Le Musée du Désert

The Desert Museum traces the history of French Protestantism in particular and Cevennes.
Its name refers to the Desert, term applied to the period in which Protestantism was illegal in France, that is to say between the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 and the Edict of Toleration in 1787.

The museum is located in Mas Soubeyran in the French commune of Mialet (Gard), near Ales and Nimes. It is established in the former home of Pierre Laporte, head of the Cevennes camisard, purchased by the secretariat under the SHPF Jules Bonnet. In a typical Cevennes and a house, it has a habitat, documents and artifacts, including the chairs of preaching used by pastoralists in the desert, designed to be hidden and transported.

As a historical vocation, the Museum of the Desert has a religious vocation: Protestant place of memory, it will also be a place of awakening, wake up Protestant. This explains that in his very entrance, it presents the Reformation of Luther and Calvin and the significance of their rupture. This explains that even for a moment interrupted his historic journey to devote an entire room to "reading the Bible," as if to emphasize that in this reading Christian freedom is rooted. This explains in particular that from the outset, it was the center of the "Assemblies of the desert."

Each year, the first Sunday in September, thousands of Protestants (15 to 20 000 depending on the year), not only from the Cevennes and Languedoc, but in all regions of France and the countries of Refuge (Switzerland, Germany, Netherlands, England, Denmark, Ireland, USA, South Africa), gather at the site of Mas Soubeyran at the Meeting of the Desert. The essential moment of the day is the worship of the morning the afternoon a party is held on a topic that varies each year, sometimes commemoration of an event (for example, in 1986, the 450th anniversary of the introduction of reform in Geneva), now a figure in the history of Protestantism (eg, in 1983, the 500th anniversary of the birth of Luther, and in 2009, the fifth centenary of the birth of Calvin).