Europe tells the story of the Huguenots as a happy one. French Protestants, persecuted at home, fled to England, the Netherlands and Prussia, enriched the countries that took them in, and within a few generations became English, Dutch and Prussian. Europe at its worst producing Europe at its best.
The story is true. It is also dangerously incomplete.
Start with how they were treated at home. By the 1560s Huguenots were perhaps a tenth of France: merchants, bankers, craftsmen, useful and resented. They were called heretics, agents of a foreign authority in Geneva, a fracture in a nation that understood being French as being Catholic.
On St Bartholomew's Day in 1572, the crown authorised a massacre that killed between five and thirty thousand across France. The Pope ordered a Te Deum of thanksgiving and struck a medal. This was not a fringe. It was the mainstream.
The Edict of Nantes in 1598 gave them protection. It was tolerance born of exhaustion, not principle, and conditional tolerance can always be withdrawn. Louis XIV withdrew it. Dragoons were quartered in Protestant homes to harass families into converting. In 1685 Protestantism was outlawed and the churches demolished.
Now the part the celebratory version skips.
The Huguenots were absorbed abroad because they were almost identical to the people who received them. White, Christian, European, and Protestant in Protestant countries. They arrived not as the Other but as a variant of the Same. Their success does not prove Europe can accept difference. It proves Europe can accept those who are nearly the same already.
And the Huguenots who survived as Huguenots were, overwhelmingly, the ones who left. Between two and four hundred thousand fled, though emigration was forbidden. Those who stayed, who trusted the edict, who believed their loyalty and usefulness would protect them, were converted by force. Their institutions were destroyed. They did not integrate. They were erased.
This is a hard lesson to write from inside Europe, and I resist it myself.
I am writing this in the house where my children sleep. The school is a short walk away. The corner shop knows our names. This is home in the most concrete sense of the word.
And the honest reading of the Huguenot story is that the people who came through the machine were the people prepared to leave home before it was too late.
That is not an argument for leaving. Not yet. There is much to say about building, and resisting, and standing ground. But it is an argument for refusing comfort in place of preparation.
Warnings, unlike comforts, only help if they are heard in time.