Protestants in Grasse

Almost hidden beside the Crédit Lyonnais bank on bd Jeu de Ballon is an alley named the Place des Huguenots* – that is, the square of French Protestants. I’ve read other explanations but it seems plausible that this tiny area, or ‘Barri’, was where Grasse’s small Huguenot population originally lived.

The Place lay behind the last remaining tower of Grasse’s fourteenth century walls. Known as the Tour Leydit or Leydier (or sometimes the Tour des Huguenots), it was demolished as late as 1931.

Bd Jeu de Ballon, 1920s. The Tour Leydit is in the centre. The lines of the Grasse-Cagnes tramway can be seen.

Swept away with it, and replaced by the Crédit Lyonnais bank building, were other alleys which made up an ancient, and by 1930 very insalubrious, cluster of dwellings. Only the Place remains today.

(Top left) An ancient entrance to the Barri des Huguenots in 1904 (Top right) The narrow alley beside the Credit Lyonnais bank leads to the Place (Bottom) The Place des Huguenots today. The small square was perhaps once a gathering point.

Protestantism in Grasse

A historian named Myriam Orban has written extensively about Protestantism in south-east France. According to her research, several noble families in Grasse, Vence and other towns and villages in our area converted to the reformed religion after about 1540. If so, servants, artisans and others associated with them further down the social scale would certainly have followed them.

Persecution started early. The bishop of Grasse was instructed to search for heretics in 1550 and there is evidence of Grasse families (but not noblemen!) leaving for Geneva. An independent and Protestant city, it was the stronghold of the French-born theologian and charismatic, John Calvin, at that time.

But in 1562, Catherine de Medici, the queen-regent who supposedly journeyed through Grasse on her way to her wedding in 1533, issued a tolerant edict allowing Calvinists to preach in ‘faubourgs’ (streets close to city gates). Since the Barri des Huguenots was a faubourg, perhaps that is the origin of the name.

What followed – the Wars of Religion in France between 1560 and 1600 – destroyed the Huguenot and Calvinist community in Grasse.

Henri IV - brought up a Huguenot, he (reputedly) said 'Paris is worth a mass'

In 1590, the Catholic League, which was the opposition to Henri IV, successfully besieged the town. It was occupied by soldiers from Savoy, an ally of the Catholic League. Only after the conversion of Henri to Catholicism in 1593, and his issue of the Edict of Nantes to protect Protestants in 1595, were the occupiers thrown out by townspeople loyal to the king.

The Edict of Nantes specified selected towns and castles as places of safety for Huguenots, but Grasse was never one of them (the nearest was Castellane, 60km and two or three days travel away over the hills). It appears that only very small numbers remained in Grasse, perhaps huddled in the Barri des Huguenots for mutual protection.

The nobles researched by Myriam Orban mostly appear to have followed Henry IV back to loyalty to Rome, and one source says that just three Huguenots were left in the town by 1682.

The Counter-Reformation in Grasse

Ironically, the main impact of Protestantism in Grasse seems to have been to proliferate the number of Catholic religious orders here. In the early years of the seventeenth century, no less than four of the new international orders which were founded under the Counter-Reformation (sometimes called the Catholic Revival) established houses in Grasse, to add to the three already here – the Cordeliers (Franciscans), Augustinians and Dominicans.

The Capucins (reformed Franciscans) established a convent to the south east of the old town in 1605. The Ursulines arrived in 1606 and subsequently moved to rue Tracastel. The Oratorians came in 1628 and twelve years later established themselves in what is now the Oratory chapel.

The Oratory chapel on rue de l'Oratoire. The doorway arch was moved here in 1851 from the Cordeliers church, which was being demolished by Bruno Court

Finally, the Visitandines arrived in 1634, creating the Jeanne d’Arc school and subsequently merging with the Ursulines.

Over 250 years on, these religious sites were critical in helping to create the ‘industrial revolution’ in perfumery in the late nineteenth century. Chiris was built on the Capucins’ convent, Bruno Court on that of the Cordeliers and Hugues Ainé (later Robertet) on part of the Dominicans site. Several firms successively took over a building which was erected in what was once the garden of the Oratorians, next to the chapel.

The arrival of the Anglicans

Many members of the ‘English colony’ of ‘hivernants’ (winter residents) who arrived after 1870 were Anglican (Church of England) and they have left at least one lasting mark on Grasse. In 1890, two English families, the Bowes and the Bookers, bought land in the Malbosc quarter, a little north east of Alice de Rothschild’s Villa Victoria, and financed the creation of an Anglican church.

John Bowes was a rich wool merchant from Liverpool and he appointed an architect, George Ashdown Audsley, based in the same city. Audsley built a wooden chapel typical of the north of England, which bore almost no resemblance to the stone Anglican churches erected elsewhere along the Mediterranean coasts of France and Italy in the same period. You can see below a comparison with a similar church, this one built in 1878.

(Above) Church of St Michael and All Angels Church, Great Altcar, Lancs - about 20km north of Liverpool in the UK (image from the parish website). (Below) Victoria Chapel (website of Eglise Protestante Unie de France)

Famously, the chapel was completed just in time for Queen Victoria’s visit to Grasse in 1891. She not only attended several services, but also commissioned a stained glass window.

The inscription at the bottom of the window stands as a permanent reminder to the congregation of Victoria's importance! It reads ‘To the glory of God and in remembrance of her visit, Victoria, Queen of Great Britain and Ireland, Empress of India, 1891’.

It’s been known as the Victoria Chapel ever since.

But unneeded by the small number of local Anglicans when the hivernants did not return after the second war, it was gradually left to deteriorate. In 1970, the chapel was given to the Reformed Church of France, which arranged its refurbishment. Its interior, especially the wooden roof, is magnificent, and there are weekly services and regular concerts. The Friends of the Victoria Chapel have a website here.

French Protestantism

Despite the Wars of Religion in the sixteenth century, followed by severe persecution under Louis XIV in the seventeenth, Protestantism never entirely disappeared from France, and active persecution ceased at the time of the Revolution. The south east, especially the Rhone valley south from Lyon and towards Montpellier has the largest concentration of Protestants in France, who make up 2-3% of the country's population.

In 2013, the Calvinists of the Reformed Church merged with the Evangelical Lutheran Church. The website of the resulting United Protestant Church of France states that they are ‘anchored in the reformed tradition of the sixteenth century’ and in a Calvinist ‘Confession of Faith’ which was declared in La Rochelle in 1559.

The United Protestant Church of France's noticeboard outside the chapel

It seems unlikely that Victoria and the Anglican hivernants would have appreciated being associated with an assembly which they would have considered non-conformist. But despite its Anglican origins, the Victoria Chapel today represents a congregation which follows directly in the footsteps of Grasse’s sixteenth century Huguenots.

*The origin of the description is often speculated upon but is certainly obscure.