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In 1684, having "suffered through eight months [of] exactions and quartering by the soldiery, for the religion with much evil," Judith Giton, a Huguenot from southern France, decided to escape. With her mother, two of her brothers, and a servant, she slipped away at night, leaving soldiers sleeping in the family bed.

The group traveled north along the Rhone and Rhine rivers to Holland and reached England in 1685. They stayed three months in London waiting for a Carolina-bound ship, then crossed the Atlantic under terrible conditions. Judith's mother died of scarlet fever, and a storm forced them to stop in Bermuda, where the captain, having "committed certain rascalities," was imprisoned and the ship seized. Penniless, Judith and her brothers indentured themselves to pay for their passage to South Carolina.

Once in Charleston, Judith endured "affliction … sickness, pestilence, famine, [and] poverty," and her elder brother, Louis, died of a fever. After a few years, though, Judith "had it the way she wanted it" and thanked "God [for giving] her good grace to have been able to withstand all sorts of trials."

Judith's story contains many elements common to the Huguenot exodus: the quartering of troops, a night flight, a long and risky voyage filled with hardships and sorrows—but also survival, hope, freedom, and prosperity.

In the 1660s, France's King Louis XIV launched a crusade to convert his Protestant subjects to Catholicism. According to the powerful "one king, one faith" principle, the country's stability depended on the monarch and his people all following the same religion. For years legal and religious harassment alternated with financial measures to entice Huguenots back into the Catholic fold.

Huguenots, who often compared themselves to the remnant of Israel (see "Slaughter, Mayhem, and Providence,"), felt that they were living in the New Babylon, ruled by an oppressive Nebuchadnezzar.

Early royal measures aimed to restrict Huguenots' freedom of worship. In 1663 Huguenots were told they could not conduct their funerals during the day, and the next year processions were limited to 10 people. Then the crown prohibited ministers from serving multiple churches, meaning that congregations too poor to hire a minister would die out. Laws also restricted psalm singing, one of the most distinctive aspects of Huguenot religious practice, outside the church—or even inside the church when a Catholic procession was passing by.

Church services came under royal surveillance and censorship. In each Huguenot temple, pews had to be reserved for Catholic observers, who were allowed to interrupt services and challenge the pastor.

In his memoirs, Jaques Fontaine, a Huguenot minister who fled to the British Isles, explained that Capuchins and Jesuits came to listen to his father's sermons so regularly that "there was a bench especially marked for them in the temple … just opposite the minister's seat."

In addition to people and practices, the monarchy targeted Huguenot property. Authorities tore down churches and imposed severe restrictions on cemeteries. By March 1685 the crown had ordered the closing of all five Huguenot académies, which meant that Calvinist ministers could no longer be trained in France.

Huguenots faced professional restrictions, too. They were excluded from the guilds of hosiery dealers in 1681, barbers and wigmakers in 1684, printers and booksellers in 1685. By then Protestants could no longer be notaries, bailiffs, apothecaries, midwives, surgeons, or doctors. They also could not keep Catholic servants.

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