Jean Claude (1619 – 13
January 1687) was a French
Protestant divine.
He was
born at La
Sauvetat-du-Dropt
near Agen
.
After
studying at Montauban
, Jean Claude entered the ministry in 1645.
For eight
years he was professor of theology in the
Protestant college of Nîmes
; but in
1661, having successfully opposed a scheme for re-uniting Catholics and Protestants, he was forbidden to
preach in Lower Languedoc. In 1662
he obtained a post at Montauban similar to that which he had lost,
but four years later he was removed from there as well.
Next he
became pastor at Charenton near Paris
, where he
engaged in controversies with Pierre
Nicole (Réponse aux deux traités intitulés la perpétuité de
la foi, 1665), Antoine Arnauld
(Réponse au livre de M. Arnauld, 1670),
and
J.B. Bossuet (
Réponse au livre de M. l'évêque de
Meaux, 1683).
On the revocation of the
edict of
Nantes in 1685 Jean Claude fled to
the Netherlands where he received a pension
from
stadtholder William of Orange, who commissioned
him to write an account of the persecuted
Huguenots ( , 1686). The book was translated into
English, but by order of
James II of England, both the
translation and the original were publicly burnt by the common
hangman on the
5th of
May 1686, as containing
"expressions scandalous to His
Majesty the king of France."
Other works by Jean Claude were
Réponse au livre de P.
Nouet
sur l'eucharistie (1668) and Œuvres posthumes
(Amsterdam
, 1688),containing the
Traité de la
composition d'un sermon, translated into English in
1778.
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