Book Description

Claude was a French Protestant divine and a professor of theology at the Protestant college of Nîmes. After the Edict of Fontainebleau (1685), which revoked the civil rights of French Protestants and outlawed Protestantism, he fled to the Netherlands, where he received a pension from stadtholder William of Orange, who commissioned him to write an account of the persecuted French Protestants, Plaintes des Protestants cruellement opprimés dans le royaume de France (1686). The book, which includes the text of the 1685 edict, was translated into English, but the translation and the French-language original text were publicly burnt by the common hangman by order of King James II in 1686 because it contained passages that criticized the king of France.