One of the great lacunae of the English-speaking Evangelical memory relates to France. For far too many English-speaking Evangelicals assume that after the Reformation France was a monolithic Roman Catholic bastion. But, for example, when John Calvin died in 1564, there were nearly 2 million Evangelicals in France, 10% of the entire population. And these believers and their churches had a rich hist-ory in the years after Calvin’s death.
Historians know this Christian tradition as the Huguenots and they produced some remarkably fine Christians and preachers. Consider, for instance, the preacher Jean Claude (1619–1687), the quarter-centenary of whose birth is this year and who, in his own day, was considered a model of preaching excellence and compared to John Chrysostom in the Ancient Church.
Claude was born to a pastor, François Claude, and his wife in the village of Le Sauvetat-du-Dropt in south-western France, about55 kilometres north of Agen. With his father’s encouragement, Claude obtained a Master of Arts degree from the Protestant school of Montauban and then studied for a further three years in that school’s faculty of divinity. A year or so after his graduation from Montauban in 1645, Claude accepted the pastorate at the town of St Affrique. He ministered here until 1655, when he was called to serve in the large congregation of Nîmes in Languedoc.
