1684.=] Dragoons were quartered upon the miserable inhabitants until they renounced their religion. Many a Huguenot who would willingly die for his religion could not bear to see his family and home at the mercy of a brutal soldiery. During the year 1684 this vile system was in force throughout the south of France. Conversions were announced by the thousand. In Languedoc it was said that as many as 60,000 took place in three days. At last in October 1685 the coping stone was put to this edifice of blood and crime. [Sidenote: =Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, 1685.=] An edict was issued by which all the privileges accorded to the Huguenots by the Edict of Nantes were withdrawn, the reformed worship was suppressed, and the ministers expelled. Huguenotism became from that moment in France, like Episcopacy a few years later in Scotland, an illegal religion outside the pale of the law and proscribed by it. [Sidenote: =Results of the measure.=] The results of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes were very different from what Louis and his ministers expected. So far from crushing the Huguenots into submission it goaded them into madness. They realised that now there was no chance of peace for them in their own country. One by one, family by family, they fled from their homes leaving behind them their property, taking their lives in their hands. Numbers were caught and sent to the galleys, numbers more escaped, and carried to the enemies of France in England and Brandenburg and Holland the thrift and the skill which under Colbert’s enlightened patronage had done so much to make France the wealthiest of European states. Holland dates its industrial revival and Brandenburg its industrial life from the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Huguenot soldiers, like Ruvigny and Schomberg, brought the discipline and training of the French armies to bear fruit in the English and Dutch service. It is said that fifty thousand families escaped in this way to fertilise with their industry the soil of the enemies of France. Those who were left behind, who were too poor or too ignorant to escape, continued in the mountains of the Cevennes a desultory and fanatical struggle with their oppressor. In the days of Louis’s greatest need, in the War of the Spanish Succession, they kept the ablest of French generals and an army of veterans from the theatre of war. Eventually in the next reign they obtained and have since enjoyed a grudging toleration. Even the uniformity of religion so dear to the heart of Louis was not attained. Large numbers of Protestants and of Protestant children, it is true, were added to the ranks of Catholicism, but Huguenotism lived on in France, socially and politically insignificant, but still alive. France soon found that persecution had bereft her of her children and her wealth, without even giving her in return that complete national solidarity which formed the excuse for the crime. [Sidenote: =Aggressive policy of Louis, 1678–1688.=]