His story, delightfully depicted in his book: Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes - is a joyous read. The region he travelled through is now a place of pilgrimage where Stevenson is venerated to this day. This summer, Catherine and I spent two weeks in the village at the heart of the Cevennes where he completed his journey – Saint Jean du Gard.

Stevenson’s book is much more than a travelogue. Apart from the endearing picture he paints of his growing bond with the donkey, Modestine, it is his encounters en route that bring this part of France, in those times, into vivid relief.

One of the most striking of these happens in a monastery, early on in his journey, where he, a Scots Presbyterian, finds himself engaged in lively theological debate with the resident monks. Whilst they remain firm in their own relative convictions, both parties come away from this experience with an increased understanding of the other’s perspective. Thereafter, religion and faith weave in and out of the story as much as the landscape and his donkey – but the religion he encounters is much more familiar.

Now I always like looking at churches on my travels. I like the ornamentation of Catholicism, both the statues and glitter inside, plus their external architectural magnificence. But here in the Cevennes, the churches are not like those I’m used to seeing in France. They are simple and devoid of any ostentation. Then it became clear, just as it did with Stevenson, that this part of France is Protestant, and unlike today’s Scotland, their faith is still very much alive.

Now I have enough knowledge of French history to know that France, like most of Europe, experienced brutal religious wars during and after the Reformation in the 16th and 17th centuries. The French Protestant reformers, who became known as Huguenots, followed the hard-line Calvinist version, as did the Swiss, Dutch, and Scots. By the second half of the 16th century, the Huguenots had become a powerful minority in France with a sympathetic nobility controlling many of the towns and cities across the country.

Then in 1572, a scheduled royal marriage in Paris raised the prospect of a likely Huguenot heir waiting in the wings. The majority Catholic establishment was horrified. Thousands of Huguenots descended on Paris for the marriage celebrations. Three days later on the 24th of August, the Catholic nobility took action. The St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, as it became known, was a blood bath of Huguenots which then quickly spread beyond Paris to towns and cities across France. An estimated 30,000 Huguenots were hacked to pieces in a matter of days.

Understandably, many of those who survived fled in their droves. This was when a new word entered the English language: ‘refugee’; (réfugié in French). London, with a population of around only half a million at the time, felt overwhelmed by the sudden arrival of nearly 50,000 Huguenots, fleeing for their lives.

Meanwhile, back in France, the sectarian civil war continued, with the weakened Huguenots fighting back with as much vigour as they could muster, until eventually a kind of peace was achieved. Henry of Navarre, the potential Protestant heir to the throne whose marriage in 1572 had been the catalyst for the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, succeeded to the throne as Henry IV in 1589, but only on the condition that he convert to Catholicism. But Henry did not desert the Huguenots. In 1598 he signed off on the Edict of Nantes, which struck a compromise between the warring sides, giving the Protestants freedom to worship with limited civil powers in their strongholds. Nevertheless, state power still lay firmly in the hands of the majority Catholic nobility.

This tenuous accord held until in 1642, when Henry IV’s grandson, the fiercely Catholic Louis XIV, succeeded to the throne, with a determination to make France 100% Catholic again by any means necessary. Faced with a choice of conversion or death, a second wave of Huguenot migration ensued. Around 200,000 of them fled to nearby Protestant countries; most of them to the Netherlands, but a further 50,000 did cross the Channel.

By this time Scotland was firmly Calvinist (i.e., Presbyterian), so a small number headed for Edinburgh. They settled in the Cowgate and established a French church in Infirmary Street. The area became known as ‘Little Picardy’ – the region of France whence they fled, with Picardy Place at the top of Leith Walk acting as a reminder to this day.

This marked the end of Protestantism in most of France, but not in the south, particularly the Languedoc and Provence. Since the early years of the reformation, the Huguenots had been strongest in in these regions, partly owing to their proximity to Geneva, the birthplace of Calvinism. Furthermore, the geography of the area, particularly in the Cevennes mountains, made royal authority harder to impose.

Faced with persistent and stubborn resistance in the Cevennes region, the king sent in the Dragonnades; soldiers who were billeted in the homes of the Huguenot families to enforce conversion. It didn’t work. The people simply fled to the countryside to worship in the mountains and caves. Then in came a much bigger army of occupation, burning down the villages and hunting them down in the wilds of the countryside. Civil disobedience had failed; it was time to fight back.

Between 1702 to 1704 the conflict in the Cevennes had escalated into a state of war, known ever since as the War of the Camisards. (These Huguenot guerrilla fighters were so named using a local Occitan word for the peasant shirts they wore.) They knew all the nooks and crannies of the wild terrain to their advantage and fought like successful guerrilla resistance movements have done ever since. The death toll and atrocities on both sides were, again, horrific.

But by 1704 Louis XIV’s armies had become heavily committed in other European wars of the time. The army found itself fighting a war on two fronts. The Royalist forces in the Cevennes had been worn down by an enemy more stubborn and committed than them. It was time to negotiate a truce, and the resulting Treaty of Nimes agreed a cease-fire that allowed for amnesties and the withdrawal of royal troops from the Cevennes - lasting long enough until Louis XIV finally died in 1715 when a new nation-wide tolerance was finally acknowledged.

The story of Camisard resistance and the tactics they employed, whilst embedded in the civilian population without any external support, has gone down in history as one of the first example of effective guerrilla warfare. During the Nazi occupation in the Second World War, these traditions inspired the French Resistance in southern France, and after the war French Protestants were particularly acknowledged in both France and Israel for their role in sheltering Jews from the Nazis throughout the entire war.

And finally, back to Stevenson. When he travelled through the area in the late 19th century, he couldn’t help but compare the mindset of the Camisards with that of the Covenanters back in his homeland, both of whom had suffered similar warfare around the same point in their respective histories, and he found the latter wanting….

“Those who took to the hills for conscience’ sake in Scotland had all gloomy and bedevilled thoughts; for once they received God’s comfort they would be twice engaged with Satan; but the Camisards had only bright and supporting visions.”

So, what started as a summer holiday to the south of France resulted in an unexpected rendezvous with one of Edinburgh’s most famous sons, followed by a journey into a bloodthirsty and forgotten corner of French history, via Picardy Place! The blessings of a historically inquisitive mind.