It must be remembered that some of them knew well how to fight. Some of their leaders--men of peace as they were, and men of an iron determination, which was shown in the obstinacy with which they refused to take up the sword--had come of stern warriors and were _Frenchmen_--Norman Frenchmen--Protestant Norman Frenchmen. A rare combination that;--cold hard steel and fire.
But it was not till some time afterwards that these men became the leaders of the peasantry, the chestnut-fed mountaineers who came down from their miserable huts and joined what had then become an organised army of insurrection. Before this time arrived a strange aberration seemed to move the people. The old simple non-resisting pastors had been done to death by torture and execution, and the people met, it is true, but often met amid the ruin of their homes, or in desert places, and as sheep having no shepherd. Then a wild hysterical frenzy appeared among them. Men, women, and even children claimed to be inspired, and at length fanaticism leaped into retaliation. On a Sunday in July, 1702, a wild mystic preacher, named Séguier went down with a band of about fifty armed men to release the prisoners. They were confined in dungeons beneath the house of one Chayla, a priest, who directed the prosecutions, and invented the tortures which he caused to be inflicted for the conversion of heretics. The Protestants broke open his door, forced the prison, and ultimately set fire to the house, in attempting to escape from which Chayla was recognised and killed. This was the beginning of a series of retaliations by the tormented people, the success of which changed the whole attitude of the Protestants of the district. They had formerly endured in silence; now they were desperate enough for insurrection. And the insurrection followed. Séguier was captured, maimed, and burnt alive; but others took his place. The war of the "Camisards" had commenced. Then it was that the leaders of the Protestant army in the Cevennes arose;--Roland and Cavalier, and the men who for a long time waged successful warfare against the royal forces, till defeat came accompanied by a new _régime_.
The rumbling of the revolutionary earthquake was already shaking the throne and the persecuting church. Voltaire, educated by the Jesuits, and hating religion, was helping to deliver the martyrs of the Protestant faith even before he began to "philosophise."