Béziers Lock

Béziers (; oc, Besièrs) is a subprefecture of the Hérault in the Occitanie region of Southern France. Every August Béziers hosts the famous ''Feria de Béziers'', which is centred on bullfighting. A million visitors are attracted to the five-day event.

The town is located on a small bluff above the river Orb, about from the Mediterranean coast and southwest of Montpellier. At Béziers, the Canal du Midi passes over the river Orb by means of the '' Pont-canal de l'Orb'', an aqueduct claimed to be the first of its kind.

History

Béziers is one of the oldest cities in France. Research published in March 2013 shows that Béziers dates from 575 BC, making it older than Agde (Greek Agathe Tyche, founded in 525 BC) and a bit younger than Marseille (Greek Massalia, founded in 600 BC).

The site has been occupied since Neolithic times, before the influx of Celts. Roman ''Betarra'' was on the road that linked Provence with Iberia. The Romans refounded the city as a new ''colonia'' for veterans in 36–35 BC and called it ''Colonia Julia Baeterrae Septimanorum''. Stones from the Roman amphitheatre were used to construct the city wall during the 3rd century.

Béziers exported wine to Rome. A '' dolia'' discovered in an excavation near Rome is marked, "I am a wine from Baeterrae and I am five years old." Another is simply marked, "white wine of Baeterrae." Béziers was conquered by the Muslims and remained part of Islamic Iberia between 720 and 752.

From the 10th to the 12th century, Béziers was the centre of a Viscountship of Béziers. The viscounts ruled most of the coastal plain around Béziers, including the town of Agde. They also controlled the major east–west route through Languedoc, which roughly follows the old Roman Via Domitia, with the two key bridges over the Orb at Béziers and over the Hérault.

After the death of Viscount William around 990, the viscounty passed to his daughter Garsendis and her husband, Count Raimond-Roger of Carcassonne (d. 1012). It was then ruled by their son Peter-Raimond (d. 1060) and his son Roger (d. 1067), both of whom were also Counts of Carcassonne.

Roger died without issue and Béziers passed to his sister Ermengard and her husband Raimond-Bertrand Trencavel. The Trencavels ruled for the next 142 years, until the Albigensian Crusade, a formal crusade (holy war) authorised by Pope Innocent III.

Massacre at Béziers

Béziers was a Languedoc stronghold of Catharism, which the Catholic Church condemned as heretical and which Catholic forces exterminated in the Albigensian Crusade.

The crusaders reached Béziers on 21 July 1209. Béziers' Catholics were given an ultimatum to hand over the heretics or leave before the crusaders besieged the city and to "avoid sharing their fate and perishing with them". However, many refused and resisted with the Cathars. The town was sacked the following day and in the bloody massacre no one was spared, not even Catholic priests and those who took refuge in the churches.

One of the commanders of the crusade was the Papal legate Arnaud-Amaury (or Arnald Amalaricus, Abbot of Citeaux). When asked by a crusader how to tell Catholics from Cathars once they had taken the city, the abbot supposedly replied, "''Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius''" ("Kill them all, for the Lord knoweth them that are His"). (This oft quoted phrase is sourced from Caesarius of Heisterbach along with a story of all the heretics who desecrated a copy of the Gospels and threw it down from the town's walls.) Amalric's own version of the siege, described in his letter to Pope Innocent III in August 1209 (col. 139), states:

While discussions were still going on with the barons about the release of those in the city who were deemed to be Catholics, the servants and other persons of low rank and unarmed attacked the city without waiting for orders from their leaders. To our amazement, crying "to arms, to arms!", within the space of two or three hours they crossed the ditches and the walls and Béziers was taken. Our men spared no one, irrespective of rank, sex or age, and put to the sword almost 20,000 people. After this great slaughter the whole city was despoiled and burnt ...

The invaders burned the Cathedral of Saint Nazaire, which collapsed on those who had taken refuge inside. The town was pillaged and burnt. By some accounts, none were left alive – by others, there were a handful of survivors. (A plaque opposite the cathedral records the "Day of Butchery" perpetrated by the "northern barons".)

Later Middle Ages

Despite the massacre, the city was repopulated. A few parts of the Romanesque cathedral of St-Nazaire had survived the carnage, and repairs started in 1215. The restoration, along with that of the rest of the city, continued until the 15th century.

Béziers became part of the royal domain in 1247.

Rule of the city was for a long time divided among three powers: the Bishopric, which reached its apogee in the 16th and 17th centuries when it was held by the Bonsi family, allied to the Medici; the consuls, local magistrates created at the end of the 12th century; and finally the king, represented by a "Viguier for judicial affairs", and from the 17th century onwards by a sub-delegate of the Intendant.

Béziers was not damaged in the Hundred Years' War.

On 8 September 1381, a riot broke out at the seat of the municipal council, rioters setting the Town House on fire. The councillors tried to take refuge in the tower, but fire spread there as well, and they all died either by fire or in jumping from the tower to the square.

Early modern times

King Charles IX passed through the city during his royal tour of France (1564–1566), accompanied by the Court and the great men of the kingdom: his brother Henry, the Duke of Anjou, his distant cousin Henri of Navarre, and the Cardinal of Bourbon with the Cardinal of Lorraine.

In 1551, Béziers became the seat of a seneschal, being removed from the jurisdiction of the seneschals of Carcassonne.

The city served as a rear base during various wars of the modern period, especially those against the Habsburgs. It was only once directly threatened. During the War of the Spanish Succession, the British in 1710 landed at Sète and moved to within a few kilometres of Béziers, before being repulsed by the Duke of Roquelaure. Béziers was at the heart of the Montmorency Revolt in 1632. It was in Béziers that Gaston d'Orléans and Henri II de Montmorency, Governor of Languedoc, met at the beginning of the rebellion. It was also here that the king, by the Edict of Béziers (October 1632) abolished the privileges of the province. (They were restored in 1649.)

During the 18th century, Béziers prospered, notably thanks to the cultivation of vines which enabled it to become an important centre for alcohol trading.

French Revolution

During the French Revolution, citizens of Béziers met in a revolutionary society created in May 1790 and numbering up to 400 members. It had several successive names: first, "The Literary and Patriotic Cabinet", a name still derived from the social life of the Ancien Régime; it then became "Society of the Friends of the Constitution and Liberty". Later becoming affiliated to the Jacobin Club of Paris, the Béziers organization was accordingly renamed the "Society of the Jacobins"; then, the abolition of the French monarchy precipitated two further changes of name: "Society of Brothers and Friends of the Republic" and then "Regenerated Society of the Jacobins, Friends of the Republic".

From 1790 to 1800, Béziers was the chief town of the district of Béziers. The city did not take part in the Girondin ("Federalist") movement.

Napoleon the Third, 1851

In the repression following Louis Napoléon's coup d'état in 1851, troops fired on and killed Republican protesters in Béziers. Others were condemned to death or transported to Guiana, including a former mayor who died at sea attempting to escape from there. In the Place de la Révolution a plaque and a monument by Jean Antoine Injalbert commemorates these events. (Injalbert also designed the Fontaine du Titan in Béziers' Plâteau des Poètes park.)

The Languedoc vine growers' revolt in Béziers, 1907

While elsewhere in France, the area planted with vines was decreasing, it increased in the Departments of Aude, Gard, Hérault

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