Boer HistoryFrench Huguenots at the Cape
Edict of Nantes and the Revocation of 1685
The French Protestants later called Huguenots belonged to the Reformed tradition of John Calvin. Through the Wars of Religion they remained a skilled minority — artisans, merchants, farmers and professionals — strong in parts of the south and west and in certain towns. On 13 April 1598 Henry IV signed the Edict of Nantes. It did not make France Protestant, but it granted limited public worship, civil rights, access to office, and protected places — a hard-won settlement after decades of civil war. [8]
Later reigns narrowed that space. Under Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu the Peace of Alès (1629) stripped Huguenots of political-military privilege while leaving worship itself standing for a time. Under Louis XIV the drive for “one king, one law, one faith” grew sharper. From the 1660s schools and hospitals were closed, mixed marriages attacked, and children pressed toward Catholicism. From 1681 the dragonnades quartered mounted troops on Protestant households until conversion certificates appeared. Whole districts abjured under pressure. [8]
On 18 October 1685 the Edict of Fontainebleau revoked Nantes. Remaining temples were to fall, schools to close, pastors to leave or convert, private worship to end, and lay emigration to be blocked under harsh penalties. Tens of thousands still fled into the Dutch Republic, England, Brandenburg-Prussia, Switzerland and beyond — taking skills France could ill spare, including silk work, crafts, and knowledge of the vine. [8][3]
The VOC Recruits Refugees for the Cape
The VOC did not run a general settler empire, but the Cape was an exception. Farming costs and ship-supply needs kept rising; free agriculturists looked cheaper than a pure Company farm system. Between 1671 and 1685 families and a few orphan girls had already been sent, with uneven success. After the Refuge began, the directors saw Protestant fugitives as possible colonists — men who could till ground, make vinegar and brandy, and work the vine and olive. [8][3]
On 3 October 1685 the Assembly of Seventeen resolved to draw Piedmontese and French families if possible. Advantages already offered to emigrants were sweetened: a French-speaking clergyman would go with them, and they might return to Europe after five years if they wished. On 28 October they engaged Pierre Simond, then minister to the refugee congregation at Zierickzee, at £7 10s. a month. Emigrants were to bring only necessary luggage, might carry specie, would receive freehold land they could work, and tools and cattle on credit to be repaid in corn or kind. They took an oath of allegiance to the States, the Prince of Orange, the Company, and Cape command. [3][8]
Response was slow at first. Some batches refused at the last moment, citing fear of the long sea. Serious embarkation only gathered in late 1687–1688, when Dutch as well as French free colonists were still being pushed toward the Cape. [8][3]
The Ships of 1688
The flute Voorschoten left on 31 December 1687 with twenty-two French emigrants. Forced by a south-easter into Saldanha Bay on 13 April 1688, she was met by the cutter Jupiter with fresh food; the refugees were brought on to Table Bay. Aboard were Charles Marais with Catherine Taboureux and four children; Philippe Fouché with wife and children; bachelors including the brothers Jean and Gabriel le Roux of Blois and Gideon Malherbe; and Jacques Pinard with Esther Fouché, married before sailing. [8][3]
The Oosterland made Middelburg to Table Bay in eighty-seven days and anchored on 26 April 1688 with about twenty-four refugees, among them Jacques de Savoye and household, the surgeon Jean Prieur du Plessis with his wife, and the vinedresser Isaac Taillefer with wife and children. The Borssenburg arrived 12 May with a party of “French Piedmontese fugitives”; her passenger list is lost. [8][3]
The China (Berg China) left Rotterdam 20 March 1688 and reached Table Bay only on 4 August after seven months, with nearly everyone sick and some twenty dead, twelve of them French — among survivors Jean Mesnard and household, plus orphan girls from Rotterdam. The Zuid-Beveland from Middelburg 22 April anchored 19 August. Next morning a boat for shore capsized; several drowned, including an official bound for Malacca. Simond and his wife Anne de Berault landed from her, with others such as Jean le Long’s household, Estienne Viret, Salomon de Gournay and David Senecal. The Schelde also brought Charles Prévot’s family and Hercules des Pres with wife and children after storms and a call at Porto Praya. [8][3]
Later batches followed. The Wapen van Alkmaar and Zion carried further parties; of roughly forty on the Alkmaar only scattered names survive in the archives. Individuals and small family groups continued to appear into the early eighteenth century, but the concentrated 1688 wave was not repeated. [8][3]
Drakenstein Settlement under Simon van der Stel
When the first twenty-two refugees landed in April 1688, the Cape’s European free population was still small: round two hundred adult citizens and about one hundred and forty children at the Caabse Vlek, and at Stellenbosch some one hundred and eighty-four adult whites and eighty-nine children. As more French ships unloaded, refugees became a large share of the free civilian body — a fact that shaped how Simon van der Stel handled them. [9]
He collected funds, granted farms in the Stellenbosch district — Drakenstein, Frenchhoek and neighbouring ground — and mixed Dutch freeholds between French ones so no solid French bloc formed. Oxen, cows, sheep and tools went out with the grants. Freeholds were on the order of sixty morgen (about 127 English acres), commonly laid 600 roods deep and 60 wide. On 16 October 1688 twenty-three initial Drakenstein grants were recorded. Farm names such as La Provence, Champagne, Bourgogne and Picardie kept a French sound on the ground even as Dutch neighbours closed in. [9][3][8]
The Company’s hope was practical: better wine and brandy, olive trials, more grain and hands for a colony that still struggled to feed fleets. Grapes already grew well, but Cape wine had been poor since the first plantings under Jan van Riebeeck. Vine stocks multiplied sharply in the years after the refugees’ arrival; olive hopes largely failed. Wagon-making, cooperage, orchards and ordinary field crops spread with the new freeholds. [3][8]
Simond, Church Services, and the Drakenstein School
Pierre Simond preached in French on alternate Sundays at Stellenbosch and at a burgher’s house in Drakenstein. When he was at one place, the sick-comforter Mankadan read sermon and prayers in Dutch at the other. The arrangement treated the French as part of a wider Reformed body, not as a fully separate national church. [3][8]
On 8 November 1688 Paul Roux of Orange in France, who understood both languages, was appointed schoolmaster of Drakenstein at 25s. plus a ration allowance, and to act as church clerk. A French baptismal register in his hand later covers 1694–1713 — the only early church book kept wholly in French that survives from the valley. [3][8]
Simond was firm for his people’s interests and short on patience with those who crossed him. That steel helped hold a scattered flock; it also grated on a commander who wanted Dutch continuity and feared a “nation within a nation” while Europe slid toward open war with France. [3][9]
Petition for a Separate Congregation, 1689–1691
Stellenbosch already had its own consistory. Many refugees refused to remain a mere annex of that Dutch congregation. In November 1689 a deputation headed by Simond asked van der Stel and the Council of Policy for leave to form their own church body and for more clustered farms. The commander answered in anger — seeing a political as well as a pastoral challenge — and for a time refused. [9][3][8]
Simond carried the case to the Lords Seventeen. Their reply, which reached the Cape in course, gave partial satisfaction: a distinct Drakenstein church council under oversight of the combined church structures; bilingual schoolteachers at Stellenbosch and Drakenstein, with care that French children learn Dutch; and a firm refusal to regroup all French farms into one solid block. Nationalities were still to be mixed when ground was granted. Open hostility between some Dutch and French mouths cooled only as freeholds improved and intermarriage began despite earlier rash talk against it. [3][8][9]
The Batavia Relief Fund of 1690
Poverty bit hard in the first seasons. In April 1690 aid drawn from a Batavia subscription was distributed among the refugees. One Cape reckoning lists help for about 176 persons; other Cape tallies speak of roughly 155 when Company servants and those already married into Dutch households are set aside. Named grants ran from large household sums — for example Pierre Lombard with wife and child at ƒ750, Isaac Taillefer’s household at ƒ720, Pierre Jacob’s at ƒ640, the widow of Charles Marais with four children at ƒ600 — down to smaller amounts for bachelors and orphans. [3][8]
Not every recipient stayed. Some later paid full passage home after recovering means; a few never thrived. The surgeon du Plessis tried profession and farming, left in 1693, then returned years later with a second wife. Jacques de Savoye, once a merchant of standing at Ghent and office-holder at the Cape, sailed back to Europe in 1712 too poor to pay full fare. Black sheep existed; so did quiet competence that never reached the commander’s praise. [8]
Viticulture and Daily Farming
Directors and Cape officers had wanted vinegar-makers, brandy distillers and people who understood the vine. Several arrivals — including the de Villiers brothers recommended from La Rochelle as men who knew how to lay out and manage vineyards — answered that hope. Vine numbers in the colony rose steeply between the late 1680s and early 1690s; wine and brandy quality improved on the rough early product, even if European standards remained the measure of complaint. [8][3]
Ordinary farming still meant wheat, barley, gardens, orchards, cattle and the endless work of new freeholds on land that was not France. Drought, distance from neighbours, and debt for tools and stock marked many first years. Success was uneven; the settlement’s value to the Company lay as much in peopling the valleys as in any single crop. [8][3]
Language, Intermarriage, and Assimilation
Shared Calvinist worship eased daily contact with Dutch free burghers more than language did. French services continued for years even after pressure from Holland. In 1701 orders pushed Dutch harder in school and church life; Drakenstein still petitioned to keep some French preaching because families lived hours apart and learned Dutch slowly. Church minutes show French services into the 1710s — sometimes before Dutch, sometimes after, even “for one or two people.” From 1709 church letters and nomination lists to government were to be in Dutch, not French. [8]
Surnames shifted under Dutch ears and pens: Nourtier toward Nortje, Mesnard toward Minnaar, Gaucher toward Gous or Gouws, Terre Blanche toward Terblanche, while de Villiers kept its spelling but not always its French sound. Farm names and family names remained the clearest French mark on the landscape long after household speech had turned. [8]
Intermarriage and shared local politics closed distances. In the struggles around Willem Adriaan van der Stel, French free burghers appear among those who stood with Dutch neighbours — a fusion driven as much by common grievance as by soft goodwill. By the early eighteenth century the “French congregation” was already becoming a Cape Reformed valley community with a French past. [8]
Names, Farms, and Later Memory
Among surnames that took root are de Villiers, du Toit, Joubert, le Roux, Malan, Malherbe, Retief, Roux, Taillefer, Lombard, Hugo, and many others listed in early aid rolls and land grants. Some families had already lived a generation or more in the Dutch Republic before 1688; others stepped almost straight from French roads onto VOC decks. A few French-origin officers and wives had touched Cape life even before the refugee fleets — but the Drakenstein settlement is the main civilian story. [8][3][9]
Year-by-year politics of 1688–1690 — Simond’s letters, further ships, wreck and relief — also sit on the calendar pages 1688, 1689, and 1690. This page holds the longer arc: why they left France, how the Company shipped and seated them, and how a French-speaking Reformed minority became part of the Cape’s free-burgher valleys.