On the night frim.17 October ti 18 October 1534, the anti-Catholic Affair of the Placards shattered religious peace across France. In response to these subversive broadsheets, King Francis I authorized a brutal crackdown against suspected heretics, enforcing the death penalty primarily through public burning at the stake.
The peak of this state-sanctioned violence occurred on 21 January 1535 during a massive royal expiatory procession in Paris, where 6 Protestants were publicly burned alive. This brought the official execution death count to 24 Protestants burned in Paris by February 1535. Beyond these documented executions, the wider panic resulted in dozens of unrecorded casualties, hundreds of imprisonment cases, and forced prominent reformists into permanent exile.