With the restoration of 1814-1815, Victor Emanuel IV. came to the throne of Sardinia, and the Vaudois once more sunk to the condition of a subjugated race, alien and oppressed. They were known to be advocates of freedom and advance; the Pope and the Jesuits again ruled at Turin; the Church and State again united to destroy the church of the mountains. From 1814 to 1848 the Vaudois suffered indignities and deprivations scarcely surpassed in the earlier persecutions. All the ancient oppressive laws were revived. They were forbidden to hold any civil office, to pursue their labors on Catholic festivals, to hold land beyond a certain limit, to make proselytes, or build new churches except in the least favorable locations, to marry into papist families, or to give, sell, or lend their Bibles to Catholics. Romish missions were established in their midst, and a convent and a church were built at La Tour to complete the conversion of the people. When Doctor Gilly visited the valleys in 1822 he was struck by the beauty of their landscape, the simplicity and purity of the people; he was touched and grieved to find that they still labored under a rule of persecution, and that liberty of conscience, for which they had ever sighed, was still denied them by unforgiving Rome.
But the church of the Alps was now to rise from its desolation, and to shine out with new luster in the eyes of all Europe. The free principles it had always inculcated, the liberty of conscience it had ever defended, were become the ruling ideas of every cultivated Italian. Turin and Sardinia had learned to look with wonder, admiration, and remorse upon the lovely valleys they had so often desolated, and the innocent people they had so constantly tortured and oppressed.
The Sardinian king, Charles Albert, stood at the head of the Italian reformers. He was resolved to give freedom to the Vaudois; to atone, if possible, for the crimes of his ancestors; to make some faint return to the people of the valleys for their long lesson of patience, resignation, and truth. Amidst the acclamations of his subjects, he prepared (1847) to extend freedom of conscience to the churches of the Alps. A patriotic excitement arose in their favor. A petition was drawn up at Turin urging the king to enfranchise the Vaudois and the Jews. Its first signer was the poet, artist, and statesman, the Marquis D'Azeglio; and his name was followed by a long list of professors, lawyers, physicians, and even liberal ecclesiastics and priests. Cheers were given for the Vaudois at public dinners in Pignerol and Turin, and all Piedmont wept over their history and rejoiced in their approaching triumph. On the 17th of February, 1848, the royal decree was issued giving freedom to the valleys.
It was received by the simple and generous Vaudois with a limitless gratitude. A thrill of joy ran over the beautiful vales, and Lucerna, San Martino, and Perouse resounded with hymns of thanksgiving upon the return of that stable freedom which had been ravished from them eight centuries ago. In every village there were processions of the young, with banners and patriotic songs; the blue colors of renewed Italy shone on every breast; the gentle race forgot all their injuries and their woes, to mingle freely with their Romish brethren, and to celebrate their victory in unbounded love. At night the wonderful scenery of the valleys was set off by a general illumination. Pignerol glittered with light; St. John and La Tour shone at the opening of the defiles; far up, ascending toward the Alps, every crag and cliff had its bonfire, and the gleam of a thousand lights startled the wild mountains, and flashed in caves and ravines where Janavel and Henry Arnaud had once hid in perpetual gloom. The snow-clad peaks and the icy torrents glowed in the illumination of freedom.
But a still more remarkable spectacle was witnessed at Turin. There for three centuries the Jesuits had labored and waited for the extermination of the Vaudois. In the public square, amidst its splendid palaces, had died a long succession of martyrs, the victims of its priests and kings. In its dreadful dungeons, noisome with disease, thousands of the people of the valleys had pined and wasted away. What unuttered woes had been borne in its prisons for freedom's sake no tongue could tell, no fancy picture. Its convents had been filled with the stolen children of the Vaudois; its stony walls had heard the vain complaints of parents and brothers without relenting. From its gates had issued forth those dreadful crusades, whose hosts of brigands, soldiers, priests, inquisitors were so often let loose upon the valleys to do the work of fiends. From Turin had come the impalers of women, the murderers of children; the Spaniards, who flung old men over beetling crags; the Irish, who surpassed even the enormities of the Italians; the Jesuits and Franciscans, who urged forward the labor of destruction; the nobles and princes, the pillars of chivalry, who looked on and applauded crimes for which Dante could have found no fitting punishment amidst the deepest horrors of his pit.314
And now all Turin, repentant and humble, resolved to do honor to the Alpine church. A day of rejoicing had been appointed for liberated Piedmont, and a deputation from the Vaudois was sent to the capital. As they issued from the valleys, they were saluted everywhere with loud vivas for “our Vaudois brothers,” for “liberty of conscience.” The citizens of Turin received them with unbounded hospitality, and the gentle Vaudois took part in the grand procession; they were preceded by a group of young girls, clothed in white, adorned with blue girdles, and each bearing a little banner. Six hundred persons composed the Vaudois deputation, the most noted in the stately pageant. To them, as a mark of especial honor, was assigned the first place at the head of the procession as it moved through the streets of Turin.
The persecuted of a thousand years walked the leaders of Italian freemen. The city rang with cheers for the Vaudois; flowers were showered upon them from the balconies; men rushed from the crowd to salute, to embrace the patient mountaineers; even liberal priests cheered them as they went by; the women of Turin smiled upon the daughters of the valleys. Yet, as the Vaudois moved through the squares hallowed by the torments of their early martyrs, beside the prisons where their ancestors had died by thousands, the palaces where Jesuits and princes had often planned their total extirpation, they were amazed at the startling contrast, and listened with grateful hearts to the glad congratulations of the people of Turin. They breathed out a silent thanksgiving, and prayed that the blessing of Heaven might ever rest upon their pleasant native land.
Their modest prayers have been fulfilled. The festival of their liberation was followed by a wave of revolution that swept over all Europe. The Jesuits and the propaganda were banished from Turin; France became suddenly a republic; the Pope was exiled from Rome, to be restored only by the French armies to his ancient tyranny; and Italy was for a moment free. If for a time the cloud of war rested over the valleys, yet the victories of Napoleon and the swift triumph of Garibaldi have given freedom to the peninsula, and safety to the Alpine church. To-day Lucerna, Perouse, and San Martino shine forth in perpetual beauty. The torrents gleam through the sweet vales of Angrogna, and roar against the cliffs of Balsille. In Pra del Tor, the citadel of the Vaudois has become a cultured field, and the chestnut groves where Henry Arnaud and his pious soldiers celebrated their holy rites are still rich with abundant fruit; the landscapes of Lucerna glow with the soft products of the Italian clime; in the wilder valleys the avalanche leaps from the snow-clad mountains, the chamois feeds on his icy pastures, the eagle screams around the peaks of Guinevert. To-day the primitive Christians assemble in peace in churches that were founded when Nero began his persecutions, or when Constantine gave rest to the tormented world. The Vaudois moderator gathers around him his humble pastors in their sacred synods, as the elders of the Middle Ages assembled at Pra del Tor. The schools of the Vaudois, from which the Bible has never been excluded since the dawn of Christianity, flourish with new vigor; their colleges no longer hide in the caverns of Angrogna. The long struggle of centuries has ended, and the gentle people of the valleys have found freedom to worship God.
Thus the moderator of the Alps has triumphed over the persecuting Pope of Rome, and liberty of conscience reigns from the valleys to the Sicilian Straits. Yet one dark scene of tyranny still remains—one blot on the fair renown of Italy. In the city of Rome the Jesuits and the Pope still rule. Still they point with menacing gestures to the people of the valleys; still they would snatch the Bible from their schools, and crush their consciences with medieval tyranny. In Rome alone persecution for religion's sake still continues; Rome alone, of all European cities, cherishes a shadow of the Inquisition, and still asserts its right to govern the minds of men by brutal force. Enthroned by foreign bayonets over a murmuring people, the vindictive Pope proclaims his undying hostility against the wise and the good of every land. But should the Holy Father and the society of Loyola turn their eyes to the Vaudois Alps, they may read their doom graven on each heaven-piercing peak. There may be seen a spectral company of the hallowed dead writing with shadowy fingers a legend on the rocks; the tiny babe crushed beneath the soldier’s heel; the fair mother hewed to pieces on the snow; the old man of ninety burned to ashes on the fatal pyre. They write, “Whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea!”—Eugene Lawrence, in Historical Studies.