Jurieu, Pierre

(1637–1713)

   Polemicist and Theologian.

   Jurieu was the son of a Protestant minister in Mer, France, and he was educated at Saumur and Sedan and in England. After serving the congregation at Mer, he was appointed Professor of Hebrew at Sedan. When the Sedan Academy was dissolved by King Louis XIV, he became Minister of the Walloon Church in Rotterdam in the Netherlands. Jurieu is remembered as the most prominent apologist for the French Protestant Church in the late seventeenth century, during the period of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. He was the author of the Histoire du Calvinisme et du Papisme, in which he demanded freedom of conscience for all citizens. In his L’Accomplissement des Prophéties ou la Délivrance de l’Eglise, he argued from the Book of Revelation that Protestantism would triumph in the year 1689. Disappointed in this, he later maintained that because the French King had used military force to coerce religious belief, violent revolution against the secular power was justifiable. He also inveighed against Bishop bossuet and against the Jansenists in his Histoire Critique des Dogmes et des Cultes.

   G.H. Dodge, The Political Theory of the Huguenots of the Dispersion with Special Reference to the Thought and Influence of Pierre Jurieu (1947).