Charles Augustin Coquerel

Charles Augustin Coquerel was born to a Jansenist family which, two generations before, had married into a minor noble family, the du Fossé seigneurs based near Rouen, Normandy. Family opposition saw Augustin-François du Fossé and his future wife Monique Coquerel, flee to England, marry, and support themselves by teaching French. They connected in this manner with the family of the avant garde poet, novelist and pro-Revolutionary essayist, Helen Maria Williams. While there, they also followed the logic of their familial Jansenism and converted to Protestantism under the teaching of Antoine-Jacques Roustan (the unitarian pastor of the Swiss Church in London, 1764 to 1791) (though Stroehlin 1883 suggests Monique had become a Protestant already). The friendship with the Williams continued when Augustin-François du Fossé's father died, leaving him the 'baronage'. Though unitarian by conviction, Du Fossé remained an active member of the Consistory and treasurer of the Reformed Church of Rouen (something he could not have done in the Church of England). Just as the French Revolution began, during the summer of 1791, Helen Maria, her mother and her sisters Parsis and Cécilia, followed the du Fossés to settle permanently in France “to [learn to] speak French well, a constitutional language”. Less than two years later, on March 6, 1794, in Paris, Cécilia Williams married Marie-Martin-Athanase Coquerel, giving birth to Athanase Laurent Charles (1795–1868) and Charles Augustin right in the middle of the turmoil of the French Revolution. When their mother died suddenly in 1798, Athanase and Charles received their early education from their aunts Helen and Persis. Athanase Laurent would go on to complete his theological studies at the Protestant seminary of Montauban, and, rejecting an offer to minister in the Church of England, became a leading figure in French Reformed Church circles.

Charles Augustin was born on 17 April 1797, and baptised by the first Reformed pastor to serve in Paris following the French Revolution, Paul-Henri Marron: his godparents were Jean-Scipion Sabonadiere and his mother's other sister, Persis Williams. The Williams' salon drew some of the most notable thinkers of their time, including Alexander von Humboldt, various members of the Monod family, the republican anti-slavery Bishop Henri Jean-Baptiste Grégoire, and the Protestant leader Jean-Paul Rabaut Saint-Étienne, among others, many of whom corresponded and acted as a sort of information network for British journals such as the unitarian Monthly Repository. Stroehlin is not alone in pointing to this mixture of pious (and in some issues quite radical) progressivist 'community of letters' as a profound impact on Charles. The brothers were first sent to a residential school in Geneva, and from 1811 Charles too studied theology at Montauban. After his return to Paris, however, he also studied medicine and other sciences, gaining a reputation as a leading amatuer astronomer. Both brothers found their family circles much affected by the collapse of the Empire, and the Williams' family's income much reduced. Both turned to the pen not just to build a name for themselves, but to earn an income. As Stroehlin notes, 'At the same time' as Charles was editing von Humboldt's works, 'he was annotating Justin Martyr and immersed himself in reading Eichhorn, Gesenius and the other contemporary German rationalists, he approached archeology with Letronne, medicine with Broussais, chemistry with Gay-Lussac, to whom he served as preparer; high mathematics with Ampère, astronomy with Arago'. (Stroehlin 1883: 29)

Charles Augustin was one of the founders of the Archives du Christianisme, of the Annales Protestantes in 1819, Le Lien, the Revue britannique (1823), and in 1825 of the Revue Protestante, in which he published pieces addressing many of the concerns of the French Reformed Churches, in which his brother was a significant figure: 'from 1831 to 1841, he gave up long-term compositions to devote all his activity to the periodical press' (Stroehlin 1883: 32) Most of these contributions did not bear his name, and many returned no income. His journals were established to champion liberal politics and the rights of Protestants under Catholic majorities, and to oppose doctrinaire tendencies both from within France and from abroad. Charles Augustin 'fought in the Protestant Revue, with a spiritual vivacity, against the invasion in France of the English Methodism and the attempts of a proselytism whose zeal could not redeem its narrowness'. (Stroehlin 1883: 33) Charles supported the anti-Slavery campaigns of his time, corresponding with such leaders as Thomas Clarkson. (Clarkson Papers, Huntingdon Library) In tones reminiscent of Augustin-François du Fossé, he reminded the 1848 national assembly of the Reformed Churches in France that private conscience, the role of the Holy Spirit and the supremacy of the Bible over any creed or Cardinal: these were the major protections against political domination (be that of the Catholic Church or, one might suggest, of the sort of Bonapartism which had suppressed Helen Maria Williams' career after her falling out with Napoleon in 1801). His brother, Athanase, explained their joint politically liberal, rationalist Reformed faith as follows: 'The best form of government must be sought in the gospel; I believe the gospel is deeply republican.' (quoted in Stroehlin 1883: 22) This was not mere theory - both brothers were closely involved in attempting to shape French thought in liberal, democratic directions, and Athanase would seek and hold national level political office.

The volume of Charles Coquerel's written work was prodigious. He published a work on English literature (1828), an Essai sur l'histoire generale du christianisme (1828) and Histoire des Eglises du Desert depuis la revocation de l'edit de Nantes (Paris, 1841; Germ. transl. by Schilling, Stuttgart, 1846). This latter won him 'a legitimate and lasting popularity' among the Huguenot diaspora, and was widely quoted in anglophone works which sought to draw lessons about Continental illiberalism. As well as authoring works, he acted as a translator of works from Britain through France to Germany, and vice versa, as well as participating in communal 'scholarly' activities with other Francophone Protestants (such as the vaudois Benjamin Constant) in the Revue Encyclopedique founded by Marc Antoine Jullien in 1819.

Consistent with his support of religious liberty, with the material appearing in his edited Archives du Christianisme, and his reading of both French (Perrin, Léger and Brez) and English sources (naming Boyer, Giles, Jones, Bowring and Lowther), Coquerel drew on their present ties with the Reformed Churches in France to champion the Waldensian past. His Notice sur l'état actuel des églises vaudoises protestantes des vallées du Piémont, was (he claimed) 'written in haste' and first published 'in a Protestant newspaper which is published in Paris' in order to 'serve the cause of religious liberty and equal rights, by calling public attention to the present situation and the woes of the Protestant Vaudois churches'. Coquerel's romantic liberalism shaped his entire interpretation. The Waldensians were an ancient church, and Coquerel defended the idea that their true origin 'goes back to a much more remote period, and close to the earliest days of the establishment of Christianity'. Their witness inspired the Reformers, and compared favourably to the 'barbarism and ignorance' of the medieval Catholic world, which drenched the West in blood and Inquisition in an attempt to repress the resurgent rational human spirit which the Waldensians represented. 'A rapid slope' (of progress), Coquerel held, 'leads men towards ideas more worthy of their nature, more in conformity with the duties which any reasonable religion must impose. It is high time that the Reformed members of the Vaudois valleys in their turn enjoyed the privilege to celebrate in peace this belief, which their fathers did not abandon in the midst of the most appalling human impositions.' No doubt, along the lines of his brother's position on experiential Christianity, Charles Augustin would have felt assured by the impact of the Reveil on the Waldensian valleys, yet another sign of life in this most primitive of protestant forms. On the other hand, his intrinsic faith in the triumph of rationality saw him translate unitarian literature, such as a summary of the work of Thomas Belsham 'which, in his thought, offered to the French Reformed readership the double advantage of being eminently Christian and not in the slightest mystical' (Stroehlin 1883: 31).

Coquerel married late in life, on 3 May 1848 in Paris, to Louise Prudence Delahaye.

Coquerel continued to champion liberal causes throughout his life, and indeed died on February 1, 1851, having seen his own family participate strongly in the bourgeois revolutions of 1848. His early interest in the plight of the (then largely French- and patois-speaking) Waldensians contributed to the flow of francophile Britons which connected to, and ultimately transformed, not just life in the valleys of Piedmont but influenced the place of political liberalism in the emerging nation of Italy.

Works:

• 1820: Sur la législation anglaise relative à la traite des Noirs, Paris: impr. de Baudouin frères

• 1822: Notice sur l'état actuel des églises vaudoises protestantes des vallées du Piémont, suivie des ordonnances intolérantes rendues contre ces chrétiens réformés, de leur pétition au roi de Sardaigne, et du tableau statistique des communes vaudoises, Paris: H. Servier

• 1823: Tableaux de l'histoire philososophique du christianisme, ou Études de philosophie religieuse, Paris: Servier, Igonette, Ponthieu

• 1824: Buxton, Thomas Fowell, C. A. Coquerel (transl. and ed.). Discours prononcé dans la Chambre des Communes d'Angleterre à l'appui de la motion pour l'adoucissement et l'extinction graduelle de l'esclavage dans les colonies anglaises, par J. Buxton, traduit de l'anglais, précédé d'une introduction sur l'état des esclaves dans ces colonies, Paris: impr. de Crapelet

• 1824: Résumé de l'histoire de Suêde. Paris: LeCointe et Durey

• 1825-1831: Revue protestante / rédacteur principal : M. Charles Coquerel, Paris: Dondey-Dupré père et fils

• 1825: Résumé de l'histoire de Suède, Paris: Lecointe et Durey

• 1827: Caritéas, Paris: A. Sautelet Servier.

• 1827: Lettre à M. O'Egger,... sur une profession générale de toute l'Église protestante, par M. Charles Coquerel,... Août 1827, Paris: Dondey-Dupré père et fils

• 1827: Madame Élisabeth Fry, membre de la Société des amis, dits Quakers

• 1828: Essai sur l'histoire générale du christianisme, Paris: A. Sautelet

• 1828: Histoire abrégée de la littérature anglaise, depuis son origine jusqu'à nos jours, Paris: L. Janet

• 1841: Histoire des églises du désert chez les protestants de France depuis la fin du règne de Louis XIV jusqu'à la Révolution française, Paris: A. Cherbuliez

Sources:

• Coquerel, Charles Augustin. (1822). Notice sur l'état actuel des églises vaudoises protestantes des vallées du Piémont. Paris: 1822.

• Delforge, Frédéric (1999). 'Du jansénisme au protestantisme unitarien', Bulletin de la Société de l'Histoire du Protestantisme Français 145 (Janvier-Février-Mars 1999): 89-122.

• North British Review, 'The Reformed Church of France', The North British Review XIV.27 (Nov. 1850).

• Stroehlin, E. (1883). Messieurs Coquerel. (Extrait de La France Protestante), Paris: Fischbacher, 1893.

• Williams, Helen Maria. (1791). Letters written from France to a friend in England during the year 1790 - Containing the history of the misfortunes of Mme du F ***. Translated from the English by M ..., Paris, 1791.