The Friar of Carcassonne Read Free Page A

France. Yet in the painting they are the accused: the brave friar has his right arm stretched out in front of him, pointing an unwavering index finger directly at his judges. A great, broadening shaft of sun streams through a barred window high up in a corner of the room, but its light illuminates neither the accuser nor the accused. It spills on the floor uselessly. The people portrayed remain in the murk of the Middle Ages.
    The painting, executed in 1887, is entitled L’Agitateur du Languedoc . Its creator, Jean-Paul Laurens, was in his day a renowned master of the grand genre, or history painting. This academic tradition, popular in the nineteenth century, had ardent partisans in Toulouse, a city of pink brick that seems an unlikely setting for a past of uncommon truculence. As historians of Laurens’ time unearthed episodes from that turbulent local past, the demand for paintings in the grand genre, many of them celebrations of the region’s cantankerous relations with king in Paris and pope in Rome, became a clamor. Laurens, a native son of Languedoc, obliged, and his work now hangs in many places in the city and its hinterland. Those who commissioned him sought to bolster local pride and regional identity, and to instruct and edify.
    Laurens painted other tableaux concerning the inquisition—a long-vanished nightmare in Languedoc by his time, but a nightmare nonetheless. Liberals like him were then battling a reactionary Catholic Church, at the same time as they were resisting the centralizing bulldozer of the French Third Republic. With the Agitateur , an episode of history plucked from obscurity in 1877 by a historian of talent, the painter tapped into this dual struggle. For there had, indeed, been a great agitator in Languedoc, a figure who fought a powerful Church at home and a pitiless king in Paris—and who had paid for that fight with his life. That man was Brother Bernard Délicieux.
    In Laurens’ time, the remarkable career of Bernard Délicieux was five and a half centuries in the past; it is now seven centuries distant. Why we of the present day should remember his story, even those of us who live far from Languedoc, will become apparent.
    Bernard Délicieux was a troublemaker of the first order, in the mold of Martin Luther, John Brown, and Mahatma Gandhi. A man of the Church, he challenged the Church; a subject of the king of France, he plotted against France. From his rise out of obscurity in 1299 to his death from the exactions of torture and imprisonment some twenty years later, Délicieux attracted supporters of all stripes and collected a formidable array of enemies. He opposed the misuse of power, the seduction of wealth, and the recourse to violent coercion. He attacked the inquisition head-on, effectively shutting it down for several years in Languedoc. He enlisted royal support in his campaign—from one of the most dangerous kings ever to sit on the French throne—and did not shrink from fomenting revolt when that support was withdrawn.
    Aside from the likeness sprung whole from the imagination of Laurens, no image of him has come down to us. We can assume that he must have possessed a strong voice capable of conveying the force of his arguments. It may have even been mellifluous, given his repeated success in persuasion. Even his many enemies recognized his outstanding gifts in oratory. No doubt he had a commanding physical stature, to stand not only before king and bishop but also before crowds of townspeople whose anger at the inquisition he so effectively channeled into action.
    Details of his early life are precious but few. Born between 1260 and 1270 into the petty nobility of Montpellier, Bernard entered the Franciscan brotherhood in 1284. His abundant talents were quickly recognized, and he rose through the ranks, representing the head of the Franciscan Order in dealing with royal authorities in Paris and becoming the prior of the Franciscan convent