Réveil

Réveil (French:revival or Awakening) was an 1814 revival movement within the Swiss Reformed Church of Western Switzerland and Southern France .

The supporters were also called pejoratively momiers. The movement was initially under the influence of Barbara von Krüdener and later British Methodists and members of Free Church of Scotland who came to the Continent after Napoleon's fall. They accused the Protestant state church of apostasy from true Christianity, they gathered in conventicles and laid emphasis on a strict religious way of life.

The leading personalities of the Réveil were Henri-Louis Empaytaz, César Malan, Louis Gaussen, Ami Bost, Antoine Jean-Louis Galland and Adolphe Monod. Most of the momiers walked out of the State churches in 1831 and set up the Evangelical Society in Geneva, with its own "preacher school" built in 1832. In 1848 the various dissident congregations united to form an evangelical Free Church (Église libre), which since then exists along to the established church (Église national). In the canton of Vaud was also formed a Reformed Free Church, whose spiritual father was Alexandre Vinet.

The Franco-Swiss Réveil was contemporary and analogous to the German Erweckungsbewegung and shared the social concern of its leaders like J. F. Oberlin. It inspired preachers such as Felix Neff, called the "Apostle of the Alps" to preach in mountain area in the border of France, Switzerland, and Piedmont, and among the Waldensians. Another preacher influenced by the Réveil was the German-speaking Swiss minister Samuel Heinrich Froehlich founder of the Neutäufer in Europe and the Apostolic Christian Church in the United States. Many of the Continental "awaked" joined the Plymouth Brethren.

References

• Encrevé, André « Le Réveil du XIXème siècle », Réforme, 4 September 2008
• Stewart, K. J. Restoring the Reformation: British Evangelicalism and the Francophone «Réveil'» 1816-1849. 2006.ISBN 1842273922