Marie Durand (1711–1776), the Famous Prisoner of Faith — Introduction
A view of Aigues-Mortes through the bars of the Tour de Constance, Marie Durand's prison for 38 years. Photograph by Campbell Markham, 2018.
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Editor’s note: This is part one of a BCL series on Marie Durand by pastor and author Campbell Markham.
My life was a tissue of tribulations. — Marie Durand, 1772
In 1730, French authorities arrested nineteen-year-old Marie Durand, shaved her head, and imprisoned her without trial for her Protestant faith in a medieval fortress, the Tour de Constance on the Mediterranean Sea. She was to be locked up there until she agreed to abjure her Protestant faith and convert to Roman Catholicism; or, until she died.
Durand refused to convert and remained in her dungeon for thirty-eight years. She was finally released in 1768 at the age of fifty-seven, when public opinion turned against the oppression of Protestants and the Tour de Constance was closed. She died in her home eight years later.
Scratched into the limestone floor of the Tour de Constance is the graffito “RESISTER”, Resist! Though no one knows who inscribed the word, it has been closely associated with Marie Durand for over two centuries. She is seen as the woman who bravely resisted the tyranny of the French King and the powerful Roman Catholic church, and their combined two-century harsh repression of Protestants.
Visit the central south of France today and you may find yourself driving on a Rue Marie Durand (there are at least eight of them) or driving past an École Marie Durand (of which there are two). In 1968 the French national postal service released a stamp with her picture, and there are numerous books, plays, major artworks, and even television features devoted to her story.
Marie Durand is quite well known in France, and a number of different causes have taken her as a figurehead.
During the nineteenth century, theologically liberal French Protestants held Marie Durand up as a heroine of freedom of conscience. They portrayed her as the woman who spent decades in prison for a cause being fought out by the French Enlightenment, by such great minds as d’Alembert, Diderot, Rousseau, and Voltaire. Liberal Protestants observed that, while the philosophes fought for freedom of conscience on the intellectual level, Durand’s decades of physical suffering made a powerful social-conscience contribution to the cause.
Conservative French Protestants, fiercely loyal to their religious and cultural roots, viewed Marie Durand as a heroic Huguenot, the ultimate example of a faithful Calvinist holding fast to her sixteenth-century Reformation heritage.
Evangelical Protestants in general have presented Durand as an example of steadfast faith in Christ under severe persecution. For them, Durand exemplifies the faithful Christian martyr, “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:10). Simonetta Carr, for example, has written a beautifully illustrated biography of Marie Durand as an inspiring example for Christian children and teens.
During World War II, leaders of the French resistance used Marie Durand’s name and story to inspire the French people to resist Nazi tyranny. And in 2016 actress and author Ysabelle Lacamp portrayed Marie Durand as a heroine of religious freedom in a series of books dealing with all kinds of social justice matters.
In short, many have held up Marie Durand as an inspiring heroine for their own causes. Few, however, have examined her life. Fewer again have examined her remarkable forty-eight surviving letters, forty-one of which were written from her dungeon.
Marie Durand was born in 1711 in a remote southern French village called Bouchet-de-Pranles. It remains to this day a delightful region of chestnut groves, undulating streams, green hills, and ancient stone farmhouses. You can still visit her home, which is now a museum devoted to her church and family, the Musée du Vivarais Protestant.
On the lintel above the family hearth Marie’s father etched, in exquisite uncials, these words of praise:
GOD BE PRAISED, 1696, É[tienne] D[urand].
Marie’s parents, Étienne and Claudine, were devoted descendants of the Huguenots, French Protestants who were converted in large numbers from Catholicism in the middle of the sixteenth century. Marie had one surviving sibling, her brother Pierre, who was eleven years her senior and who in his twenties served as a Huguenot pastor. The lives of all four family members would be engulfed by tragedy.
In his 1685 Edict of Fontainebleau, Louis XIV, the Le Roi soleil, formally revoked his Grandfather Henri IV’s 1598 Edict of Nantes, which had granted religious freedom to Protestants. Louis’ Revocation made it illegal to be a Protestant in France and an estimated two-hundred thousand Huguenots fled France to begin new lives in Switzerland, Germany, and Holland, and overseas in the British Isles, North America, and South Africa. Of those who stayed behind, tens of thousands converted to Roman Catholicism. Many, though, continued to practice their Protestant faith underground. Sometimes they were caught: Protestant men were condemned to be galley slaves for life; Protestant women were imprisoned for life in dungeons and prison-like convents; Protestant pastors were hanged, or worse. Waves of government oppression from one decade to the next made it very dangerous for the Huguenots to practice their Protestant faith.
That’s why Marie, though only a teenager, was arrested in her home in 1730 with Matthieu Serre, to whom she had recently been betrothed. Marie was sent to the dreaded Tour de Constance, about two-hundred kilometres south of Bouchet-de-Pranles. There she was locked into a circular stone room, eight metres in diameter, with between twenty and thirty other Huguenot women. They were given the pain du Roi, the “King’s bread,” a meagre daily ration of bread and water and a little straw to sleep on. It was not enough for survival and the women’s lives depended on gifts of food, wood, and money from the outside. They also craved cloth, needles, and thread. Huguenot women were skilled seamstresses and lace makers, and they could sell what they made to purchase enough food and fuel to survive.
Marie did not sit idly in her dungeon. Her father Étienne was a greffier, a respected clerk and land agent. Marie herself was well-educated and could read and write very well at a time when only a fraction of rural women were literate. In prison she used her rare ability to write letters on behalf of her imprisoned sisters. She wrote letters to pastors, churches, and individual Christians urging them to send life-giving aid to the Tour de Constance. When aid did arrive, she wrote detailed receipts to show their benefactors that their gifts had arrived safely and were being distributed fairly. She also wrote to the court in Versailles and even to the Queen of France herself, describing the women’s plight and urging them to intercede on their behalf.
Sixteen of Durand’s letters were written to her niece Anne in Geneva, the orphaned daughter of Marie’s brother Pierre, who was martyred for his faith in 1732. From her dungeon she reached out to Anne with love, to provide wisdom and guidance, to mother her from afar, and to send her clothes sewed in prison. She called Anne her Miette, her “Little Crumb,” and tenderly reassured her, Je t’aime plus que moi-même. “I love you more than myself.”
Forty-eight of Marie Durand’s letters survived, amounting to some twenty-five thousand words. You can see many of the originals today in the fabulous Bibliothèque de la Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Français in Paris, the Musée du Vivarais in Le Bouschet, the Musée du Désert in Mialet, and Leiden University in Holland. Upon thick cream-coloured paper Marie’s beautiful handwriting is clearly legible, beginning each letter with her dreadful address, De la tour de Constance, and often finishing with Votre très humble et très obéissante servante, La Durand, “Your very humble and very obedient servant, La Durand.”
Although different groups have held up Marie Durand as a heroine for various causes, Marie Durand’s letters are only rarely referenced. Too often she is portrayed as the author of merely a single word, Résister, inscribed in the floor of her dungeon. Yet, while no one knows who inscribed that word, the twenty-five thousand known words of Marie Durand are largely ignored. She has been silenced in effect, made to be a figurehead for certain causes—like the Enlightenment—that she could not have even known about, let alone supported. Only sometimes is she acknowledged as a heroine for the cause for which she herself said that she stood—the freedom to worship her Seigneur Jésus-Christ according to her conscience.
For the last four years, while undertaking PhD research at the University of Western Australia, I have closely studied the life of Marie Durand and have translated her forty-eight remarkable letters. Marie is a heroine of the Christian faith and in the months ahead I am thrilled, in partnership with Beautiful Christian Life, to bring her true story to light and, for the first time, to publish her forty-eight letters in the English language. (Each installment will include between two and four of her translated letters.)
Marie Durand Letter 1 – to Benefactors
[After four years in prison.]
To our benefactors
January 11, 1734
To our very dear Brothers and Sisters in our Lord Jesus Christ,
We have received by the hands of Loubierre a container of oil, from your delightful charity, which we have shared by common consent.
Together, we pray to the Lord for your preservation, which is so precious to us, and that it will please him to reward you for your gift, with good health and prosperity in this world, and forever in heaven.
We have the honour of being, with our deep respect and submission, your very humble and very obedient servants,
The Prisoners of the Tour de Constance.
January 11, 1734.
Translation © 2022 Campbell Markham | All rights reserved
Marie Durand Letter 2 – to a Benefactor
[After eight years in prison.]
To our Benefactor
August 22, 1738
Monsieur,
Mademoiselle de Couste, who came with Mademoiselle Boureille, showed us kindness by bringing to us eighteen silver livres, from you, which we shared between us all.
We have the honour, Monsieur, to give our most humble thanks for your charity, so good and pleasant. It came at just the right time. We pray to the Lord that it will please him in turn to reward you, both in this world, and forever in his Holy Paradise. While we wait for this eternal and ineffable happiness, may it please him to prolong your years with good health and prosperity. We pray the same for all your dear family, whom we have the honour of greeting.
May it please the God of mercy and all consolation to pour out his most precious blessings upon you, and in general upon all that belongs to you, while you wait to receive the entire harvest, with that sacred oil which will last for all eternity, from the Sun of Justice, who bears health upon his wings.
We have the honour of wishing you, Monsieur, having the honour to address you with profound respect and submission,
Monsieur,
Your most humble and obedient servants,
the Prisoners of the Tour de Constance,
Lavassas, La Durand,signed by all.
August 22, 1738.
Translation © 2022 Campbell Markham | All rights reserved
Marie Durand Letter 3 – to a Benefactor
[After ten years in prison.]
February 23, 1740
An account of what was sent to the Tour de Constance the 19th February 1740:
155 Ca of cloth in 31 parcels of 5ca each
400L. salted lard in 32 parts
220L. rice from the Levant
100L. white soap
320L. olive oil making 16 cannes
16 L. pepper in 32 packets
2 L. spices in 32 packets
2 L. cotton thread in 32 packets
2 L. sewing thread
31 pairs of cloth slippers
12 Ca 5 pans of rags, cut up for the little children.
We declare and profess to have received all that which is recorded in the above list, that we, held in the said Tour de Constance, have shared among us by common consent, thirty-one prisoners, and we signed a receipt for this with those who delivered it.
Made at the said Tour at Aigues-Mortes, this 23rd February one thousand seven hundred and forty.
Maurit de Chabanel, Michel de Julliant
Aberlinque de Pasquier, Jaquete Paule, Anne Soleirol,
Jaquete Vigne, Sause, La Fortune, Jobte, Vassase,
Marie Durand,
for those who do not know how to sign,
Gabiade de Pasquier, Gaussainte de Crose, Mauranne,
Vidale de Durand, The widow of Rouvier, Savannière,
Ladraitte, Goutette, Bourette, Frisole, Marie, Paironne,
Mademoisselle, Rigoulet, Fialaisse.
Translation © 2022 Campbell Markham | All rights reserved
