Pamiers, Seat of the Inquisition, Monday 8/16/10

I played a hunch on planning the trip that, even though I would spend no more than a day at a specific site, it would be sensible to bed down in the same location whenever possible, thus reducing the time consumed in reorienting to an unfamiliar area every evening, when I could count on being exhausted. So, when on Sunday night I finally located the Balladin Hotel, a sort of French Motel 6 just north of the city of Foix, I was relieved to know that I would not have to pull up stakes again until Saturday. There were several destinations within a hundred-mile radius of Foix, most closer in, to keep me occupied.

With legs still wobbly from the climb up Montsegur, I made Monday, the 16th , as a more look-see and acclimation day, leaving Foix and more strenuous adventures for Tuesday and beyond.

My primary destination for the day was the city of Pamiers, 13 miles north of Foix, mere minutes on the excellent E9 expressway, which ran right outside the hotel. Not a notoriously ancient or historic location as European cities go, I went to Pamiers, now quite the industrial town, in search of a very particular individual, Bishop Jacques Fournier, in the very narrow period from 1317 to 1325. As if to confirm I’d come to the right place, early on I noticed a main street named in his honor. I’ll save the bishop’s full story for The Perfect, merely mentioning here that Fournier, who eventually became Pope Benedict XII, earned his fame as the model inquisitor, bar none, during those few years in Pamiers.

Inquisition applies to an institution within the justice system of the Roman Catholic Church that arrested, tried and sentenced heretics and other offenders against church law. As a formal body, it was established in 1229 to uproot the remaining Cathars. Operating from Toulouse, Albi, Carcassonne and other towns during the 13th century and for much the 14th, it ferreted out heretics by interrogating entire towns, offering pardons to those who reported their neighbors, torturing and imprisoning those who would not talk, and sentencing those who would not abjure their faith to be burnt at the stake.

After the fall of Montsegur in 1244 ended organized resistance, the remaining Cathars, now without the support of the local nobles and their fortifications, scattered, meeting at night in cellars or in the forests, mountains and caves. By design, the tentacles of the Inquisition reached into the people’s personal lives and anyone could be summoned to appear at any time. Cathar leaders, the Perfects, seldom recanted; hundreds were killed until their ranks were thinned to a handful. Repentant lay believers were punished less severely with many obliged to wear yellow crosses on their clothing as a sign of their former heretical status, a practice the Nazis, among others, copied to stigmatize the Jews.

And yet, as long as 65 years after the fall of Montsegur, some Cathars were still at large, and the Inquisition was still at work. The leaders of the last Cathar revival in the Languedoc, Pierre and Jacques Authier, were not captured and executed until 1310. And the “cleansing” continued for two more decades. It took Jacques Fournier, a Cistercian monk from Fontfroide Abbey, to bring the Cathar chapter to a conclusion satisfactory to his Church, when, in 1317, he became bishop of Pamiers and the Languedoc’s chief Inquisitor. He was the man who literally wrote the manual of operation that the Church Office of the Inquisition followed for the next several centuries.

As recently as 1975, author Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie used Fournier’s manuscripts to create his pioneering work of micro-history, Montaillou. Thanks to the bishop’s meticulous records and thorough interrogations, which ran the gamut from tattling to torture, we know more about life in the tiny Pyrenean village of Montaillou than we know about life in London or Paris in the 14th century. I’d studied Ladurie’s book and had it on hand when I went to Montaillou later in the week. Indeed, I was not only familiar with the town, but I felt present with those who once inhabited it, from the ruined chateau above, to the village church below, and on all the paths that criss-crossed the hillside between.

Fournier’s campaign against the Cathars of Montaillou was duplicated throughout the region, even reaching across the Pyrenees into Spanish Aragon. From there, with a trap that took years to set, Fournier finally lured the last known Cathar Perfect, Guilhem Belibaste, back to his jurisdiction, where the man was captured, tried and burned alive in Villerouge-Termenes (a location also on my agenda) in 1321. When Fournier moved on from Pamiers in 1325, eventually to become pope, he was justifiably satisfied that the Cathar heresy had been eradicated from the Languedoc forever. That it would return, at least in the form I was witnessing in my travels, after 700 years as Belibaste predicted on going to the stake, was not because of any lack of zeal on the part of Bishop Fournier.