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 surrounded it with fortifications and defended it valiantly against John of England. During the Breton wars of succession Nantes took part first with Jean de Montfort, but afterwards with Charles of Blois, and did not open its gates to Monfort till his success was assured and his English allies had retired. In 1560 Francis II. granted Nantes a communal constitution. In the course of the 15th and 16th centuries the city suffered from several epidemics. Averse to Protestantism, it joined the League along with the duke of Mercœur, governor of Brittany, who helped to raise the country into an independent duchy; and it was not till 1598 that it opened its gates to Henry IV., who here signed on the 2nd of May of that year the famous Edict of Nantes which until its revocation by Louis XIV. in 1685 was the charter of Huguenot liberties in France. It was at Nantes that Henry de Talleyrand, count of Chalais, was punished in 1626 for plotting against Richelieu, that Fouquet was arrested in 1661, and that the Cellamare conspirators were executed under the regent Philip of Orleans. Having warmly embraced the cause of the Revolution in 1789, the city was in 1793 treated with extreme rigour by J. B. Carrier, envoy of the Committee of Public Safety, whose noyades or wholesale drownings of prisoners became notorious. Nantes on more than one occasion vigorously resisted the Vendeans. It was here that the duchess of Berry was arrested in 1832 while trying to stir up La Vendée against Louis Philippe.

NANTES, EDICT OF, the law promulgated in April 1598 by which the French king, Henry IV., gave religious liberty to his Protestant subjects, the Huguenots. The story of the struggle for the edict is part of the history of France, and during the thirty-five years of civil war which preceded its grant, many treaties and other arrangements had been made between the contending religious parties, but none of these had been satisfactory or lasting. The elation of the Protestants at the accession of Henry IV. in 1589 was followed by deep depression, when it was found that not only did he adopt the Roman Catholic faith, but that his efforts to redress their grievances were singularly ineffectual. In 1594 they took determined measures to protect themselves; in 1597, the war with Spain being practically over, long negotiations took place between the king and their representatives, prominent among whom was the historian J. A. de Thou, and at last the edict was drawn up. It consisted of 95 general articles, which were signed by Henry at Nantes on the 13th of April 1598, and of 56 particular ones, signed on the 2nd of May. There was also some supplementary matter. The main provisions of the edict of Nantes may be briefly summarized under six heads: (1) It gave liberty of conscience to the Protestants throughout the whole of France. (2) It gave to the Protestants the right of holding public worship in those places where they had held it in the year 1576 and in the earlier part of 1577, also in places where this freedom had been granted by the edict of Poitiers (1577) and the treaties of Nérac (1579) and of Félix (1580). The Protestants could also worship in two towns in each bailliage and sénéchansée. The greater nobles could hold Protestant services in their houses; the lesser nobles could do the same, but only for gatherings of not more than thirty people. Regarding Paris, the Protestants could conduct worship within five leagues of the city; previously this prohibition had extended to a distance of ten leagues. (3) Full civil rights were granted to the Protestants. They could trade freely, inherit property and enter the universities, colleges and schools. All official positions were open to them. (4) To deal with disputes arising out of the edict a chamber was established in the parlement of Paris (le chambre de l'édit). This was to be composed of ten Roman Catholic, and of six Protestant members. Chambers for the same purpose, but consisting of Protestants and Roman Catholics in equal numbers, were established in connexion with the provincial parlements. (5) The Protestant pastors were to be paid by the state and to be freed from certain burdens, their position being made practically equal to that of the Roman Catholic clergy. (6) A hundred places of safety were given to the Protestants for eight years, the expenses of garrisoning them being undertaken by the king. In many ways the terms of the edict were very generous to the Protestants, but it must be remembered that the liberty to hold public worship was made the exception and not the rule; this was prohibited except in certain specified cases, and in this respect they were less favourably treated than they were under the arrangement made in 1576.

The edict was greatly disliked by the Roman Catholic clergy and their friends, and a few changes were made to conciliate them. The parlement of Paris shared this dislike, and succeeded in reducing the number of Protestant members of the chambre de l’édit from six to one. Then cajoled and threatened by Henry, the parlement registered the edict on the 25th of February 1599. After similar trouble it was also registered by the provincial parlements, the last to take this step being the parlement of Rouen, which delayed the registration until 1609.

The strong political position secured to the French Protestants by the edict of Nantes was very objectionable, not only to the ardent Roman Catholics, but also to more moderate persons, and the payments made to their ministers by the state were viewed with increasing dislike. Thus about 1660 a strong movement began for its repeal, and this had great influence with the king. One after another proclamations and declarations were issued which deprived the Protestants of their rights under the edict; their position was rendered intolerable by a series of persecutions which culminated in the dragonnades, and at length on the 18th of October 1685 Louis revoked the edict, thus depriving the Protestants in France of all civil and religious liberty. This gave a new impetus to the emigration of the Huguenots, which had been going on for some years, and England, Holland and Brandenburg received numbers of thrifty and industrious French families.

NANTEUIL, ROBERT (1623–1678), French line-engraver, was born about 1623, or, as other authorities state, in 1630, the son of a merchant of Reims. Having received an excellent classical education, he studied engraving under his brother-in-law, Nicholas Regnesson; and, his crayon portraits having attracted attention, he was pensioned by Louis XIV. and appointed designer and engraver of the cabinet to that monarch. It was mainly due to his influence that the king granted the edict of 1660, dated from St Jean de Luz, by which engraving was pronounced free and distinct from the mechanical arts, and its practitioners were declared entitled to the privileges of other artists. He died at Paris in 1678. The plates of Nanteuil, several of them approaching the scale of life, number about three hundred. In his early practice he imitated the technique of his predecessors, working with straight lines, strengthened, but not crossed, in the shadows, in the style of Claude Mellan, and in other prints cross-hatching like Regnesson, or stippling in the manner of Jean Boulanger; but he gradually asserted his full individuality, modelling the faces of his portraits with the utmost precision and completeness, and employing various methods of touch for the draperies and other parts of his plates. Among the finest works of his fully developed period may be named the portraits of Pomponne de Bellièvre, Gilles Ménage, Jean Loret, the duc de la Meilleraye and the duchess de Nemours.

NANTICOKE, a borough of Luzerne county, Pennsylvania, U.S.A., on the North Branch of the Susquehanna river, opposite West Nanticoke, and 8 m. S.W. of Wilkes-Barre. Pop. (1880), 3884; (1890), 10,044; (1900), 12,116, of whom 5055 were foreign-born; (1910 census) 18,877. It is served by the Pennsylvania, the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western and the