The fiscal reformation in rural France, 1598-1685

How did French Calvinists pay the pastor's salary, maintain a physical worship space, and provide poor relief programs for their members without help from secular authorities? Scholars have for a long time studied the broad consolidation and secularization of urban poor relief during the late-medieval/early modern period. In response to rising popular levels, municipal governments organized and systematized the secular administration of assistance to the urban poor. French Calvinists present a unique and unstudied challenge to this narrative because much unlike other mainstream Protestants, the French Reformed Churches adopted John Calvin's ideas to the situation in France. Relying on the authority of their Christian religion, Huguenot leaders across France created a new fiscal policy in which they determined how much their members should pay and, using these funds in combination with the consistory, enforced what historians now call social discipline. My project focuses on how one church in a small town called Montagnac developed this system in an age of secularization and religious persecution.