Museum of the Desert

The Musée of the Desert recalls the history of the Protestantisme French and Cevennes in particular. Its name refers to the Désert, term applied to the period during which Protestantism was illegal in France, i.e. between the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 and the Édit of tolerance in 1787.

The museum is located at the Mas Soubeyran, in the common Frenchwoman of Mialet (Gard), not far from Alès and of Nimes. It is established in the old house of Roland, chief Camisard of the the Cevennes. In a typically Cevennes framework and a house, it presents a habitat, documents and objects of time, such these chairs of Prédication used by the pastors with the Désert, conceived to be camouflables and transportable.

As much as a historical vocation, the Museum of the Desert has a religious vocation: place of the Protestant memory, it wants to be also a place of awakening, of Protestant alarm clock. What explains why at its entry even, it presents the Reform of Luther and Calvin and the significance of their rupture. What still explains why it stops one moment its historical course to devote a whole room to “the reading of the Bible”, as to stress that in this reading Christian freedom finds its source. What explains especially why, right from the start, it was the center of the “Assemblies of the desert”.

Each year, first Sunday of September of the thousands of Protestants (15 to 20.000 according to the years), come not only from the the Cevennes and the Languedoc, but from all the areas of France and from the countries of the Refuge (Swiss, Germany, Netherlands, England, Denmark, Ireland, the United States, South Africa), gather on the site of the Farmhouse Soubeyran at the time of the Assemblée of the Desert. The essential moment of the day is the worship of the morning; the afternoon proceeds a festival on a subject which varies each year, commemoration sometimes of an event (for example, in 1986, the 450e birthday of the introduction of the reform to Geneva), sometimes of a figure of the history of Protestantism (for example, in 1983, the 500e birthday of the birth of Luther).

External bonds

Official site of the Museum of the desert

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