ST.BARTHOLOMEW`S DAY MASSACRE HELD ON THE NIGHT OF 1572 AUGUST 23-24
The St. Bartholomew's Day massacre (French: Massacre de la Saint-Barthélemy) in 1572 was a targeted group of assassinations and a wave of Catholic mob violence, directed against the Huguenots (French Calvinist Protestants) during the French Wars of Religion.
Traditionally believed to have been instigated by Catherine de' Medici, the mother of King Charles IX, the massacre took place five days after the wedding of the king's sister Margaret to the Protestant Henry III of Navarre (the future Henry IV of France). This marriage was an occasion for which many of the most wealthy and prominent Huguenots had gathered in largely Catholic Paris.
The massacre began in the night of 23–24 August 1572 (the eve of the feast of Bartholomew the Apostle), two days after the attempted assassination of Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, the military and political leader of the Huguenots.
The king ordered the killing of a group of Huguenot leaders, including Coligny, and the slaughter spread throughout Paris. Lasting several weeks, the massacre expanded outward to other urban centres and the countryside. Modern estimates for the number of dead across France vary widely, from 5,000 to 30,000.
The massacre also marked a turning point in the French Wars of Religion. The Huguenot political movement was crippled by the loss of many of its prominent aristocratic leaders, as well as many re-conversions by the rank and file, and those who remained were increasingly radicalized.
Though by no means unique, it "was the worst of the century's religious massacres."[2] Throughout Europe, it "printed on Protestant minds the indelible conviction that Catholicism was a bloody and treacherous religion".[3]
Hans J. Hillerbrand in his Encyclopedia of Protestantism:
Background[edit]
Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, the leader of the Huguenots
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 8 August 1570.
The marriage between Henry III of Navarre and Margaret of Valois on 18 August 1572.
The failed assassination of Admiral de Coligny on 22 August 1572.
An unacceptable peace and an unacceptable marriage[edit]
The Peace of Saint-Germain put an end to three years of terrible civil war between Catholics and Protestants. This peace, however, was precarious 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 Protestants to the court, but the queen mother Catherine de' Medici and her son 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 planned to marry her daughter Margaret to the Protestant prince Henry of Navarre (the future King Henry IV). The royal marriage was arranged for 18 August 1572. It was not accepted by traditionalist Catholics or by the Pope. Both the Pope and King Philip II of Spain strongly condemned Catherine's policy
Tension in Paris[edit]
Charles IX of France, who was 22 years old in August 1572
The impending marriage led to the gathering 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, and Parisians, who tended to be extreme Catholics, found their presence unacceptable. Encouraged by Catholic preachers, they were horrified at the marriage of a princess of France with a Protestant.[4] The Parlement of Paris itself decided to snub the marriage ceremony.[citation needed]
Compounding this bad feeling was the fact that the harvests had been poor and taxes had risen.[5] The rise in food prices and the luxury displayed on the occasion of the royal wedding increased tensions among the common people.
A particular point of tension was an open-air cross erected on the site of the house of Philippe de Gastines, a Huguenot who had been executed in 1569. The mob had torn down his house and erected a large wooden cross on a stone base.
Under the terms of the peace, and after considerable popular resistance, this had been removed in December 1571 (and re-erected in a cemetery), which had already led to about 50 deaths in riots, as well as mob destruction of property.[6] In the massacres of August, the relatives of the Gastines family were among the first to be killed by the mob.[7]
The court itself was extremely divided. Catherine had not obtained the Pope Gregory XIII'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 (paternal uncle of the Protestant groom, but himself a catholic clergyman) to marry the couple.
Beside this, the rivalries between the leading families re-emerged. The Guises were not prepared to make way for their rivals, the House of Montmorency. François, Duke of Montmorency and governor of Paris, was unable to control the disturbances in the city. Faced with a dangerous situation in Paris, he elected to leave town a few days before the wedding.[citation needed]
The massacres[edit]
Preparation for the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre
. Painting by Kārlis Hūns (1868)
massacre. Painting by Kārlis Hūns (1868)
Paris[edit]
The attempted assassination of Coligny triggered the crisis that led to the massacre. Admiral de Coligny was the most respected Huguenot leader and enjoyed a close relationship with the king, although he was distrusted by the king's mother. Aware of the danger of reprisals from the Protestants, the king and his court visited Coligny on his sickbed and promised him that the culprits would be punished.
While the Queen Mother was eating dinner, Protestants burst in to demand justice, some talking in menacing terms.[13] Fears of Huguenot reprisals grew. Coligny's brother-in-law led a 4,000-strong army camped just outside Paris[11] and, although 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 evening, Catherine held a meeting at the Tuileries Palace with her Italian advisers, including Albert de Gondi, Comte de Retz. On the evening of 23 August, Catherine went to see the king to discuss the crisis. Though no details of the meeting survive, Charles IX and his mother took the decision to eliminate the Protestant leaders, Holt speculates perhaps "between two and three dozen noblemen" who were still in Paris.[14]
Other historians are reluctant to speculate on the composition or size of the group of leaders targeted at this point, beyond the few obvious heads. Most potential candidates were accompanied by groups of gentlemen as staff and bodyguards like Coligny; so, each killing of a leader could have been expected to involve killing these as well.
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 a Protestant 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 castle and then slaughtered them in the streets.
One morning at the gates of the Louvre, 19th-century painting by Édouard Debat-Ponsan. Catherine de' Medici is in black. The scene from Dubois (above) re-imagined.
A group led by Guise in person dragged Admiral Coligny from his bed, killed him, and threw his body out of the window. Huguenot nobles in the building had first put up a fight.[15]
Although the Huguenot nobles were terrified for the life of their leader, one of Coligny’s murderers recognized his fearlessness of his fate by stating that “he never saw anyone less afraid in so great a peril, nor die more steadfastly” (Dethou).[16]
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, including women and children. Chains were used to block streets so that Protestants could not escape from their houses.
The bodies of the dead were collected in carts and thrown into the Seine. The massacre in Paris lasted three days despite the king's attempts to stop it. Holt concludes that "while the general massacre might have been prevented, there is no evidence that it was intended by any of the elites at court," listing a number of cases where Catholic courtiers intervened to save individual Protestants who were not in the leadership.[17]
The two leading Huguenot princes, Henry of Navarre and his cousin the Prince of Condé (respectively aged 19 and 20), were spared as they pledged to convert to Catholicism; both would renounce their conversions when they had escaped Paris.[18] According to some interpretations, the survival of these princes was a key point in Catherine's overall scheme, to prevent the House of Guise from becoming too powerful.
On August 26, the king and court established the official version of events by going to the Paris Parlement. "Holding a lit de justice, Charles declared that he had ordered the massacre in order to thwart a Huguenot plot against the royal family."[19] A jubilee celebration, including a procession, was then held, while the killings continued in parts of the city.[19]
In the provinces[edit]
Although Charles had dispatched orders to his provincial governors on August 24 to prevent violence and maintain the terms of the 1570 edict,[20] from August to October, similar massacres of Huguenots took place in a total of twelve other cities:
after the St. Bartholomew massacre.
Toulouse,
Bordeaux,
Lyon,
Bourges,
Rouen,[21]
Orléans,
Meaux,
Angers,
La Charité,
Saumur,
Gaillac and
Troyes.[22]
In most of them, the killings swiftly followed the arrival of the news of the Paris massacre, but in some places there was a delay of more than a month. According to Mack P. Holt: "All twelve cities where provincial massacres occurred had one striking feature in common; they were all cities with Catholic majorities where there had once been significant Protestant minorities....
All of them had also experienced serious religious division... during the first three civil wars... Moreover seven of them shared a previous experience ... [they] had actually been taken over by Protestant minorities during the first civil war..."[20]
The Siege of La Rochelle (1572–1573) began soon after the St. Bartholomew massacre.
In several cases the Catholic party in the city believed they had received orders from the king to begin the massacre, some conveyed by visitors to the city, and in other cases apparently coming from a local nobleman or his agent.[23] It seems unlikely any such orders came from the king, although the Guise faction may have desired the massacres.[24] 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 fortunately held on to his without publicising it until a week later when contrary orders from the king had arrived.[25] In some cities the massacres were led by the mob, while the city authorities tried to suppress them, and in others small groups of soldiers and officials began rounding up Protestants with little mob involvement.[26] In Bordeaux the inflammatory sermon on September 29 of a Jesuit, Edmond Auger, encouraged the massacre that was to occur a few days later.[27]
In the cities affected the loss to the Huguenot communities after the massacres was numerically far larger than those actually killed; in the following weeks there were mass conversions to Catholicism, apparently in response to the threatening atmosphere for Huguenots in these cities. In Rouen,
where some hundreds were killed, the Huguenot community shrank from 16,500 to fewer than 3,000 mainly as a result of conversions and emigration to safer cities or countries. Some cities which were not affected at all by the violence nevertheless also witnessed a sharp decline in their Huguenot population.[28]
Soon afterward both sides prepared for a fourth civil war, which began before the end of the year.
Death toll[edit]
Estimates of the number that perished in the massacres, “have varied from 2,000 by a Roman Catholic apologist to 70,000 by the contemporary Huguenot duc de Sully, who himself barely escaped death".[29] Accurate figures for casualties have never been compiled,[30] and, even in writings by modern historians, there is a considerable range, though the more specialised the historian, the lower they tend to be. At the low end are figures of about 2,000 in Paris[31] and 3,000 in the provinces, the latter figure an estimate by Philip Benedict in an article in 1978.[32] Other estimates are about 10,000 in total,[33] with about 3,000 in Paris[34] and 7,000 in the provinces.[35] At the higher end are total figures of up to 20,000,[36] or 30,000 in total, from "a contemporary, non-partisan guesstimate" quoted by the historians Felipe Fernández-Armesto and D. Wilson.[37] For Paris, the only hard figure is a payment by the city to workmen for collecting and burying 1,100 bodies washed up on the banks of the Seine downstream from the city in one week. Body counts relating to other payments are computed from this.[38]
Among the slain were the philosopher Petrus Ramus, and in Lyon the composer Claude Goudimel. The corpses floating down the Rhone
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