Alpine regions have experienced a significant warming with temperature increases during the 20th century. Such warming strongly alters the components of the cryosphere, including shift from solid to liquid precipitation and more frequent and intense snowmelt. Such changes are expected to lead to changes in spontaneous avalanche activity. However, the IPCC notes that “avalanches are one of the least understood processes of the cryosphere in terms of response to warming”. This research gap is mainly due to the insufficient documentation of past events, based on (1) historical chronicles, often discontinuous and focused on catastrophic events, or (2) on systematic inventories limited to the second half of the 20th century which do not allow a comparison of climatically different periods. The dendrogeomorphic approach has been shown to be a reliable complement to historical archives and systematic observational series. However, most dendrogeomorphic studies have failed to identify clear relationships between avalanche activity and climate variability due to (i) the limited number of avalanche tracks included in the reconstructions; (ii) potential non-stationarities related to increasing sample depth over time. Using a hierarchical Bayesian network, we (1) developed a multicentennial (1560–2016) regional reconstruction for the Queyras Massif (French Alps) and (2) compared avalanche activity with climatic fluctuations on different time scales. Over 1801–2016, our study shows a global increase in avalanche frequency during cooler and wetter periods, and reduced activity during warmer and drier periods. At the centennial scale, avalanche activity shows a decrease at the end of the 20th century with a release probability significantly lower than in the pre-industrial period. These preliminary results suggest a climatic control of avalanche activity and a direct impact of global warming on the frequency of snow avalanches in the southern French Alps.