When Louis the Fourteenth revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685, he withdrew the legal toleration French Protestants, the Huguenots, had held for nearly a century, and the mountainous Cevennes region of southern France, one of the last strongly Protestant areas left in the kingdom, was subjected to forced conversions and to dragonnades, the practice of quartering royal troops in Protestant households until their occupants submitted. Resentment simmered for years under a Catholic clergy many Cevenols regarded as an occupying presence, and it broke into open revolt in July 1702, when a band of Protestant villagers killed the Abbe du Chayla, an abbot notorious locally for imprisoning and torturing Huguenots who had continued worshipping in secret.
What followed was two years of guerrilla warfare fought by peasant bands who called themselves Camisards, from the white shirts some wore in night raids, under popular leaders including the baker's apprentice Jean Cavalier and the shepherd Pierre Laporte, known as Roland. Though never numbering more than a few thousand fighters, the Camisards tied down some twenty five thousand royal troops under two marshals of France before Cavalier negotiated a surrender in May 1704. Roland fought on and was killed in an ambush that August, and scattered resistance continued for several more years before the rebellion was fully suppressed.