Chapter 33 : The Millenarianists

Chapter 33: The Millenarianists

In the adventure of God, the Jewish, Essene and Christianized apocalypses (or revelations) expressed the historical myth of a Golden Age, passed but promised to return, such as it was conceived, in regret and hope, by the Greco-Roman mindset, deceived by the disorder of the emperors and decked out in all the virtues of an ideal and universal republic.

In the “revelations,” the creator God, originally imperceptible and inaccessible, resembled his creatures and, through a growing epiphany, manifested himself so as to separate the just and loyal from the bad and wicked, with the result that, the latter having been annihilated, he would descend to the earth and build with the saints and the elect a kingdom of a thousand years.

The Constantinian Church, called “Catholic,” accommodated itself poorly to a doctrine previously and collectively received by a Hellenized Christianity that aspired to the triumph, not of an ecclesiastical authority, but of the ekklesia or communities of the faithful. Justin the Apologist, Irenaeus of Lyon, Tertullian and Origen were convinced millenarianists. The conception discretely continued up to the Twelfth Century, despite the reticence of the clergy, the exclusive holder of salvation, which controlled access to the kingdom of the saints.

Joachim Of Fiore

With the renewal of the social and political forms of the Twelfth Century, there came to be a consciousness of history in progress but still enclosed in the cyclical form of myth. The revolutionary process of market expansion, which incited philosophy to free itself from theological tutelage, also instilled at the very heart of the language of God the venom [venin] of becoming [devenir], a venom from which it would eventually die.

The idea of an Eden uprooted to the beyond and inscribed in a human future that was more or less near expressed — at the heart of a theocentric cosmos — the same hopes for the immediate future that would be sung (to the point of loss of voice and life) by the ideologies of the revolutions still to come.

Ironically, such a project was born in the brain of the monk who was the least inclined to sow trouble in the ecclesiastical universe. The theories of Joachim of Fiore only offered, it is true, a danger to the Church due to the interpretations that drew the efferverscence of the centuries from them.

In the Ninth Century, Bishop Rathier of Verona founded upon the balance of three orders the conservative society that produced the agrarian economy: the oratores, monks and priests; the armatores, soldiers; and the laboratores, working to feed those who protected them on earth and in the name of heaven.

Everything happened as if the commerical flight [l’essor] of the towns — like an arrow let fly at the modernity of capital — made the cyclical and static representation of Rathier of Verona tip over into the spirit of Joachim, flattening and stretching it according to a linear becoming, ordered into three ages.

The Book of Concord of the New and Old Testaments, written around 1180, put forth a sampling of formulas, none of which were threatening to the Church, but the meaning of which — sharpened by history — would cut like a knife into the adipose flesh of Roman power.

The first era was that of knowledge; the second that of wisdom; the third will be that of full intelligence. The first was servile obedience; the second filial servitude; the third will be freedom. The first was the ordeal; the second action; the third will be contemplation. The first was fear; the second faith; the third will be love. The first was the age of slaves; the second that of sons; the third will be that of friends. The first was the age of old men; the second that of young people; the third will be that of children. The first passed in the flash of the stars; the second was the aurorea; the third will be a full day. The first was winter; the second was the beginning of spring; the third will be summer. The first carried nettles; the second one roses; the third will carry lillies. The first one provided herbs; the second one cobs; and the third will provide wheat. The first provided water; the second wine; the third will provide oil. The first is related to Septuagesima; the second to Quadragesima; the third will be related to Easter. Thus the first age was related to the father, who is the author of all things; the second to the Son, who deigned to invest our [mortal] clay; the third will be the age of the Holy Spirit, of which the apostle said, ‘There where the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.’[388]

In the precise date that the Calabraisian monk assigned to the advent of the Third Age, the explosive mix of the Joachimite component and historic evolution discovered a detonator. Joachim counted from Adam to Jesus 42 generations of 30 years each, thus 1260 years. As the same period of time must be reproduced from the birth of the Christ [to the present], the new era would start at the dawn of 1260. Great troubles and the unleashing of the Antichrist obviously were the prelude to the birth of a paradisiacal world in which the saints, in joy, expected the return of the Christ.

Under the archaism of the cyclical calculations, there slid a subtle political design. Joachim foresaw the growing importance of the beggar orders, a veritable war machine that the Church opposed to the progress of the Vaudois heresy and the voluntarily impoverished reformers. It was of their preeminence that Joachim dreamed when he announced the reign of the saints. And the order closest to apostolic despoilment, Franciscanism, would succumb the easiest (through a malicious return) to the seductions of millenarianism.

With the rule of the Elect of the Joachimite Third Age, the reign of the Church would be abolished. There would no longer be Father, nor Son, nor rites, nor sacrifices, nor sacraments, just one law, the lex libertatis. The Amauricians, nay, the simple reformers, such as Pierre de Bruys and Henri of Lausanne, had already predisposed the Joachimite spirit to a social and individual practice that was radically hostile to Rome and, in the best of cases, radically hostile to the very essence of religion, which is the exile of self. How indeed could one, faced with the imminence of a paradisiacal nature in which God would be dissolved, prevent abstract concepts from retaking bodies by breaking the ecclesiastical barrier that prohibited access to the conjoined pleasure in the world and in oneself?

Sterilized by theological and philosophical speculation, certain words began to recover their fecundity. In the notion of perfection germinated the refusal of all guilt; contemplation became the illumination of the God of desire that each carries inside oneself; charity was elevated to the art of erotic courtesy; love translated the effusion of lovers; and freedom evoked at least the freedom of nature, at most the surpassing of the unfortunate coupling of divine tyranny and oppressed and violated nature.

Joachimism

The writings of Joachim encountered an immediate success among the learned. Among the Amauricians condemned in 1210, William the Goldsmith and Master Godin of Amiens had already drawn the subversive implications of the imminence of the Third Age. If Valdeism and Catharism knew nothing about them, the “spiritual” faction born from the dissensions in the Franciscan order perceived in the rule of the saints the emergence of a society inspired by the voluntary poverty that Francis of Assisi had so cleverly snatched from Valdo’s disciples, the Cathars and the apostolic preachers.

The date 1260, forseen by Joachim as the inauguration of the new era, exploded in history as multiple social, political and religious fragments. The shock waves would agitate the stratification of the centuries accumulated by the time without which the Edenic expiration date, always deferred, involved no other consequence than the revision of prophetic calculations.

Drafted in the second half of the Thirteenth Century, two works of wide distribution proved the influence of Joachimism on the political rivalry between Rome and the emperors of Germany. The Abbatis Joachim Florensis scriptum super Esaiem prophetam (the manuscript was belatedly printed in Venice in 1517) and the Interpraetatio praeclara abbatis Joachim in Hieremian prophetam (Venice, 1525) fixed 1260 as the end of the affliction of the Holy City. The German emperor, Frederic II, would in the hands of God be the whip destined to punish the sinful Church. The Imperium ravaged by the Saracens, who were destroyed in their turn by the Mongols and the Tarars, would lead the world to the brink of annihilation. Thereafter, as backlash, there would finally be born the rule of peace and the era of the just. (In the Nineteenth Century, at a time when ideological language had supplanted religious language, such would be the conception of the anarchist Ernest Coeurderoy in his Hurrah, or the Revolution of the Cosacks.[389])

The elitism of the Spirituals discovered a nourishment appropriate to their chiliastic pretensions in the theories of Joachim of Fiore. In 1254, a Spiritual from Pisa, Gerardo da Borgo San Donnino, radicalized and vulgarized Joachimite ideas in his Introduction to the Eternal Gospel. Insisting on the fateful year 1260, he prophesized the disappearance of the Roman Church and the advent of a spiritual Church, in germination in Franciscanism. The condemnation of the book in 1255 reflected on the Abbey of Fiore, thenceforth held as suspect of heresy. Condemned to perpetual reclusion, Gerardo da Borgo San Donnino would die, after 18 years of severe incarceration, without having denied his conceptions.[390]

Joachimism was revived again, but more vididly, among the Spirituals who took up the old program of reform and were increasingly opposed to the racketeering [affairiste] politics of Rome. A radical faction would be born from the Spiritual current, at the boundary between Franciscanism and the Free-Spirit, which the Church would condemn under the name “Fraticelles.”

Here there stood out — that is, once stripped of the anti-Semitic resentment of the Pastoureaux and the morbid comportment of the flagellants — an egalitarian social movement for which God constituted less a religious reference than a principle of government that excluded the Church and the princes in the name of a new and classless society.

Gerardo Segarelli

In the Italian towns, the political and social struggle most often obeyed the confusion of quarrels between the Guelphs, allies of Rome, and the Ghibellins, partisans of the Emperor of Germany. The will to purge the Church of its corruption (which Savonarole would still require in 1491) and revolutionary millenarianism created monthly, if not weekly tumults.

In the Joachimite year of 1260, in Parme, then ravaged by famine and internecine wars, a shopkeeper named Gerardo Segarelli — renewing the gesture of Pierre Valdo — sold his goods to the profit of the poor and decided to promote a community of faithful in which the apostolic virtues of the Christ and his apostles would be revived.

Illuminated, and no doubt imprinted with the hysteria shared by preachers and tribunes of all types, Segarelli soon played the role in Parme of popular and picturesque Messiah, although he failed to position as lies and calumnies the majority of the ridiculous traits with which the Franciscan Salimbene weighed him down. (In his Chronicle, Salimbene confessed the motives of his bad-tempered incontinence: “The people of Parme give more willingly to these vagabonds than to the brother preachers or the minor brothers.”[391]) Segarelli enjoyed the benevolent protection of Bishop Opizo, perhaps motivated less by solicitude than by aversion to the official beggars who constituted the Dominicans, universally detested for their base police work, and the Franciscans, often charged with hypocrisy.

Rallying the flagellants to his ecumenicism, Segarelli traveled through the town to cries of “Penitenzagite!” the popular form of “Panitentiam agite!” (do penitence).

With the aid of an old Franciscan, Robert, called Fra Glutto (Glutton), Segarelli organized a brotherhood to which thronged “debauchees, cowherds, swineherds, loafers who roamed the streets eyeing the women, and good-for-nothings for knew neither work nor prayer.”[392] In vain did the Council of Lyon of 1274 order them to dissolve or rally to one of the orders recognized by Rome.

Strong from their numerical significance and their growing audience, the Segarellists sent out missionaries, wandering apostles often confused with the Beghards, who shared with them a common devotion to voluntary poverty and the impeccability that it guaranteed.

The influence of “the spirit of freedom” was not absent from Segarellism, despite its exhortations to penitence. The prophet himself made assurances that the life of the poor was the true life of the apostles, “the most perfect of lives (...), freedom in adoring God, freedom in sermons, freedom in the relations between man and woman.”[393]

One attributes to Segarelli and his disciples the practice — recommended by the very orthodox Robert of Abrissel — of the “white martyr,” which consisted in a couple going to bed nude and interlaced, but resisting the natural solicitations of love. The current of the Free-Spirit gave to the exercise a more human meaning by changing it into a patient refinement of the desire that was not satisfied before it became irresistible. It is probable that certain apostles of Segarelli conformed more willingly to the latter version of martyrdom, denuded of excessive rigor.

Salimbene was surprised that Segarelli refused to assume the role of community leader, although he was the object of a great veneration. Sincerely devoted to the Christic myth, he deemed it offensive to his holiness if he governed rather than radiated. Nevertheless, he couldn’t avoid all forms of power.

Guidone Putagi, brother of the Podesta of Bologna, took control of the government of the congregation and would exercise it for many years, despite an ostentatious way of life, little in conformity with evangelical requirements.

A schism was declared, which degenerated into armed struggle in which each camp disputed Segarelli, a most unfortunate God in his successive incarnations and attempts to once again assist in the birth of a Church.

Guidone’s partisans carried him off, but shortly afterwards, he left the brotherhood and rallied to the Order of the Templars. (His adherence to the order of the Temple left the road open to calculations on the opening of the [age of the] spirit by the future victims of Philippe the Beautiful and Clement V. Merchants and bankers two centuries ahead of their time, they did not reject scorn for received ideas, nor for the pleasures that cynically camouflaged the exemplary reputations of the soldiers and businessmen who were above suspicion.)

In 1286, Pope Honorius IV condemned the Segarellist apostolics, refused to receive them or give them alms from the Vatican coffers.

A year later, the Council of Wurzburg enjoined the faithjful to no longer welcome nor feed the wandering apostolics dressed in extravagant clothing and called leccatores, ghiottoni, or scrocconi, that is to say, “gluttons.”[394]

Segarelli (again according to Salimbene) was increasingly eccentric. Three of his disciples, accused of debauchery, were hanged in Bologna so that there would be no doubts about their holy calling, which had been so loudly proclaimed.

Thrown into prison, Segarelli owed his salvation to the Bishop of Parme, who offered him refuge in his house. Nevertheless, a new bull issued in 1290 by Pope Nicolas IV relaunched the repression. In 1294, on the entreaties of the Inquisition, two men and two women who were members of the congregation were put on the pyre. That same year, and so as to to take by surprise an institution that was unanimously abhorred, the episcopal authorities — including civil power and certain ecclesiastical dignitaries — brought before it the prophet whose downfall Rome had sworn and whom it condemned to perpetual imprisonment.

This does not even mention the fierceness of the religious police. The actions engaged in by the Inquisition would involve the condemnation of Gerardo Segarelli to death, forty years after his divine revelation. With him perished many of his partisans, including Etienne, one of his principle evangelists.

Among those who, on 18 July 1300, contemplated the prophet in his tunic of flames, one of his partisans, Dolcino of Novara, would bring to Joachimism the modern form of a social and peasant-based revolution, inaugurating a tradition that would continue to exist until the decline of the colonies in the Twentieth Century.

The Guillelmites

At the same that Segarelli was agitating Parme and attracting the hostility of a Church that was clouded by the accumulation of capital, a millenarianist group founded in Milan claimed for women the privilege of guiding humanity as a whole towards the Third Age and the egalitarian kingdom.

In the prophetic year 1260, a young widow and her son arrived in Milan. Guiglelma, said to be from Bohemia, seems to have been the daughter of Constance, wife of the king of Bohemia. Nothing authenticates such parentage other than the declaration of one of her disciples, Andrea Saramita, who had been to see Constance in the hope of recovering a debt. Soon thereafter her exemplary piety attracted followers, whose numbers grew with her reputation as a thaumaturge and the multiplication of miraculous recoveries. The cult of the saint was soon made a part of the whirlpool of fashionable messianic ideas. Her sectarians let it be understood that she had been chosen to convert the Jews and the Saracens, and to instaurate the universality of the Christian faith.

Around 1276, a gilded legend supported the idea that Guiglelma was the incarnation of the Holy-Spirit, designated the harbinger of the Third Age by Joachim of Fiore. She was incarnated as the third in the Trinity as the Christ had been the incarnation of the second in the body of a man. Her nature was at once divine and natural, if one believes two of her more zealous partisans, Andrea Saramita, a notable from Milan, and an umiliata in the ancient convent of Biassono, the sister of Maifreda di Pirovano, who belonged to the powerful Visconti family. Guiglelma had the prudence to openly contest such a pretense, which made her subject to inquisitorial control, but, with or without her consent, her role as saint inscribed itself in the double signification of millenarianism and feminine preeminence, which — from the Cistercian Monials to Hadewijch and Porete — did not cease to disturb the Church.

When Guiglelma died, on 24 August 1281, she left her goods to the Cistercian community of Chiaravalle, near Milan, where she was buried in a great luxury of piety. The cult organized in her honor did profitable business. A month after the transfer of her remains, Andrea Samarita, with great pomp, exhumed the body. She washed it with wine and water, and preserved the precious mix as a cream for the healing of the sick. Maifredo used it as a cure for pilgrims; she also instaurated new ceremonies for the anniversary of Guiglelma’s death and the transfer of the saint. The abbey, whose prestige grew year by year, attracted the favor of generous donors. One of them, Giaccobe of Novati, a nobleman from Milan, bequeathed to it all of his goods and offered his powerful protection to the Guillelmites.

It was now necessary for the group to claim that it constituted the kernel of a new Church, marking the advent of the reign of the saints. Andrea, spiritual daughter of Guiglelma, devoted herself to defining a new dogma. The Archangel Raphael announced to the blessed Constance that the Holy-Spirit was incarnated in her; she chose feminine form because, under masculine form, she’d perished as the Christ, and the entire world with him. The tomb of Chiaravalle was raised to the glory of Saint-Sepulcre; rites were prescribed and communion was held in it.

From time to time, Guiglelma would appear to the faithful in the form of a dove. The gospels were replaced by Andrea’s writings, which imitated Paul’s epistles. Maifreda, the author of litanies and prayers, prophesizd the second coming of Guiglelma and the end of the traditional papacy. She herself would become a pope. She worked to form a cardinal college exclusively composed of women. Sumptuously dressed, she gave her benediction, celebrated Mass, consecrated the Host, and gave communion to the faithful.

The support of a number of rich Milanese, including the Visconti family, in all probability explains the slowness and hesitations of the Inquisition. It was disquieted by the Guillelmites in 1284, but contented itself with a simple admonishment. The inquests of 1295 and 1296 were not followed up upon. However, at the time Maifreda revived the millenarian danger by announcing the coming of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost 1300, the Church decided to intervene in a center of agitation that had consolidated the front of apostolics, Fraticelles, Dolcinites and heterdox Beghards.

Among the Guillelmites who were arrested, four or five were condemned as relapsers. On 23 August 1300, Sister Giaccoa dei Bassani mounted the pyre. In September, it was the turn of Andrea Saramita and Maifreda. Lighter penalties were given to the others. Guiglelma’s remains were exhumed[395] and burned. Thus ended a schism that opposed to the patriarchal Church the will to found a feminine Church and that brought a gynecratic constitution to millenarianist hopes. It would not be until the Sixteenth Century that the idea of salvation through women would appear (in the writings of Guillaume Postel).

Dolcino Of Novara

In Dolcino of Novara was incarnated the millenarianist aspirations of the urban areas and the old collectivist dreams of the peasant commune, according to a covergence that, up to the Twentieth Century, would govern the archaic and modern meanings of economic, political and social revolution. Remarkable for his intelligence, courage and sincerity, Dolcino offered to seven centuries of history one of the first and noblest revolutionary figures to attempt to instaurate a new society.

Originally from the region of Novara, Dolcino was the son of a certain Giulio, a priest in Trentano in the valley of Ossola or a hermit from Prato near Novara. Another priest, Agosto, attached to the church of Saint-Anges in Verceil, took charge of his education and trusted him with a pedagogue named Ziona. His brilliant spirit attracted animosity. A calumnious imputation accused him of stealing from his protector, driving him from Verceil. Perhaps he then joined a wandering group of apostolics, Fraticelles or Beghards, adepts of Segarelli. His prestige and eloquence rallied to him a large number of partisans. Carried to the head of the Segarellist movement, he drafted a new version of Joachimite doctrine.

The past was divided into three periods. The first covered the centuries of the Old Testament; the second extended from the coming of the Christ to Pope Sylvestre and situated itself under the sign of penitence; the third ran from Sylvestre to Segarelli, marked by the decadence of the Church that no reform succeeded in saving: not that of Benoit, nor the attempts of Dominique and Francis of Assisi. The fourth period, inaugurated in 1260, would procede towards the annihilation of the corrupt Church, the end of monks and priests, and the triumph of the poor and humble, the only carriers of the Holy Spirit and a new fraternal and egalitarian society.

Like all the prophets, Dolcino made the error of fixing a precise date — [in his case, it was] in three years, that is, in 1303 — for the universal upheaval from whence would burst forth the light of the terrestrial kingdom. Politically, Dolcino bet upon Frederic II, enemy of the papacy, on whom it fell to accomplish the designs of divine justice.

According to the Apocalypse attributed to John and Bogomilist tradition, as well, Dolcino identified the angels of the seven Churches: Sylvestre for Pergame, Benoit for Ephesus, Dominique for Laodicea, Francis for Sardes, Segarelli for Thyatire and Dolcino himself for Philadelphia. (At the same time, Guion of Cressonaert, friend of Marguerite Porete, also called himself the angel of Philadelphia.)

The course of events contradicted Dolcino’s short-term prophecies. Boniface VIII died in 1303, the victim of the brutalities to which he subjected Nogaret and Colonna, mandated by Philippe the Beautiful, King of France. Frederic did not manifest himself and the new pope, Benoit XI, was chased from Rome by the Colonna faction, took refuge in Perugia and did not temper the zeal of the Inquisitors against the Dolcinists.

A second epistle from Dolcino pushed back the date of the end of the Church of Rome by two or three years. In 1304, Benoit XI perished unexpectedly, no doubt with the aid of a posion; Frederic still hadn’t shown up. Clement V, enemy of the Beghards of Free-Spirit, proclaimed his resolution to finish off the Dolcinist movement.

At the head of some 4,000 men, Dolcino — accompanied by his friend, the rich and beautiful Marguerite of Trente — commanded a staff of experienced men, such as Alberto of Cimega, Longino Cattaneo of Bergamo, Federigo of Novara, and Valderigo of Brescia. Dolcino then began a guerrilla campaign that baffled his enemies with its great mobility, winning Bolgone, Modena and Northern Italy, especially the regions around Bergamo, Brescia, Milanm and Como. Arrested three times by the Inquisition, he escaped [each time]. He ended up establishing himslf in the region neighboring Novara and Verceil, where the peasant populations regrouped themselves under his leadership into a veritable peasant revolt.

Milano Sola, a rich [property] owner from Borgo di Sesia, offered to house Dolcino, but the pressure brought by the armies levied by Saint-Siege incited him to search in the mountains of Valsesia for a better refuge. In 1305, Mount Balmara and then the Parete Calvo, snowy and difficult-to-reach summits in the Alps, were erected as fortified camps for a population of 1,400 people, organized as a commune.

Around the couple formed by Dolcino and Marguerita, the partisans were called to lay down the bases for a new world in which the goods for survival were collectivized, property was abolished and marriage — which reduced women to objects of appropriation — was suppressed in the name of the “union according to the heart.” Dolcino recommended the practice of nudity among couples, refining the gestures of love until irresistible desire accomplished the will of nature in an innocence that revoked all guilt.

Clement V assimilated the struggle against the Dolcinists into a crusade enriched by indulgences. Through threats and promises, the people of Valsesia were forced to adhere to a line destined to prevent all aid to those who were besieged. Pushed by deprivation, Dolcino’s partisans’ raids and pillages alienated the sympathies of the villagers who had been initially won over to their cause, but the presence of enemy troops added to both the increasing misery and the ordinary cowardices to be found in such situations.

Nevertheless, the audacity of Dolcino turned in his favor a situation judged to be disastrous. The Podesta of Varallo, who fell into the hands of the Dolcinists after trying to seize the Parete Calvo, was exchanged with his troops for an important shipment of supplies.

On 10 March 1306, after a year-long stay in the cold and scarcity, the Dolcinists abandoned a retreat that was dooming them to a slow annihilation and succeeded in taking up a new position on Mount Rubello, near the village of Treverio in the Verceil region. Badly armed and weakened, their numbers did not exceed a thousand, but they nevertheless managed to break two offensives launched by the Bishop of Verceil. Pushed by famine, Dolcino provoked the enemy into battle, throwing itself into a hasardous confrontation from which he emerged the victor, capturing prisoners whom he exchanged for supplies.

Clement V then issued several Bulls of Crusade, promised tax reductions and advantages for all the [religious] orders, and obtained military reinforcements from Lombardy, Piemont and the Count of Savoie. To the blockade [of Dolcino’s position], Clement V added siege machines and the weapons of experienced mercenaries.

Drafting The Divine Comedy, (*) Dante Alighieri didn’t hide the sympathies that Dolcino’s guerrilla war aroused in him. Dante put Dolcino on guard against the tactic of falling back in a climate that worked against him and deprived him of the advantages that had assured him the mobility of his seasoned and well-nourished troops.

(*) The Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise correspond to the three Joachimite ages. The three degrees of the Scala perfectionis participated in both the alchemical process and the quest for “refined love.”

At the start of winter, a battle that turned to carnage saw the Dolcinists victorious again. The blockade and the rigors of the cold where the real reasons for their heroism. On 23 March 1307, the assault exhausted the last resistance.

Clement V would show his relief by giving out prebends and fiscal compensation to the Crusaders. His resentment prescribed him to inflict the most odious punishments upon Dolcino, Marguerite and their friends. Dragged through the streets of Verceil, Dolcino was — like many arrestees on the way to the pyre — carved up alive with the aid of red-hot pinchers. Witnesses recounted that Dolcino did not let out a cry.

Bernard Gui, one of the most ignoble men ever produced by inquisitorial fanaticism, vowed on his life to pursue the Dolcinists. They were burned in Toulouse in 1322, along with Pierre de Lugo, who was originally from Galice; in Trente in 1332 and 1333; in Compostelle, where the disciples of the Italian Dolcinist Richard were condemned in the manner of Bernard Gui; in Prague in 1305; in Rietti in 1335, despite the municipal authorities, who refused to deliver the Dolcinists to the Inquisition; in England; in Padua in 1350; in Avignon, under John XXII; in Naples in 1372; and in Germany at the beginning of the Fifteenth Century.

Although it was led by the parish priest Guillaume Cale, the great peasant revolt was encumbered by few religious considerations. Moreover, it involved more rioting and tumult than a politically organized plan and a program of precise demands. The peasant movement led by John Ball in England in the second half of the Thirteenth Century enjoyed the sympathy of the Lollards but, beyond Ball’s preaching and his celebrated question “While Adam dug and Eve spun, where was the nobleman?” the religious connotations remained absent. Same with the revolt led by Watt Tyler and the many popular insurrections that split the great cities. Millenarianism, still impregnated with the sacred spirit, did not reappear until the Anabaptists of Munster. It would fascinate thinkers such as Campanella and Weitling, a contemporary of Marx. The great revolutionary movements gave to millenarianism a more ideological than religious form — nevertheless, it would be a mistake to underestimate the role of irrational and Joachimite faith in Nazi millenarianism,[396] that is, in the antithesis of the projects of a classless society or an ecological paradise, both carried to consciousness by the successive waves of the economny.[397]