VI.
The persecutions we have seen until now, appear moderate beside those of which the Vaudois of Provence were the victims. To find a parallel for so fearful a butchery, we must go back to the extermination of the Albigeois.
On the 18th of November, 1540, the parliament of Aix passed a decree to the following effect: Seventeen inhabitants of Mérindol shall be burned alive. Their wives, children, parents, and servants, shall be arrested and brought to trial, and if they cannot be taken, they shall be banished the kingdom for ever. The houses of Mérindol shall be burned and razed to the ground, the woods cut down, the fruit-trees uprooted, and the place rendered uninhabitable, and no one shall be allowed to build there. “As exorbitant, cruel, and inhuman a decree,” says a contemporary, “as any parliament ever made, and like in every respect to the edict of the king Ahasuerus against the people of God.”
A cry of horror arose throughout Provence. It is sad to relate that the priests were the most unrelenting in urging the execution of the sentence. And when the chief president Chassanée represented to them that the king might be displeased at so great a destruction of his subjects, a bishop said to him: “If the king should think ill of it at first, we will soon cause him to approve it: we have the cardinals with us, and particularly Cardinal Tournon, to whom nothing could be more pleasing.”
The Vaudois presented a petition to Francis I., who being then desirous of keeping on good terms with the Protestant princes of the empire, commissioned Guillaume de Langey, the same who had been his ambassador to Germany, to cause an inquiry to be made respecting this devastation.
These Vaudois formed a population of about eighteen thousand souls. They had come from Piedmont and Dauphiny into Provence, and had dwelt there for three hundred years. When they first settled in the country, it was uncultivated, and overrun with brigands; but, under the tillage of their hands, it was covered with plentiful harvests. A domain which before their establishment would not have let for four crowns, fetched from three to four hundred. They had built Mérindol, Cabrières, and twenty other towns or villages.
They were a peaceable, well-ordered people, loved by their neighbours, faithful to their promise, just in the payment of their debts, careful of their poor, and charitable to strangers. Never could they be drawn into any kind of swearing or blasphemy: they never used an oath, but when required to do so in the administration of the law. They were also distinguished for this, that if they chanced to be in any company where improper conversation was heard, they immediately withdrew, in order to signify their displeasure.
There was nothing to reproach them with, unless it was that when they frequented the towns and the markets, they seldom visited the conventual churches, and if they did, they offered their prayers without reference to the saints. They passed by the crosses and images on the roadside without showing any reverence. They said no Mass, nor Libera me, nor De profundis; they took no holy water, and if it were offered them in any house, they set no store by it. They undertook no pilgrimage for the sake of pardons. When it thundered, they never made the sign of the cross, and they presented no offerings either for the living or the dead.
For a long time unknown, the Vaudois excited neither the cupidity of the priests nor the hatred of the great, and the gentry, whose incomes they augmented, gave them their protection. They chose among themselves their pastors, or Barbes, as they termed them, to instruct them in the knowledge and the practice of the Scriptures.
As he was passing through Dauphiny in 1501, these heretics were denounced to King Louis XII., who caused an inquiry to be instituted; but after having read it, he ordered that the processes already begun should be thrown into the Rhone, saying: “These people are much better Christians than myself.”
When they heard, about the year 1530, of the preaching of Luther and Zwinglius, they sent some of their pastors to Switzerland and Germany, who recognised in the Reformation a sister of their own communion. Encouraged by these new friends, they caused the first edition of the Bible, translated into French by Robert Olivétan, to be printed at Neufchâtel, in 1535. It is said that they expended upon it many hundred gold crowns.
The ire of the Romish clergy was excited against this heresy, and the more so as many of the gentry, advocates, counsellors of justice, and even theologians, showed a leaning towards it. A decree was pronounced, in 1535, against the Vaudois. A second decree—that which we have cited—was delivered in 1540. Francis I., adopting the advice of Guillaume de Langey, granted them letters of pardon, but upon condition that they should return to the church of Rome before the expiration of three months. This was to withdraw with one hand, what he had given with the other.
This courageous people, however, did not lose courage. They sent to the parliament of Aix, and to Francis, their confession of faith, in which they took care to establish all their doctrines, article by article, on texts from the Scriptures. When this confession was read to him by his order, the king, quite amazed, says Crespin, asked where fault could be found; and no one had the hardihood to offer a contradiction.
The bishops of Provence, finding themselves unsupported in their system of persecution, commissioned three doctors of theology to convert the Vaudois; but, marvel of marvels! all three were themselves converted to the proscribed religion: “I am compelled to confess,” said one of these doctors, after his interrogatories to some catechumens, “that I have often been to the Sorbonne to hearken to the disputations of the theologians, and that I have not learned there so much as I have done from listening to these little children.”
The rage of the priests was now at its height; and the chief president Chassanée being dead, they persuaded his successor, Jean Meynier, baron d’Oppède, to prosecute the heretics without mercy. Memorials were sent at the same time to the king, in which the Vaudois were accused of an intention to seize upon Marseilles, to form a sort of republican canton, in imitation of the Swiss. Francis did not become a dupe to this ridiculous fable; he knew very well that a few thousand poor peasants could not convert Provence into a republic. But he had just concluded a treaty with Charles V., through the mediation of Paul III., by which the two monarchs engaged themselves to exterminate heresy. This prince lay, moreover, dangerously ill, and the Cardinal de Tournon, seconded by several bishops, beseeched him, in the name of his eternal salvation, to revoke his letters of pardon. He thereupon wrote to the Parliament of Aix, on the 1st of January, 1545, to execute the decree pronounced against the Vaudois.
The Baron d’Oppède, who appears to have imported into this horrible enterprise motives of jealousy and personal vengeance, collected bands of mercenaries, who had been accustomed in the Italian wars to the most frightful brigandage. He placed over them some officers of Provence, and took the field on the 2nd of April. Then began a horrible carnage. “They were no longer,” says an historian, “either gentlemen or soldiers: they were butchers.”
The Vaudois were surprised and massacred, like the deer in a hunt; their houses were burned, their cornfields laid waste, trees uprooted, wells choked, bridges destroyed. All were put to the fire and the sword; and the peasants of the surrounding country, joining the executioners, completed the pillage of the miserable remnants of the devastation.
Those of the Vaudois who could fly, wandered about the woods and mountains; but the weaker, the old men and children and women, were forced to stay, and were slain by the soldiery, after having satiated their brutal passions. At Mérindol there only remained one poor idiot, who had promised two crowns to a soldier for his ransom. D’Oppède purchased from his purse the fate of the unhappy wretch, and causing him to be tied to a tree, had him shot. Scarce a gentleman present could restrain his tears.
On the 19th of April, in obedience to the summons of the vice-legate, this army of executioners entered the county of Venasque, belonging to the pope, and fresh bodies of banditti hastened thither under the guidance of priests. The town of Cabrières was besieged. Sixty men, who alone had remained there, held out for twenty-four hours. On the promise of their lives, they came forth unarmed, and were immediately hacked to pieces. Their women, shut up in a barn, were burned alive. A soldier, moved to pity, tried to open them a passage, but they were driven back into the flames with the halbert. The church of Cabrières was profaned with infamous debauches; and the steps of the altar were inundated with blood. The clergy of Avignon blessed the murderers: they had pronounced a sentence decreeing no quarter. The day was to come when the glacière of Avignon should count other victims. There is justice upon earth for the privileged classes, who abuse their power: it is sometimes tardy, but it is sure.
The Vaudois perished in numbers in their wild retreats. The vice-legate and the Parliament of Aix had forbidden, under pain of death, that any shelter or food should be given them, “which,” says Bouche, the historian of Provence, “was the means of killing a very great many.” Numbers of the unhappy people supplicated D’Oppède to accord them permission to depart, even with nothing but their shirts. “I know what I have to do with this people of Mérindol and their like,” answered he: “I will send them to dwell in hell, them and their children.”
Two hundred and fifty prisoners were put to death, after a mock trial; a more atrocious act than the massacre, since it was committed in cold blood. Others, the youngest and more robust, were sent to the galleys. A few succeeded in gaining the frontiers of Switzerland.
The name of the Vaudois disappeared almost entirely from Provence, and their country relapsed into as desolate a wilderness as it was three centuries before.
History has preserved the pious words uttered by the Vaudois, who had taken refuge with their pastors in the mountain gorges. Prepared for death, and beholding in the distance the blazing ruins of their dwellings, the old and young thus exhorted each other: “The least of our cares should be for our property and our lives; the greatest and chiefest fear that ought to fill us with emotion, is lest we fail in the confession of our Lord Jesus Christ and his holy Gospel. Let us call on God, and he will have pity upon us.”
The massacre of the Vaudois raised the indignation of all France; the souls of the people were not yet merciless, as they became during the religious wars. The king complained that his orders had been exceeded; but, sick and almost dying, he gave way to the representations of the Cardinal de Tournon, and had not the courage to punish the assassins. But, in his last moments, he adjured his son to take vengeance upon them, adding that if he failed therein, his memory would be execrated throughout the world.
In effect, the matter was brought before the Parliament of Paris in 1550, where it occupied fifty audiences. The advocate of the Vaudois, or rather of the Lady du Cental, who complained that she had been ruined, spoke for seven days consecutively, with a force which was said to have shown the things, instead of relating them. The Baron d’Oppède defended himself, and had the audacity to commence his pleading with these words of the Psalmist: “Judge me, O God, and plead my cause against an ungodly nation.” He was acquitted. The advocate-general Guérin only was condemned to death, and care was taken to specify in the sentence that he had been guilty of misappropriating the king’s money; as if a whole people murdered was not a sufficient crime in the eyes of these judges.