In 1642, on the eve of the Civil War, there died in London the notorious Benjamin de Rohan, Lord of Soubise, who had survived in exile an age that belonged to the past. With the fall of La Rochelle, the political power of the Huguenots was struck down, and there remained no further check on the path of absolute monarchy. Protestant historians are wont to lament the lukewarm faith that marked the period extending from 1629 to the Revolution. Indeed, the outward manifestations of Huguenot zeal had then ceased to be characteristic of the Church militant. The Bearnese or Languedocian gentleman no longer left his castle for the wars, bearing as a twofold symbol of his sect and party the Bible in the one hand and the sword in the other; and the time was yet to come when in the wild Cévennes mountains, in the "Desert," as they said in their highly-coloured language, arose the heroic witnesses of the persecuted Church. The accidental causes that had temporarily given the Huguenots an undue influence in the State ceasing to operate, they appeared from a formidable party suddenly to shrink into insignificance. But their intellectual development meanwhile must not be overlooked. Alone in France, with those that a popular dogmatism, no doubt justified in some cases, contemptibly nicknamed libertines, they were prepared by a suitable mental training to act as a check on the natural bias of the majority regarding its own infallibility. And over the libertines they had the advantage both of general austereness of life and of a certain readiness to suffer for their convictions.
No doubt the discipline exercised by the Calvinistic organisation discouraged individual eccentricity. The struggle for emancipation over, the leaders who had upheld against the Church of Rome their right of judging in spiritual matters concluded that no further encroachments of individualism on authority were permissible. The Confession of Faith lay heavy upon the Churches; the Synod of Dort, whose decisions had become laws for the French Synods, was singularly like a Reformed Council of Trent. Still, there remained in the early seventeenth century a wide difference between the mental attitude of a Huguenot and a contemporary Scotch Presbyterian. A minority in France, the Huguenot leaders could not cut off their flocks from the outer world; they mixed with the Catholics, who outnumbered them; they shared in the development of thought in their country; they were not all scholars and divines: some made bold to be men of letters, poets, even libertines.[149] In the literary coteries of the capital, in the incipient French Academy, over which the Protestant Conrart presided, abbés and pastors were reconciled in common admiration for an elegant alexandrine or a correct period.