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The St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre (Massacre de la Saint-Barthélemy in French) was a wave of Catholic mob violence against the Huguenots (French Protestants), under the authority of Catherine de Medici, the mother of Charles IX. Starting on August 24, 1572, with the assassination of a prominent Huguenot, Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, the massacres spread throughout Paris and later to other cities and the countryside, lasting for several months, during which as many as 70,000 may have been killed. The massacres marked a turning-point in the French Wars of Religion by stiffening Huguenot intransigence.

Background

After the third war in 1570, there was a possibility of peace. The House of Guise had fallen from favour at the court and had been replaced by moderates who were more willing to find a peaceful solution to the crisis. The Huguenots were in a strong defensive position as a result of the Edict of Saint-Germain (August 1570). They controlled the fortified towns of La Rochelle, La Charité-sur-Loire, Cognac, and Montauban. Catherine de Medici had hoped that the marriage alliances of her children would support her move for peace, including the proposed marriage of her son, François, Duke of Anjou and Elizabeth I of England.

By 1571, however, hopes of peace were collapsing. Relations between the Huguenots and the Catholics had deteriorated, and in Rouen on a Sunday in March, forty Huguenots were killed because they refused to kneel in front of the host (the eucharist) during a Catholic street procession.

With the Guise faction out at the French court, the Huguenot leader, Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, was readmitted into the king's council in September 1571. The Guises hated Coligny for two reasons: he was the leader of the Huguenots, and they thought he was implicated in the assassination of Francis, Duke of Guise, in February 1563.

The Catholic fleet assembled under Don John of Austria defeated the Turks at the Battle of Lepanto. This confirmed to the Huguenots that Catholicism could resurge across Western Europe, led by Philip II of Spain. In April 1572, Sea Beggars took control of Brielle, thus taking control of Holland. This meant that there was pressure within France to intervene on behalf of the rebels in the Netherlands to prevent a Spanish intervention in France. Coligny was the main supporter of this intervention. There was then the possibility of either another civil war or a major war against Spain, which was at that time western Europe's greatest Catholic power.

Ostensibly to quell the rancour between the Protestants and the Catholics (the House of Bourbon and the House of Guise), the Queen-Mother, Catherine de Medici, arranged for Henry of Navarre, Duke of Bourbon, the patron of the Huguenots, to marry her daughter Marguerite. The wedding provided an extraordinary occasion to get all of the powerful Huguenots in one place. Catherine therefore planned the massacre of many of the Huguenots while they were in town for the wedding, but she had a hard time convincing her son, Charles IX of France, to go along, since he had developed a friendly relationship with Admiral de Coligny. Finally, after much argument, Charles became furious and lashed out at his mother, commanding the massacre to be done thoroughly if it were to be done at all — in other words, he didn't want to face any retaliation, so he ordered them all to be killed.

The massacres

One of the early historians of the tragic event, Jacques-Auguste de Thous (The History of the Bloody Massacres of the Protestants in France in the year of our Lord, 1572 (London 1674)), places the blame on the Protestants themselves, for the slaughter on St. Bartholomew's Day and following. He suggests that the entire Protestant movement among the nobility in Europe was primarily motivated by avarice, as princes coveted the vast properties that had been acquired by the Roman Catholic church. When the Protestant Reformation took hold, French nobility forlorningly looked on for several decades as the English nobility enriched themselves on stolen loot, and some of them sought a way to similarly fill their coffers. The Huguenot movement soon showed itself to be a genuine threat to the Guise family and the unity of France, after it was newly invigorated by the systematic teachings of John Calvin. According to de Thou these rival princes saw in the momentum of the Protestant cause that the opportunity had arrived to guarantee their personal fortunes regardless of the cost to the nation's well-being, and thus they took it by supporting the Protestant cause.

Naturally, as with the Lutheran movement in Germany, there were many pedestrian and sincere followers of the Reformation. But in de Thou's cynical view, shared by many nationalist and Catholic critics of French Protestantism, the nobility's motivation for supporting the Huguenots was avaricious, not at all theological or philosophical. The most notable of these Huguenot conspiracies against the crown was the Amboise plot in 1560, which was ultimately unsuccessful. During the Wars of Religion that ensued, the Huguenots were never an impotent faction, but from very near the outset of the political movement they had military strength and ample funding as they continually aimed at overthrowing the Catholic crown in France. Huguenot forces committed random massacres of Catholics, destroyed churches, shrines and private houses. For a time, it looked as if the Huguenots would win. Paris itself was under constant threat. In 1569, the Huguenot general, Gabriel de Montgomery, enjoyed victory over the royal forces led by General Terride at the Battle of Orthez in French Navarre. The surrender of the Catholic nobility was predicated upon a promise by the Huguenots that their lives would be spared. In spite of that pledge, the Huguenots had the Catholics massacred in cold blood on St. Bartholomew's Day, August 24, 1569. Thus, according to de Thou's thesis, the date chosen on which to unleash revenge on the rival house, and the Huguenot cause, was not arbitrarily chosen; however, he supposes that the killing was supposed to be limited to the nobility attending the wedding, who had been responsible for the first massacre of Catholics in 1569.

In 1572, a series of inter-related incidents occurred after the royal wedding of Marguerite of Valois to Henry of Navarre, an alliance that strengthened his claim to the throne of France. On 22 August, Catherine's agent, a Catholic named Maurevel, attempted to assassinate Admiral de Coligny in Paris, but succeeded only in wounding him and infuriating the Huguenot party. Then in the early hours of the morning of 24 August, St. Bartholomew's Day, Coligny and several dozen other Huguenot leaders were murdered in Paris, a series of coordinated assassinations that could only have been planned at the highest level. That was the signal for a widespread massacre. Beginning on 24 August , and lasting to 17 September, there was a wave of popular killings of Huguenots by the Paris mob, as if spontaneous.

"To be a Huguenot," the historian, Mézeray, "was to have money, enviable position, or avaricious heirs." Hence, according to Mézeray, when on the following morning the houses of the rich were pillaged and blood flowed in streams it was an outpouring of popular envy. As the massacres spread to the countryside, it was carried out by the peasantry against Huguenots who were perceived, for no small reason, to be anti-Catholic and anti-national enemies of France.

From August to October, similar seemingly spontaneous massacres of Huguenots took place in other towns, such as Toulouse, Bordeaux, Lyon, Bourges, Rouen, and Orléans. Again, carried out by the populace, not regimens of the crown. Estimates of the number of those murdered range as high as 100,000. a Huguenot source gives a figure of 70,000. Other sources estimate 30,000 or fewer. Among the slain was composer Claude Goudimel. The great and reliable British historian Hilaire Belloc gave the most sober number at around "perhaps 2,000" as he surmised the lasting impact of the massacres thus: "...for a time thoroughly cowed anti-Catholic nobles. The fury of the populace had a lasting effect which could never be undone." The number of victims in the provinces is unknown, the figures varying between 2000 and 100,000. The "Martyrologe des Huguenots", published in 1581, brings it up to 15,138, but mentions only 786 dead. At any rate only a short time afterwards the reformers were preparing for a fourth civil war.

"Catholics say only 30,000 were slain in the Inquisition of France. Protestants put the number at 70,000. We would prefer the latter figure. If there were 70,000 Huguenots in Paris on the night of the massacre, so much more the justification for the slaughter… We have heard ring out many times the very bells that called the Catholics together on that fatal night. They always sounded sweetly in our ears." (Western Watchman, No. 21, 1912)

Contemporary accounts report bodies in the rivers for months afterwards, so that no one would eat fish. Pope Gregory XIII's reaction was jubilant: although Catholic sources indicate that the news he received from France was that of a serious Protestant plot against the King having been thwarted. Indeed, communications were extremely slow and disparate in the sixteenth century; but this view may not explain why all the bells of Rome pealed for a public day of thanksgiving, the guns of the Castel Sant'Angelo sounded a joyous salute, a special commemorative medal was struck to honour the occasion, and Gregory commissioned Giorgio Vasari to paint a mural depicting the Massacre, which is in the Vatican. Gregory XIII, a cultured and scientific man, believed this would ultimately lead to peace in France, a noble motivation by any measure. In any event, In Paris, the poet Jean-Antoine de Baïf, founder of the Academie de Musique et de Poésie, wrote a sonnet extravagantly praising the killings. Clearly, the prevailing view was that the Protestants got what they deserved.

Popular culture

The story was fictionalised by Alexandre Dumas in La Reine Margot, an 1845 novel that is accurate as far as the historical facts go but fills in with romance and adventure between them. That novel has been translated into English and was made into a bawdy, commercially successful French film in 1994 under the aforementioned French title.

The massacre was also portrayed in D.W. Griffith's epic silent film Intolerance (1916).

A serial in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, The Massacre of St Bartholomew's Eve, is set during the events leading up to the Paris massacre. Leonard Sachs appeared as Admiral Coligny and Joan Young played Catherine de' Medici. Sadly, this serial only survives in audio form.

The pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais famously captured the essence of the conflict in his painting "The Huguenot", which depicts a Catholic woman attempting to convince her Huguenot lover to wear the badge of the Catholics and protect himself. The man, true to his beliefs, gently refuses her.

External links

• Brief account The papal medal and other illustrations.
• A Huguenot, on St. Bartholomew's Day Refusing to Shield Himself from Danger by Wearing the Roman Catholic Badge Oil on canvas, by Millais.
• Catholic Encyclopedia The Official Catholic Encyclopedias entry on the Massacre

• History of Catholicism in France
• Massacres
• 1572
• Religion in France
• Counter Reformation