Massacre of Saint Bartholomew's Day

 

murder of French Protestants, or Huguenots, that began in Paris on Aug. 24, 1572. It was preceded, on Aug. 22, by an attempt, ordered by Catherine de' Medici, on the life of the Huguenot leader Admiral Coligny. The failure of the attempt led to formulation of the plan for a general massacre. The opportunity was furnished by the presence in Paris of many of the Huguenot nobility for the wedding of Henry of Navarre (later King Henry IV) and Catherine's daughter, Margaret of Valois. Involved in the scheme were the duc d'Anjou, later King Henry III; Henri, 3d duc de Guise (see under Guise); and the reluctant King Charles IX. Coligny was the first victim; his death was followed by the killing of minor leaders and of all Huguenots within reach of the soldiery and the mob. The massacre continued even after a royal order to stop, and it spread from Paris into other sections of France. Massacres continued into October reaching the provinces of Rouen, Lyons, Bourges, Orleans, and Bourdeaux. An estimated 3,000 were killed in Paris, 70,000 in all of France. News of the massacres was welcomed by the Pope and the King of Spain. Protestants, however, were horrified, and the killings rekindled the hatred between Protestants and Catholics and resulted in the resumption of civil war (see Religion, Wars of).

Bibliography

See studies by P. Erlanger (tr. 1962) and N. M. Sutherland (1973).

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 King Charles IX. The massacre took place six days after the wedding of the king's sister to the Protestant Henry of Navarre, an occasion for which many of the most wealthy and prominent Huguenots were in Paris, and two days after the attempted assassination of Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, a Huguenot leader. Starting on 24 August 1572 (the feast of Bartholomew the Apostle) with the murder of Coligny, the massacres spread throughout Paris, and later to other cities and the countryside, lasting for several months. The exact number of fatalities is not known, but it is estimated that anywhere from ten thousand to possibly one-hundred thousand Huguenots died in the violence throughout France. 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. The Huguenot political movement was crippled by the loss of many of its prominent aristocratic leaders, and those who remained were increasingly radicalized.

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 III of Navarre and Marguerite of Valois on August 18, 1572
• The failed assassination of Admiral de Coligny on August 22, 1572.

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 Dowager, 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. Both the Pope and King Philip II of Spain strongly condemned the Queen Dowager's policy.

A tense city

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, 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. Compounding this bad feeling was the fact that the harvests had been poor; 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 Dowager'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 a dangerous situation in Paris, he elected to leave town a few days before the wedding.

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?

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. 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.

The two leading Protestants of the kingdom, Henry of Navarre and the Prince of Condé, were spared as they pledged to convert to Catholicism; both would renounce their conversion when they had escaped Paris.

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.

Reactions to the massacre

Pope Gregory XIII ordered a Te Deum to be sung as a special thanksgiving (a practice continued for many years after) and had a medal struck with the motto Ugonottorum strages 1572 showing an angel bearing a cross and sword next to slaughtered Protestants.^[3] He also commissioned the artist Giorgio Vasari to paint three murals in the Sala Regia depicting the wounding of Coligny, his death, and Charles IX before Parliament. "The massacre was interpreted as an act of divine retribution; Coligny was considered a threat to Christendom and thus the pope designated 11 September, 1572 as a joint commemoration of the Battle of Lepanto and the massacre of the Huguenots".^[4]

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 events, and only the concentrated efforts of Catherine's ambassadors prevented the collapse of her policy of remaining on good terms with them. England's ambassador to France, Sir Francis Walsingham, barely escaped with his life.

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 responsibility of the royal family:

• The traditional interpretation, maintained by Janine Garrisson, makes Catherine de Medici and her Catholic advisers the principal culprits in the execution of the principal military leaders. They forced the hand of a hesitant and weak-willed king in the decision of that particular execution.

• 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 execution decision was therefore his own, and not Catherine de' Medici's.

• 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.

• According to Thierry Wanegffelen, the member of the royal family with the most responsibility in this affair is the Duke of Anjou. Following the failed assassination attack against the admiral de Coligny, which Wanegffelen attributes to the Guise family and Spain, the Italian advisers of Catherine de Medici undoubtedly recommended in the royal Council the execution of about fifty Protestant leaders to benefit from the occasion by eliminating the Huguenot danger, but both the Queen Mother and the King were very firmly opposed. However Henri of Anjou, lieutenant general of the kingdom, present at this meeting of the Council, could see a good occasion to make a name for himself with the government. He contacted the Parisian authorities and another ambitious young man, running out of authority and power, the duke Henri de Guise (whose uncle, the clear-sighted Charles cardinal of Lorraine was then detained in Rome). The Parisian St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre results from this conjunction of interests, and this offers a much better explanation as to why the men of the duke of Anjou acted in the name of the lieutenant general of the kingdom, consistent with the thinking of the time, rather than in the name of the King. One can also understand why, the day after the start of the massacre, Catherine de Medici had condemned by royal declaration of Charles IX the crimes, and threatened the Guise family with royal justice. But when Charles IX and his mother learned of the involvement of the duke of Anjou, and being so dependent on his support, they issued a second royal declaration, which while asking for an end to the massacres, credited the initiative with the desire of Charles IX to prevent a Protestant plot. Initially the coup d'état of Henri of Anjou was a success, but Catherine de Medici went out of her way to deprive him from any power in France: she sent him with the royal army to remain in front of La Rochelle and she had him elected King of Poland.

Cultural references

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.

The story was fictionalised by Prosper Mérimée in his Chronique du règne de Charles IX (1829), and by Alexandre Dumas, père 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, La Reine Margot (1994 film), starring Isabelle Adjani.

Giacomo Meyerbeer's opera Les Huguenots (1836), based on the events of the massacre, was one of the most popular and spectacular examples of French grand opera.

The pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais captured the essence of the conflict in his painting A Huguenot on St. Bartholomew's Day (1852), 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.^[5] Millais was inspired to create the painting after seeing Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots.

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 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.

See also

• Monarchomachs

Notes

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 Wikipedia.

External links

• A short account including a contemporary painting of the massacre and photos of the papal medal. Use for multimedia purposes only, biased and inaccurate source.
• Brief account The papal medal and other illustrations.
• Catholic Encyclopedia The Catholic Encyclopedia's entry on the Massacreru-sib:Фоломейска ноч

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