Another way of being a Christian in France: a century of Baptist implantation: France is the largest country of Western Europe. Its cultural influence is very ancient and still strong today, in spite of the fact that, since the beginning of the twentieth century, English has gradually replaced French as the language of the world's cultural elite

Baptist History and Heritage, Wntr-Spring, 2001 by Sebastien Fath

In many ways, the Reformed and Lutheran churches developed, at the beginning of Baptist implantation, what could be called a Moriscus Complex. This means that the mainline Protestant churches in France shared the same kind of experience as the Moriscus, those former Muslims who had to adapt to life in a Catholic Spain by restraining their testimony and any public expression of their inner faith. The Huguenots experienced such a struggle from the end of the seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth century. Any public expression of their faith was considered dangerous, and they had learned to dissimulate their specific Christian identity. In such a repressive context, evangelism became nonsense to most of them. When the Baptists came, mainline Protestants had just come out of this difficult period, but they were still shy in terms of evangelism. This has been described by an English Baptist correspondent:

   Their dependence on the state, their fear to displease the authorities,
   their dread of awakening the jealousy of the Roman Catholics, and many
   other considerations, made them fearful of taking one aggressive step to
   attack the kingdom of darkness. (4)

Mainline Protestant churches feared to evangelize in France. However, the above quotation ignored the main reason: a past of hostility, discrimination, and persecution, during which being a Protestant in France meant being martyred or sent to prison for life. The French Baptists, on the contrary, did not share the same historical legacy. They did not have many reasons to fear evangelism. This cultural gap explained, during the nineteenth century and even later, the tensions between mainline Protestant churches and Baptist churches, in spite of good relations. The first ones had lost, in some ways, their evangelistic priority. The second still wanted to evangelize France "without complexes."

The Monopolist Complex.--The second cultural legacy Baptists inherited from the nineteenth century is the strong hostility of the Catholic Church. The relationship with the Catholic giant seems on the whole rather conflicting, especially during the first two thirds of the nineteenth century, a time when the clergy tried with all its power to curtail Baptist initiatives, and put a stop to their presence. Catholicism almost had a monopoly on the religious market, and it had great difficulties admitting that religious pluralism and Protestant evangelization should be allowed in contemporary France. Many priests and bishops did their best to hinder Baptist implantation--especially before 1870. They considered Baptist proselytizing as a religious pretense for destabilizing Catholic populations.

Four chapels (Tremel in Brittany, Genlis, Chauny, and Servais in Picardie) were closed for years because of bishops who wrote to the authorities against the Baptist churches. Many Baptists had difficulties in their jobs because of priests who asked employers to fire them.

At school, at work, sometimes in everyday circumstances, Baptists were discriminated against because of sporadic Catholic intolerance. In response, French Baptists were strongly anti-Catholic. They never missed an opportunity to denounce the "popish" influence on French society. For example, Reuben Saillens, perhaps the most famous French Baptist of all times, thought that Catholicism was a totalitarian system that imprisoned people not only on the religious but also on the political level. (5)