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Updated: May 20, 2025
Think of the inhuman massacre of the innocent Waldenses of southern France by the violent bigot Oppede , who slew eight hundred men in one town, and thrust the women into a barn filled with straw and reduced the whole to ashes only a sample of his barbarity; or of their oppression in southern Italy by Pope Pius IV. , at whose command they were slain by thousands, the throats of eighty-eight men being cut on one occasion by a single executioner!
The duty of assisting justice was assigned to Baron d'Oppede; and from the 7th to the 25th of April, 1545, two columns of troops, under the orders, respectively, of Oppede himself and Baron de la Garde, ravaged with fire and sword the three districts of Merindol, Cabrieres, and La Coste, which were peopled chiefly by Vaudians.
His successor, John de Maynier, Baron of Oppede, was a violent man, passionately bigoted, and moreover, it is said, a personal enemy of the Vaudians of Cabrieres, on which his estates bordered; he recommenced against them a persecution which was at first covert; they had found protectors in Switzerland and in Germany; at the instance of Calvin, the Swiss Protestant cantons and the German princes assembled at Smalkalden wrote to Francis I. in their favor; it was to his interest to humor the Protestants of Germany, and that fact turned out to the advantage of the Vaudians of Provence; on the 14th of June, 1544, he issued an edict which, suspending the proceedings commenced against them, restored to them their privileges, and ordered such of them as were prisoners to be set at large; "and as the attorney-general of Provence," it goes on to say, "is related to the Archbishop of Aix, their sworn enemy, there will be sent in his place a counsellor of the court for to inform me of their innocence."
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