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The issue of religious liberty has gained ever-increasing attention among policy makers and the public. Whereas politicians have long championed the idea of religious freedom and tolerance, the actual achievement of these goals has been an arduous battle for religious minorities. What motivates political leaders to create laws providing for greater religious liberty? In contrast to scholars who argue that religious liberty results from the spread of secularization and modern ideas, Anthony Gill argues that religious liberty results from interest-based calculations of secular rulers. Using insights from political economists, Gill develops a theory of the origins of religious liberty based upon the political and economic interests of governing officials. Political leaders are most likely to permit religious freedom when it enhances their own political survival, tax revenue, and the economic welfare of their country. He explores his theory using cases from British America, Latin America, Russia, and the Baltic states.
The issue of religious liberty has gained ever-increasing attention among policy makers and the public. Whereas politicians have long championed the idea of religious freedom and tolerance, the actual achievement of these goals has been an arduous battle for religious minorities. What motivates political leaders to create laws providing for greater religious liberty? In contrast to scholars who argue that religious liberty results from the spread of secularization and modern ideas, Anthony Gill argues that religious liberty results from interest-based calculations of secular rulers. Using insights from political economists, Gill develops a theory of the origins of religious liberty based upon the political and economic interests of governing officials. Political leaders are most likely to permit religious freedom when it enhances their own political survival, tax revenue, and the economic welfare of their country. He explores his theory using cases from British America, Latin America, Russia, and the Baltic states.
In assaying responsibility for the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the crescendo of persecution which preceded it, historians have shown rather noteworthy indecisiveness. It would seem that almost every member of Louis XIV's inner circle and every possible combination of individuals within that select group have been stigmatized at one time or another by some memoirist or historian for his part in the events of 1685. Louvois, Le Tellier, Châteauneuf, Harlay, Seignelay, Fr. La Chaise, Mme. de Maintenon, and others have had their reputations alternately blackened and whitewashed, or restored to a fairly satisfactory shade of gray. The Grand Monarch himself has been portrayed both as the innocent victim of unscrupulous and misleading advisers and as the archfanatic in an entourage of fanatics.
After the Calas Case of 1762–64 the more severe of the anti-Protestant laws fell into disuse. Raids on the open-air religious meetings ceased; few if any clergy were executed; no laity were sent to the galleys; and no property apparently was seized. The Protestant pastors became bolder and, in the 1780's, Paul Rabaut and his son Rabaut Saint-Etienne, the two foremost of them all, lived without disguise and without molestation as they served their flock in the city of Nîmes. The pastor Frossard, whose name has passed down to us as the author of an able antislavery pamphlet, worked without harm in Lyons, where he was visited by Brissot in 1782. Court de Gebelin, son of the daring pastor Antoine Court and himself a pastor, lived openly in Paris from 1763 to 1784 without annoyance, became secretary of the celebrated Freemason's Lodge of the Nine Muses frequented by Voltaire and Franklin, and acquired some reputation as a writer and scholar. And when at length he died (in 1784) his funeral was unmolested, and Quesnay de SaintGermain, a councillor at the Parlement of Paris, and the pastor Rabaut Saint-Etienne addressed the assemblage. Even earlier, in 1748, Simon Louis de Ry, son of a Protestant refugee at Cassel, came to Paris and studied architecture. Either the government did not know or care who he was. Likewise his sister, married to a French Protestant refugee named Le Clerc, returned to Paris for a period of three months in 1773 without molestation. The Protestant physician Paul Bosc went to Paris in the 1750's and not only lived untroubled but even became a court physician, a member of the Academy of Sciences, and was sent on a government mission to England. He died a noted scientist in 1784. As a youth he had even been a Protestant pastor. What did that matter? Paris did not care. Paris throughout the eighteenth century was perhaps the safest place for a Protestant in France.
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