Biography
Marie Durand was born in 1711, in the village of Bouschet de Pranles, in the Vivarais region of southern France, in a family of Huguenot farmers. The Huguenots were the French Protestants, who had been subject to persecution since the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Public worship was forbidden, and the pastors were hunted. The faithful met in secret in the woods and the caves, in the so-called Church of the Desert. Her family was part of the underground church. Her brother, Pierre Durand, became a pastor in 1730, when he was only twenty. He led a secret congregation and performed baptisms and marriages in defiance of the law.
In 1730, when Marie was nineteen, her family was betrayed. Her father and her brother were arrested. Her father was put in a prison, and Pierre fled but was caught in 1732. She herself was arrested because she refused to renounce her Protestant faith, and she was taken to the Tower of Constance, at Aigues-Mortes, a fortress on the Mediterranean coast. It was a grim stone tower, built in the thirteenth century, which served as a prison for Protestant women. She was held with other Huguenot women in a large round room, with little light and air. They lived in cold, damp and filth. They were fed on bread and water. They were not allowed to practice their faith.
Her brother Pierre was hanged in 1732, in Montpellier. She was a young woman, and her life was in ruins. She remained in the tower, and she was offered her freedom if she would sign a statement of conversion to Catholicism. She refused every offer. She was among the women who held on through the hardship. She became a leader among the prisoners. She was one of the few who could read and write. She kept up a correspondence with the outside world and with the Protestant leaders, and she wrote letters to relatives to ask for aid. She distributed money and food among the women. She also encouraged the prisoners to remain faithful and read the Bible with them.
There is a story, which may be a legend, that she engraved a word on the stone rim of the well in the prison. The word was résister, which means resist. It is a word that stands at the center of the memory of her. It was a call to the women to hold to their faith. It is said that she scratched it into the stone with a spindle. Whether or not she did, the word represents her spirit. It sums up her resistance to the pressure to conform.
She spent thirty-eight years in the tower, from 1730 to 1768. She saw many of the women die of disease, hunger and cold. She grew old behind its walls. In 1767, a new governor, Prince de Beauvau, visited the tower and was moved by the plight of the prisoners. He worked for their release. In April 1768, she was freed with the other surviving women. She was about fifty-seven years old. She returned to her village, where she lived for another eight years. She died in 1776.
In the years after her release, the situation of the Huguenots in France improved. In 1787, the Edict of Tolerance restored some civil rights to Protestants. Her witness has been remembered by the Protestant churches of France, and the tower is now a monument. She is an example of the endurance of those who suffer for their faith. Her life shows the cost paid by many of the French Protestants and the courage of a woman who would not give way.