lefevre. Later, Huguenots followed the Lutheran movement, and finally, Calvinism.

They shared John Calvin's fierce reformation beliefs which decried the priesthood, sacramental theology, and doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church. They believed in salvation as an act of God as much as in creation as an act of God, and thus that only God's predestined mercy toward the elect made them fit for salvation.

Some see this dual emphasis on creation and on salvation, and God's sovereignty over both, as a cornerstone principle for Huguenot developments in architecture and textiles and other merchandise.

Above all, Huguenots became known for their fiery criticisms of worship as performed in the Roman Catholic Church, in particular the focus on ritual and what seemed an obsession with death and the dead. They believed the ritual, images, saints, pilgrimages, prayers, and hierarchy of the Catholic Church did not help anyone toward redemption. They saw Christian faith as something to be expressed in a strict and godly life, in obedience to Biblical laws, out of gratitude for God's mercy.

Like other Protestants of the time, they felt that the Roman church needed radical cleansing of its impurities, and that the Pope represented a worldly kingdom, which sat in mocking tyranny over the things of God, and was ultimately doomed. Rhetoric like this became more fierce as events unfolded, and stirred up the hostility of the Catholic establishment.

Violently opposed to the Catholic Church, the Huguenots attacked images, monasticism, and church buildings. Most of the cities in which the Huguenots gained a hold saw iconoclast attacks, in which altars and images in churches, and sometimes the buildings themselves were torn down. Bourges, Montauban and Orleans suffered particularly.

The first Huguenots to leave France seeking freedom from prosecution had done so years earlier under the leadership of Jean Ribault in 1562. The group ended up establishing the small colony of Fort Caroline in 1564, on the banks of the St. Johns River, in what is today Jacksonville, Florida.

The colony was the first attempt at any permanent European settlement in the present-day United States, but the group survived only a short time. In September 1565, an attack against the new Spanish colony at St. Augustine backfired, and the Spanish wiped out the Fort Caroline garrison.

God's blessings on each of you,

LJG

SOURCE: Wikipedia