Louis XVI Signs the Edict of Toleration

On 7 November 1787, King Louis XVI signed the Edict of Toleration at Versailles, restoring civil status to France's Protestants more than a century after Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685, already recorded here. Registered by the Parlement of Paris on 29 January 1788, the edict let non-Catholics, chiefly the Reformed communities who had worshiped in secret as the underground Churches of the Desert, register births, marriages and deaths before a royal judge or a parish priest acting as civil registrar, allowing them to legalize their unions and removing the stigma of illegitimacy French law had attached to Protestant births for a century. It authorized private worship, though public Protestant services stayed forbidden, and opened most commercial and professional occupations to non-Catholics while still barring them from public administration and teaching posts. Most French Protestants responded by bringing their long unrecognized Desert marriages before the newly available civil registrars. The edict fell well short of full religious liberty, which came only with the Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789, but it ended a century in which Reformed worship in France existed outside the law, more than four decades before the Secession of 1834 founded the Christian Reformed Churches in the Netherlands, already recorded here.