Massacres of the Waldenses

A Hidden People Steps into the Light

When the Waldenses of the Alps joined the Reformed churches at Chanforan in 1532 (see the Waldensian churches), they gave up hiding. They stopped attending the mass, welcomed pastors trained at Geneva, and began to build their own places of worship. Their open faith drew the attention of Catholic princes and courts that had tolerated, half unknowingly, a quiet people of good farmers. Over the next century and a half the Waldenses suffered some of the most notorious massacres in European history.

This article follows four episodes, Provence in 1545, Calabria in 1561, Piedmont in 1655, and the exile and return of 1686–1690, and then the long road to legal toleration in 1848. In each case the persecutors were Roman Catholic rulers acting with the church's blessing. The Reformation had changed much of Europe. It had not changed Rome's view of those who left it.

In Provence the Waldenses lived in the hills of the Luberon, east of Avignon, in villages such as Mérindol, Cabrières, and Lourmarin. Their ancestors had come down from the Alps in the late fifteenth century to farm land emptied by plague and war. They were prosperous and peaceable, and their landlords valued them.