St. Bartholomew's Day massacre

• 1. Introduction

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  The Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre of 1572 grew out of a wedding that was meant to end a war. Many of the wealthiest and most prominent Huguenots, as French Calvinist Protestants were known, travelled to largely Catholic Paris to attend it. Within days, a targeted group of assassinations gave way to a wave of mob violence against them. The killing then spread outward from the capital to the countryside and to other towns, and it lasted several weeks. The Huguenot political movement lost many of its aristocratic leaders. Many ordinary members converted, and those who stayed became more radical. Historians still argue over how it began. Was it a short, planned strike on a handful of leaders that spun out of control? Who actually gave the orders, and who simply followed the crowd? What did the rest of Europe make of it, and what did people later do with the memory? The answers begin with a peace treaty that many powerful Catholics refused to accept.

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• 2. A Fragile Peace

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  On the 8th of August 1570, the Peace of Saint-Germain-en-Laye ended three years of civil war between French Catholics and Protestants. Hardline Catholics refused to accept it. The strongly Catholic Guise family fell out of favour at court, while the Huguenot leader, Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, returned to the king's council in September 1571. The queen mother, Catherine de' Medici, and her son Charles IX backed the peace for practical reasons. The kingdom was short of money, and the Huguenots held the fortified towns of La Rochelle, La Charité-sur-Loire, Cognac and Montauban.

  Catherine's plan for securing the peace was a marriage. Her daughter Margaret would wed the Protestant Henry of Navarre, the future King Henry IV and the son of the Huguenot leader Queen Jeanne d'Albret. The ceremony was set for the 18th of August 1572. Traditionalist Catholics rejected the match, and so did the Pope. King Philip II of Spain also condemned Catherine's Huguenot policy in strong terms. Catherine had not even obtained permission from Pope Gregory XIII, so French prelates hesitated over what stance to take. It took all her skill to persuade the Cardinal de Bourbon, the groom's Catholic uncle, to marry the couple.

  Paris was a violently anti-Huguenot city. Its largely extreme Catholic residents found the arrival of so many well-born Protestants unacceptable, and preachers fed their outrage. Harvests had been poor and taxes had risen. Rising food prices, set against the luxury of the royal wedding, made the common people angrier still.

  One grievance had already cost lives. After the Huguenot Philippe de Gastine was executed in 1569, a mob tore down his house and raised a large wooden cross on a stone base at the site. Under the peace terms, the cross was removed in December 1571 and re-erected in a cemetery. Riots over its removal killed about 50 people. When the August killings came, relatives of the Gastine family were among the mob's first victims.

  News from the north made matters worse. In May 1572, a Huguenot army under Louis of Nassau crossed into the Netherlandish province of Hainaut and captured the Catholic strongholds of Mons and Valenciennes. Louis governed the Principality of Orange around Avignon for his brother William the Silent, who led the Dutch Revolt against Spain. Many Catholics suspected that Coligny had again pushed the king toward war on the Dutch side. He had managed this the previous October, before Catherine got the decision reversed.

  The court itself was split. The Guises would not give ground to their rivals, the House of Montmorency. François, Duke of Montmorency, was governor of Paris, and he could not control the disturbances in the city. On the 20th of August he left the capital and withdrew to Chantilly.

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• 3. The Admiral and the Gunshot

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  On the 22nd of August 1572, Admiral de Coligny was making his way home from the Louvre when he was shot from an upstairs window. He was seriously wounded. He and the other leading Huguenots had stayed in Paris after the wedding to press the king about unresolved grievances under the peace. The gunman most likely was Charles de Louviers, Lord of Maurevert, who escaped in the confusion.

  Three candidates stand behind him in the accounts. The Guises are the most likely suspects. The Cardinal of Lorraine was in Rome at the time, but his nephews, the Dukes of Guise and Aumale, believed Coligny had ordered the assassination of their father Francis, Duke of Guise, ten years earlier. The shot came from a house belonging to the Guises.

  The second candidate is the Duke of Alba, who governed the Netherlands for Philip II. During the summer, Coligny had secretly sent troops to help the Protestants in Mons, now besieged by Alba, and he planned to lead a campaign against Spanish rule. The third is Catherine herself. According to tradition, she feared the king was falling under Coligny's influence and that France would be dragged into a war with Spain.

  Coligny was the most respected Huguenot leader, and he had a close bond with the king, though the king's mother distrusted him. Fearing reprisals, Charles and his court visited the wounded man at his bedside and promised that the culprits would be punished. While Catherine was eating dinner, angry Protestants burst in demanding justice, and some spoke in menacing terms.

  Outside the city walls, Coligny's brother-in-law had a 4,000-strong army camped. No evidence shows that it planned to attack. Even so, Catholics in Paris feared it might take revenge on the Guises or on the city's people.

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• 4. Night of the Bells

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  At the Tuileries Palace, Catherine met with her Italian advisers, among them Albert de Gondi, Comte de Retz. On the evening of the 23rd of August she went to see the king. No details of that conversation survive, but Charles IX and his mother apparently decided to eliminate the Protestant leaders. The historian Holt speculated that this meant "between two and three dozen noblemen" still in Paris. Other historians decline to guess at the number. Most of these men travelled with gentlemen who served as staff and bodyguards, so killing them meant killing their retainers too.

  Soon afterward, the municipal authorities of Paris were summoned. They were ordered to shut the city gates and arm the citizens, supposedly to head off a Protestant uprising. The king's Swiss mercenaries received a list of leading Protestants to kill. The exact chronology is hard to establish today. A signal was probably given by ringing the bells for matins at Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois, the parish church of the kings of France, near the Louvre. The Swiss drove the Protestant nobles out of the Louvre and cut them down in the streets.

  At noon on the 24th of August, in the Holy Innocents' Cemetery, a hawthorn bush that had withered for months began to turn green near an image of the Virgin. Parisians read it as divine approval of the killings. That night, a group led by Guise in person dragged Coligny from his bed, killed him and threw his body out of a window. The Huguenot nobles in the building tried to defend their leader, but Coligny himself seemed unperturbed. The historian Jacques Auguste de Thou reported that one of the killers marvelled at the calm of the dying man. The man said he had never seen anyone less afraid in so great a peril, nor die more steadfastly.

  Then the city itself erupted. Ordinary people began hunting Protestants, including women and children. Chains were stretched across streets to trap people in their houses, and carts hauled the dead to the Seine. The killing in Paris lasted three days despite the king's attempts to stop it. Holt concludes that the general massacre could have been prevented, but that nothing shows any court elite intended it, and he lists Catholic courtiers who shielded individual Protestants. Newer research by Jérémie Foa points to militants who had already drawn up lists of Protestants deserving death, while most of the population was not directly involved.

  Two Huguenots escaped. Henry of Navarre, aged 19, and his cousin the Prince of Condé, aged 20, were spared after pledging to convert to Catholicism, and both later renounced the pledge once they got out of Paris. Some interpretations hold that their survival was central to Catherine's scheme to stop the House of Guise from growing too powerful.

  On the 26th of August, the king went before the Paris Parlement and held a lit de justice. Charles declared that he had ordered the massacre to thwart a Huguenot plot against the royal family. A jubilee celebration with a procession followed, even as killings went on in parts of the city.

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• 5. Beyond Paris

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  On the 24th of August, Charles sent orders to his provincial governors to prevent violence and uphold the 1570 edict. Even so, from August to October, similar massacres struck twelve other cities: Toulouse, Bordeaux, Lyon, Bourges, Rouen, Orléans, Meaux, Angers, La Charité, Saumur, Gaillac and Troyes. In most of them, the killing followed quickly on the news from Paris. In some places it came more than a month later.

  Holt found one striking trait shared by all twelve. Each was a city with a Catholic majority that once had a significant Protestant minority, and each had suffered serious religious division during the first three civil wars. Seven had actually been taken over by Protestant minorities during the first of those wars.

  In several cities, local Catholics believed that royal orders had reached them, carried by visitors or sent by a local nobleman or his agent. Such orders probably did not come from the king, though the Guise faction may have wanted the killings. Some apparently genuine letters from the Duke of Anjou, the king's younger brother, did urge massacres in the king's name. In Nantes, the mayor kept his letter quiet until contrary orders from the king arrived a week later.

  The pattern varied from place to place. In some cities, mobs led the violence while the authorities tried to suppress it. In others, small groups of soldiers and officials rounded up Protestants with little mob involvement. In Bordeaux, a Jesuit named Edmond Auger preached an inflammatory sermon on the 29th of September, and a massacre followed a few days later.

  Nobody has ever compiled accurate casualty figures. Estimates run from 2,000, offered by a Roman Catholic apologist, to 70,000, offered by the Huguenot Maximilien de Béthune, who himself barely escaped death. Among modern historians, the more specialised the scholar, the lower the figure tends to be. At the low end sit about 2,000 in Paris and 3,000 in the provinces, the provincial figure being Philip Benedict's estimate from 1978. Other estimates reach about 10,000 overall, with about 3,000 in Paris and 7,000 elsewhere. The highest totals run to 20,000 or even 30,000.

  For Paris, the only hard figure is a payment by the city to workmen who collected and buried 1,100 bodies that washed up downstream from the city in a single week. The dead included the philosopher Petrus Ramus and, in Lyon, the composer Claude Goudimel. Corpses floating down the Rhône from Lyon are said to have put the people of Arles off drinking the water for three months.

  In Rouen, where some hundreds were killed, the Huguenot community shrank from 16,500 to fewer than 3,000. Most of the drop came from conversions and from emigration to safer cities or countries. Other cities untouched by violence also saw their Huguenot populations fall sharply. The Huguenots may have made up as much as 10% of the French population on the eve of the massacre. By the end of the 16th century, the share had fallen to 7-8%, and it fell further when heavy persecution returned under Louis XIV and ended in the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Before 1572 was over, both sides were preparing for a fourth civil war.

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• 6. Who Is Responsible

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  In 1767, the French historian Louis-Pierre Anquetil published his Esprit de la Ligue and became one of the first to investigate the massacre impartially. He stressed that nothing had been premeditated before the attempt on Coligny. He also noted that Catholic mob violence had a history of escalating beyond control. Meanwhile, Voltaire, in his Henriade, and other Enlightenment writers used the massacre as ammunition against organised religion in general. Lord Acton changed his mind twice about premeditation before finally concluding there had been none. By the late 19th century, historians had reached a consensus that the massacre was not planned long in advance.

  Who decided on the killing of the leaders is still disputed. The traditional view blames Catherine and her Catholic advisers, who supposedly forced the hand of a hesitant, weak-willed king. Historians including Janine Garrisson have largely abandoned that view. In later work, Holt names four ringleaders: Henry, Duke of Anjou; Chancellor Birague; the Duke of Nevers; and the Comte de Retz. Apart from Anjou, all were Italian advisers at the French court.

  Denis Crouzet argues the decision was Charles's own. The king feared a Protestant uprising and chose to strangle it at birth. Jean-Louis Bourgeon instead blames Paris. He says the city stood on the verge of revolt, and the popular Guises used that pressure to push the king and queen mother.

  Thierry Wanegffelen points to the king's ambitious younger brother. He attributes the attack on Coligny to the Guise family and Spain, and he argues that Catherine's Italian advisers urged the council to execute about fifty Protestant leaders. According to him, Anjou, as Lieutenant General of the Kingdom, overrode the firm opposition of the queen mother and king. He then contacted the Parisian authorities and the young Henri de Guise, whose uncle, the Cardinal of Lorraine, was detained in Rome. This would explain why the killers claimed to act in Anjou's name rather than the king's. The day after the killing began, a royal declaration condemned the crimes and threatened the Guises with justice. When Charles and his mother learned of Anjou's role, they issued a second declaration, which blamed a Protestant plot. Catherine then stripped Anjou of power by sending him to La Rochelle with the royal army and having him elected King of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

  A second line of inquiry looks at the killers themselves. Traditional histories focused on the notables whose scheming set events moving. Newer work stresses ordinary lay Catholics, who believed they were carrying out the will of both king and God. In an age before mass media, and with poor literacy, the pulpit was probably the most effective means of mass communication.

  The historian Barbara Diefendorf points to Simon Vigor, the most popular preacher in Paris. He said that if the king ordered the Admiral killed, it would be wicked not to kill him. In her view, those words legitimised the events in advance. She adds that once a noble showed the murdered Coligny's head to the mob and said the king willed it, the die was cast. Holt agrees that Vigor filled his sermons with warnings of the evils that would follow a Protestant takeover of the capital.

  Holt also reads the violence as ritual. Burning houses recalled the purification of heretics by fire, and throwing victims into the Seine recalled the purifying water of Catholic baptism. In his account, Huguenots had to be dishonoured and shamed as well as killed.

  The picture is not one-sided. Raymond Mentzer reminds readers that in 1567 at Nîmes, Protestant neighbours massacred twenty-four Catholics, mostly priests and prominent laymen. Leonie Frieda stresses a class dimension, with the "haves" killed by the "have-nots". Some Catholic Parisians died too, and many debts vanished with the deaths of creditors and moneylenders. At least one Huguenot bought off his would-be murderers.

  H.G. Koenigsberger found the massacre disturbing because Christians were killing neighbours who had lived beside them under the same ruler for a thousand years. The anthropologist-minded historian Bruce Lincoln adds that Huguenots differed from Catholics in dress, eating and pastimes. In his reading, the rituals of the royal marriage deepened this social split, against their intent.

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• 7. Rome and Europe Respond

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  Coligny's severed head was apparently sent to Pope Gregory XIII, though it got no further than Lyon. The Pope nonetheless sent the king a Golden Rose and ordered a Te Deum sung in thanksgiving, a practice that continued for many years. He also had a medal struck with the motto Ugonottorum strages 1572. It shows an angel bearing a cross and a sword before felled Protestants. He commissioned Giorgio Vasari to paint three frescos in the Sala Regia, showing the wounding of Coligny, his death, and Charles IX before Parliament. They matched frescos celebrating the defeat of the Turks at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, and the Pope named the 11th of September 1572 as a joint commemoration of both events.

  Doubts spread in the papal curia as the true story emerged. Gregory refused to receive Charles de Maurevert, said to be Coligny's killer, because he was a murderer. Philip II of Spain supposedly laughed on hearing the news, for almost the only time on record. In Paris, the poet Jean-Antoine de Baïf, founder of the Academie de Musique et de Poésie, wrote a sonnet praising the killings. The Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II, Charles's father-in-law, was sickened and called it a "shameful bloodbath". The Politiques, Catholics who put national unity above sectarian interest, were horrified, and moderate Catholics began to doubt that religious uniformity was worth the price.

  The massacre caused a major international crisis. Only the efforts of Catherine's ambassadors, including a special mission by Gondi, kept her policy of good relations with Protestant countries from collapsing. Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth I's ambassador in France, barely escaped with his life. Even Tsar Ivan the Terrible wrote to the Emperor in horror at the carnage.

  A flood of polemical writing followed. Catholic authors praised the king for acting boldly against a supposed Huguenot coup, and officially sponsored works filled in its details. Huguenot works dwelt on the violence and spread theories that the court had long planned everything. They also showed fierce anti-Italian feeling aimed at Catherine, Gondi and other Italians. Diplomatic letters were readier to admit that events had been chaotic. So were memoirs published in later years, including those of Margaret of Valois, the only eyewitness account from a member of the royal family.

  One vivid account, attributed to Henry, Duke of Anjou, was not exposed as a fake until the 19th century. It gave rise to the line credited to Charles IX: "Well then, so be it! Kill them! But kill them all! Don't leave a single one alive to reproach me!"

  Some Italian Catholic authors broke with the official French line and applauded the massacre as a brilliant stratagem planned well beforehand. The most extreme was Camilo Capilupi, a papal secretary, who claimed that Charles IX had conceived the whole series of events since 1570 and deceived his own mother and ministers along the way. The Venetian government refused to let his work be printed. It appeared in Rome in 1574 and was quickly reprinted that year in Geneva, in Italian and in French.

  That climate gave rise to the idea that the massacre was a product of Machiavellianism. The Huguenot Innocent Gentillet published his Discours contre Machievel in 1576, and it went through ten editions in three languages over the next four years. Sydney Anglo argues that Gentillet was quite wrong about Machiavelli's standing among Italian courtiers. Anglo also finds little trace of Machiavelli in French writing before the massacre. Even so, the idea took hold and shaped the lasting popular picture of Machiavellianism. Vickie Sullivan, for her part, holds that responsibility rests directly with Charles IX and his advisers, and that the attack on the nobility echoed Machiavelli's advice.

  The Elizabethan dramatist Christopher Marlowe knew the story from Huguenot literature translated into English, and probably from French refugees in his native Canterbury. In The Jew of Malta, around 1589-90, Machevil in person speaks the Prologue and claims to have possessed the soul of the Duke of Guise. His last play, The Massacre at Paris, dated 1593, takes the massacre and the following years as its subject and shows Guise and Catherine as Machiavellian plotters. Even the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1913 described the massacres as a political act committed in the name of Machiavellianism.

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• 8. Afterlives

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  In 1561, John Calvin published his Readings on the Prophet Daniel, and in it he argued that kings who disobey God automatically abdicate their worldly power. That marked a change from his earlier works, which said even ungodly kings must be obeyed. Huguenot writers soon expanded on the idea and began promoting the sovereignty of the people, to the fierce response of Catholic writers and preachers.

  Still, widespread Huguenot support for anti-monarchical ideas came only after the massacre, among the Monarchomachs and others. Writers who had paraded their loyalty to the Crown now called for the deposition or assassination of a godless king. The massacre marked the start of a new French Protestantism, openly at war with the crown. Earlier, the first three civil wars had been fought only against royal policy.

  The story kept finding new audiences. In 1772, Louis-Sébastien Mercier wrote the play Jean Hennuyer, Bishop of Lizieux, which went unperformed until the French Revolution. Elizabeth Inchbald adapted it into English in 1792 as The Massacre, and it reflected events of the Revolution. Joseph Chénier's play Charles IX was a huge success during the Revolution and drew strongly anti-monarchical and anti-religious lessons. Chénier later voted for the execution of Louis XVI, then fell under suspicion of moderation himself.

  In 1829, Prosper Mérimée fictionalised the period in A Chronicle of the Reign of Charles IX. Alexandre Dumas, père published La Reine Margot in 1845, filling in the history with romance and adventure. It became a commercially successful French film in 1954, starring Jeanne Moreau, and was remade in 1994 with Isabelle Adjani. Giacomo Meyerbeer's opera Les Huguenots, from 1836, was only very loosely based on the events yet became one of the most popular and spectacular examples of French grand opera.

  In 1852, the Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais painted A Huguenot, on St. Bartholomew's Day, inspired by seeing Meyerbeer's opera. It shows a Catholic woman urging her Huguenot lover to wear the white scarf of the Catholics for protection. He gently refuses. Mark Twain took a bitterly ironic view in 1879, calling the massacre the finest thing of its kind ever devised, with the King and the Queen Mother taking a hand.

  The twentieth century brought D.W. Griffith's film Intolerance in 1916, which shows Catherine de' Medici plotting the massacre and coercing her son to approve it. A 1966 serial of Doctor Who, The Massacre of St Bartholomew's Eve, survives only in audio form after the BBC lost the footage. Ken Follett's 2017 novel A Column of Fire places all responsibility on the Guise family and treats Catherine and Charles as sincere supporters of toleration.

  On the 23rd of August 1997, Pope John Paul II was in Paris for the 12th World Youth Day when he addressed the massacre at a late-night vigil. He called it a sad event of very obscure causes, and he said that Christians had done things the Gospel condemns. He declared himself convinced that only forgiveness, offered and received, leads to a fruitful dialogue.

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