WAS THE FRENCH QUARTER IN PETERSBURG HUGUENOT?

The authors investigate the religious affiliation of the French Quarter’s inhabitants in 1716–1720 and determine the confessional composition of the French Diaspora of St. Petersburg under Peter I. The relevance of this study is determined by the contradictory data that historians provide regarding the composition of the Petersburg foreign population. The authors solve the problems on the basis of hired French specialist’s lists, a list of the French Quarter residents and a wide range of non-Orthodox parishes’ documents. The article provides personal data of a large number of French natives in Petersburg in the Peter the Great era. This study is based on the method of descriptive statistics. All church documents reflecting the personal composition of the French colony were examined by the method of continuous name-by-name study with the fixation of each person’s belonging to a particular parish. The lack of data on all the mentioned persons required the authors to turn to the extrapolation method. The article concludes that in the era under study, Catholics definitely prevailed among St. Petersburg Frenchmen with a clarified religion. Individuals of the Protestant faith could live in the French Quarter, and certainly were associated with it, but did not influence its religious specifics. This suggests that the French Quarter was not Huguenot, but Catholic.