How I challenged a history myth in my French village

Some time ago, I had the bright idea to write a history of our abbey church, first in English and then, with the help of two friends, in French.

All went well until I came to compiling a timeline. I could establish almost all the necessary dates except one. 

In every authoritative source on the church of Larreule (Hautes-Pyrénées) it says that a Huguenot (French Protestant) army, led by the fearsome Count of Montgomery, descended upon our village during the Wars of Religion in the 16th Century.

The soldiers, we are told, burned our church to the ground as well as 150 others. They also committed endless atrocities, the heathen swines.

Montgomery is known to history as the Kingslayer for having skewered Henry II in a joust. A character in the Game of Thrones saga is inspired by him.

This despicable act of barbarism, I thought, had to be on my timeline. To include it, all I needed was to confirm the facts; in particular, the date on which the burning happened.

So began a trawl through all the documents I could find, in print and online, even when they were in ancient handwriting and needed hours of deciphering.

Doubts over orthodox history

The trail led back to one book that all local historians refer to, Les Huguenots en Bigorre (1884) by Charles Durier, graduate of the prestigious Ecole des Chartes and archivist of our department, Hautes-Pyrénées (previously known as Bigorre). 

Sources do not come more respectable than that, you would think. 

Sure enough, there it was: our village was mentioned several times in Durier’s records of damage caused by Montgomery and his Huguenots in the first week of September 1569.

I was about to put this date in my timeline but something aroused my suspicion. Was it possible to burn so many churches in so little time?

Besides, there were no signs in the church of the building having been destroyed by fire and rebuilt. It has most of its Romanesque features even if it was given a 19th-Century facelift.

Looking further into the matter I found that there were good archival records of Montgomery’s passage through Bigorre. I could plot his route on a map and state exactly where he was at any given time.

The evidence led to a surprising conclusion. The Huguenot army never came to our village; it could not have done so. 

It did not have the time between marching from sieges and battles. It was an impossibility, even if all those local historians insist it did.

Catholic propaganda

At this point I returned to Les Huguenots en Bigorre, and read it more carefully. I realised it was not a work of history at all but a recital of Catholic propaganda.

It was based on prejudiced “evidence” from the 16th Century and written, as all history is, for an audience of Durier’s contemporaries.

In the 1880s, the threat to French civilisation did not come from Protestantism, but the secularisation of the Third Republic’s education policy. History was being used to vilify those who would separate church from state.

What else could I do but compile my findings into a book which I knew was going to challenge established scholarship.

I wrote it in English to begin with but my target audience was the French-speaking inhabitants of modern Bigorre. 

So, I recruited my wife Clara and three very good friends to not only translate it, but eliminate the waffle and make sure it read well in French. Only the title stayed the same: Holy Smoke!

We organised a book launch in our local communal café with two friends, Arielle and Joel, reading a lively version of the first chapter, and another friend, Gwen, who is Welsh, playing the Celtic harp. The instrument somehow seemed to evoke the period we were dealing with.

After their performance, I stood up in front of 50 people and explained why and how I had written the book. I took questions and a lively debate about the authenticity of history ensued.

My next step is to get the book into the hands of those historians whose work I challenge to see if they can pick holes in my argument. 

You might be thinking that all this is a rather parochial spat with no implications for the present but, as I explain in the second part of the book, 'big history' is made from local fragments. 

By correcting the facts about Larreule Abbey in the year 1569 I am effectively rewriting the history of France.

Misconceptions – “fake history” – are often used to propagate misinformation in the present and justify some unsavoury political stances. 

We must always ask questions of what we are told. Whenever I hear someone say “everyone says x is true”, I can never resist asking: “Are you sure they are right? Have you checked the facts for yourself?” 

Holy Smoke: Briser le mythe de l’invasion huguenote en Bigorre. (€20+p&p) is available from selected bookshops in Hautes-Pyrénées or directly from the author via info@nickinman.com.