The event called the Massacres of La Glacière, when sixty people are thrown into the dungeon of the tower on the Palais des Papes at Avignon recently united to France, then are summarily executed, takes place on the night of October 16 to 17, 1791, after the lynching by a mob of the secretary-clerk of the commune, who was wrongly suspected of wanting to seize church property.
The Massacres, an isolated and early example of violence in the opening phase of the French Revolution, are interpreted by French historians not as presaging the September massacres of 1792 and the Reign of Terror but as a last episode in the struggle between partisans and advocates of the reunion of the papal enclave of Avignon and the Comtat Venaissin with the state of France.
