Note Back to Main Text — Chapter III

This dreadful massacre was perpetrated by a French army, under the direction of Albert Catanée, the papal legate. The army had been sent into Piedmont with the object of subjugating or destroying the Vaudois on the Italian side of the Alps, but had returned discomfited to Briançon, unable to effect their object. The legate then determined to take his revenge by an assault upon the helpless and unarmed French Vaudois, and suddenly directed his soldiers upon the valleys of Fressinières and Louise. The inhabitants of the latter valley, surprised, and unable to resist an army of some twenty thousand men, abandoned their dwellings, and made for the mountains with all haste, accompanied by their families, and driving their flocks before them. On the slope of Mont Pelvoux, about a third of the way up, there was formerly a great cavern, on the combe of Capescure, called La Balme-Chapelle—though now nearly worn away by the disintegration of the mountain-side—in which the poor hunted people contrived to find shelter. They built up the approaches to the cavern, filled the entrance with rocks, and considered themselves to be safe. But their confidence proved fatal to them. The Count La Palud, who was in command of the troops, seeing that it was impossible to force the entrance, sent his men up the mountain provided with ropes; and fixing them so that they should hang over the mouth of the cavern, a number of the soldiers slid down in full equipment, landing on the ledge right in front of the concealed Vaudois. Seized with a sudden panic, and being unarmed, many of them precipitated themselves over the rocks and were killed. The soldiers slaughtered all whom they could reach, after which they proceeded to heap up wood at the cavern mouth which they set on fire, and thus suffocated the remainder. Perrin says four hundred children were afterwards found in the cavern, stifled, in the arms of their dead mothers, and that not fewer than three thousand persons were thus ruthlessly destroyed. The little property of the slaughtered peasants was ordered by the Pope's legate to be divided amongst the vagabonds who had carried out his savage orders. The population having been thus exterminated, the district was settled anew some years later, in the reign of Louis XII., who gave his name to the valley; and a number of "good and true Catholics," including many goitres and idiots,[102] occupied the dwellings and possessed the lands of the slaughtered Vaudois. There is an old saying that "the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church," but assuredly it does not apply to Val Louise, where the primitive Christian Church has been completely extinguished.