ABSTRACT
The men and women who constituted the Reformed churches of France worked arduously and endlessly to mold and define their confessional community during the early modern period. Most conspicuously, a ceaseless campaign of oppression and violence conducted by Catholic opponents provided French Protestants with an unambiguous, if heavily negative definition. They were an appallingly mistreated Christian people whose relentless persecution by the Catholic monarchial state and its ecclesiastical allies lent ready validation as a true church. After the midseventeenth century, Reformed pastors in their sermons drew increasingly upon the example of the ancient Hebrews and the suffering visited upon God’s people, recalling images of the Roman destruction of the temple of Jerusalem and, more generally, invoking the notion of a holocaust.1 Along more positive lines, Reformed Christians throughout the kingdom viewed themselves as a moral community, a community of belief, and a community of worshipers. While all three aspects of this self-understanding are vital for appreciating French Protestants during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this essay focuses attention on the Reformed churches as communities of worshipers. What were the common rites in which the faithful participated? How, furthermore, did the liturgy serve to define the community’s character and lend it strength and unity?
