St. Bartholomew's Day massacre

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Painting by François Dubois born about 1529, Amiens, Picardy.

The St. Bartholomew's Day massacre (Massacre de la Saint-Barthélemy in French) was a wave of Catholic mob violence against the Huguenots (French Calvinist Protestants), traditionally believed to have been instigated by Catherine de' Medici, the mother of Charles IX. Starting on August 24, 1572, with the murder 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. The exact number of fatalities will never be known, but several thousand, possibly tens of thousands, of Huguenots died in the violence. Though by no means unique, "it was the worst of the century's religious massacres." ^[1] The massacres marked a turning-point in the French Wars of Religion by radicalising the Huguenot faction.

1 Background
2 The massacres
3 Reactions to the massacre
4 Interpretation
5 Cultural references to the massacre
6 Notes
7 Other references
8 External links

[edit] Background

The Massacre of Saint Bartholomew's Day was the culmination of a series of events:

The Peace of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, which put an end to the Third War of Religion on August 8, 1570.
The marriage between Henry of Navarre and Marguerite of Valois on August 18, 1572
The failed assassination of Admiral de Coligny on August 23, 1572.

[edit] An unacceptable peace and an unacceptable marriage

The Peace of Saint-Germain put an end to three years of terrible civil war between Catholics and Protestants. This peace was precarious, however, since the more intransigent Catholics refused to accept it. With the Guise family, who led this faction, out of favour at the French court, the Huguenot leader, Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, was readmitted into the king's council in September 1571. Staunch Catholics were shocked by the return of the Protestants to the court, but the Queen Mother, Catherine de' Medici, and her son, King Charles IX, were determined not to let war break out again. They were also conscious of the kingdom's financial difficulties, which led them to uphold the peace and remain on friendly terms with Coligny. The Huguenots were in a strong defensive position as they controlled the fortified towns of La Rochelle, La Charité-sur-Loire, Cognac, and Montauban. To cement the peace between the two religious parties, Catherine de' Medici planned to marry her daughter Marguerite de Valois, to the Protestant prince, Henry of Navarre (the future King Henry IV). The royal marriage was arranged for the 18 August 1572. It was not accepted by diehard Catholics, or by the pope. He and King Philip II of Spain strongly condemned the Queen Mother's policy.

[edit] A tense city

The marriage led to the presence of a large number of well-born Protestants in Paris, who had come to escort their prince. But Paris was a violently anti-Huguenot city. The Parisians, who were extreme Catholics, found their presence unacceptable. Encouraged by Catholic preachers, particularly the Capuchins, they were horrified at the marriage of a princess of France with a Protestant. The Parlement of Paris itself decided to snub the marriage ceremony. Besides this, harvests had been bad. The rise in prices and the luxury displayed on the occasion of the royal wedding intensified the hatred felt by the common people.

The court itself was extremely divided. Catherine de' Medici had not obtained the pope's permission to celebrate this irregular marriage. Consequently, the French prelates hesitated over which attitude to adopt. It took all the Queen Mother's skill to convince the Cardinal de Bourbon to marry the couple. Besides this, the rivalries between the leading families re-emerged. The Guises were not prepared to make way for the Montmorencys. Francois, Duke of Montmorency, and governor of Paris, was unable to control the disturbances in the city. Faced with the dangerous situation in Paris, he preferred to leave town a few days before the wedding.

[edit] The attempted assassination of Admiral de Coligny

After the wedding, Coligny and the leading Huguenots remained in Paris in order to discuss some outstanding grievances about the Peace of St. Germain with the king. On August 22, an attempt was made on Coligny's life. The would-be assassin, Maurevert, escaped in the ensuing confusion and it is still difficult today to decide who was ultimately responsible for the attack. History records three possible candidates:

The Guises: the Cardinal of Lorraine, the Duke of Guise and the Duke of Aumale are the most likely suspects. The leaders of the Catholic party, they wanted to avenge the death of Francois of Guise, believed by them to have been murdered by Coligny ten years previously. The shot aimed at the admiral came from a house belonging to the Guises.

The Duke of Alba, who governed the Netherlands on behalf of Philip II: Coligny planned to lead a campaign in the Netherlands to liberate the region from Spanish control. During the summer, he had secretly dispatched a number of troops to help the Protestants in Mons, who were besieged by the Duke of Alba. So the admiral was a real threat to the latter.

Catherine de' Medici: according to tradition, the Queen Mother worried that the king was increasingly becoming dominated by Coligny. Amongst other things, Catherine feared that Coligny's influence would drag France into a war with Spain over the Netherlands. Nevertheless, it is difficult to believe in her culpability today, given the efforts the Queen Mother had made to ensure the peace and tranquility of the state. If she was not the author of the assassination attempt however, would she at least have been aware of what the Guises or the Spanish were planning?

[edit] The massacres

The attempted assassination of Coligny triggered the crisis that led to the massacre. Admiral de Coligny was the most respected Huguenot leader. Aware of the danger from the Protestants, the king and his court visited Coligny on his sickbed and promised him the culprits would be punished. While the Queen Mother was eating dinner, Protestants burst in to demand justice. Fears of Huguenot reprisals grew. Coligny's brother-in-law led a 4,000-strong army camped just outside Paris ^[2] and, though there is no evidence it was planning to attack, Catholics in the city feared it might take revenge on the Guises or the city populace itself. That very evening, Catherine held a meeting at the Tuileries Palace with her Italian advisers and Baron de Retz.

On the evening of August 23, Catherine went to see the king to discuss the crisis. Though no details of the meeting survive, it is obvious that Charles IX and his mother took the decision to eliminate the Protestant leaders, with the exception of the princes of the blood, Henri of Navarre and the Prince of Condé. According to an unsubstantiated tradition, he angrily exclaimed: "Well then, so be it! Kill them! But kill them all! Don't leave a single one alive to reproach me!"

Shortly after this decision, the municipal authorities of Paris were summoned. They were ordered to shut the city gates and to arm the citizenry in order to prevent any attempt at an uprising. The king's Swiss Guard was given the task of killing a list of leading Protestants. It is difficult today to determine the exact chronology of events and to know the moment the killing began. It seems a signal was given by ringing bells for matins (between midnight and dawn) at the church of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, near the Louvre, which was the parish church of the kings of France. Before this, the Swiss guards had expelled the Protestant nobles from the Louvre palace and then slaughtered them in the streets. Admiral Coligny was dragged from his bed by the Duke of Guise himself, killed, and his body thrown out of the window. The tension that had been building since the Peace of St. Germain now exploded in a wave of popular violence. The common people began to hunt Protestants throughout the city. The ferocity of the slaughter was incredible. Chains were used to block streets so that Protestants could not escape from their houses. Women and children were butchered in cold blood. The massacre lasted several days, despite the king's attempts to stop it. Among the slain were the composer Claude Goudimel and the philosopher Petrus Ramus.

From August to October, similar apparently spontaneous massacres of Huguenots took place in other towns, such as Toulouse, Bordeaux, Lyon, Bourges, Rouen, and Orléans. The number of victims is unknown, with figures varying between 2,000 and 100,000. Some recent historians estimate the number of dead at 2,000 in Paris, and 5,000 to 10,000 in the rest of France. At any rate only a short time afterwards the reformers were preparing for a fourth civil war.

[edit] Reactions to the massacre

Contemporary accounts report bodies in the rivers for months afterwards, so that no one would eat fish. Pope Gregory XIII's reaction was jubilant: 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. In Paris, the poet Jean-Antoine de Baïf, founder of the Academie de Musique et de Poésie, wrote a sonnet extravagantly praising the killings. On the other hand, the Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian II, King Charles's father-in-law, was sickened, describing the massacre as "shameful". Moderate French Catholics also began to wonder whether religious uniformity was worth the price of such bloodshed and they began to form a movement, the Politiques, which placed national unity above sectarian interests.

Protestant countries were horrified at the bloody barbarity, and only the concentrated efforts of Catherine's ambassadors prevented the collapse of her policy of remaining on good terms with them.

[edit] Interpretation

Over the centuries, the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre has inevitably aroused a great deal of controversy. Modern historians are still divided over the causes and the responsibility for the massacre:

According to Denis Crouzet, Charles IX feared a Protestant uprising, and chose to strangle it at birth in order to protect his own power. The decision was therefore his own, and not Catherine de' Medici's.
The traditional interpretation, maintained by Janine Garrisson, makes Catherine de' Medici and her Catholic advisers the principal culprits. They forced the hand of a hesitant and weak-willed king.
According to Jean-Louis Bourgeon, it was the violently anti-Huguenot city of Paris which was really responsible. He stresses that the city was on the verge of revolt. The Guises, who were highly popular, exploited this situation to put pressure on the king and the queen mother. Charles IX was thus forced to head off the potential riot, which was the work of the Guises, the city militia and the common people.

[edit] Cultural references to the massacre

Dumas' book was published in English as Marguerite de Valois.

The story was fictionalised by Prosper Mérimée in his Chronique du règne de Charles IX (1829), and 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 commercially successful French film in 1994 under the same French title.

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

Furthermore, the Elizabethan dramatist Christopher Marlowe knew well of this incident as French refugees sought refuge in his native Canterbury. He wrote an openly anti-Catholic and anti-French play based on the events entitled 'The Massacre at Paris'. Also, in his biography The World of Christopher Marlowe, David Riggs claims the incident remained with the playwright, and massacres are incorporated into the final acts of three of his early plays, 1 and 2 Tamburlaine and The Jew of Malta.

A serial in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who officially entitled The Massacre of St Bartholomew's Eve, but often referred to by fans simply as The Massacre, is set during the events leading up to the Paris massacre. Leonard Sachs appeared as Admiral Coligny and Joan Young played Catherine de Medici. 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.

See also the opera Les Huguenots by Giacomo Meyerbeer.

[edit] Notes

^ H.G. Koenigsberger, George L.Mosse, G.Q. Bowler, "Europe in the Sixteenth Century", Second Edition, Longman, 1989
^ Mack P. Holt The French Wars of Religion 1562-1626, (Cambridge University Press, 1995 ed.)

[edit] Other references

Denis Crouzet : Les Guerriers de Dieu. La violence au temps des troubles de religion vers 1525-vers 1610, Champvallon, 1990 (ISBN 2-87673-094-4), La Nuit de la Saint-Barthélemy. Un rêve perdu de la Renaissance, Fayard, coll. « Chroniques », 1994 (ISBN 2-213-59216-0) ;
Jean-Louis Bourgeon : L'assassinat de Coligny, Genève, Droz, 1992. Charles IX devant la Saint-Barthélemy, Droz, coll. « Travaux d'histoire éthico-politique », 1995 (ISBN 2-600-00090-9) ;
Janine Garrisson, 1572 : la Saint-Barthélemy, Complexe, 2000 (ISBN 2-87027-721-0).
Note: this article incorporates material from the French version of Wikipedia