The revolutionary Avignonnais, with the opening events…
September 1791 CE
The outcome was virtually civil war in the region, with assassinations and mob violence.
In the superheated atmosphere, following circulated reports of miraculous tears on the Madonna of the Cordeliers, a papist mob lynches a patriot municipal administrator, Nicolas Jean-Baptiste Lescuyer, who was falsely suspected of planning to seize church property.
Jean Duprat, a silk merchant elected mayor of Avignon the previous June, is suspected of having participated.
Some sixty persons are summarily executed in a tower of the Palais des Papes, following the lynching.
Amnesty for the executioners, as patriots, will be debated in Paris, as justice in revolutionary France becomes more and more politicized.
Mathieu Jouve Jourdan, nicknamed "Jourdan Coupe-Tête", will be implicated in the atrocities, eventually traduced to the revolutionary tribunal, condemned to death and guillotined on 8 prairial II (May 27, 1794).
The savage massacres of La Glacière, dramatized in popular engravings, are traumatic in the region and appall the reading public of the Age of Enlightenment; they will reverberate for a generation.
Jules Michelet will devote two chapters of his massive history of the Revolution to the massacres.