The St Bartholomew's Day Massacre

I. France before the Massacre

By 1572 France had experienced three civil wars between the crown and its Catholic supporters on one side and the Protestants, known as Huguenots, on the other. The Reformed Church of France had grown rapidly in the 1550s under the influence of John Calvin and the pastors sent from Geneva. By 1562 there were perhaps fifteen hundred to two thousand Reformed congregations, and Protestants made up perhaps a tenth of the population of the kingdom, with a much higher proportion among the nobility and in certain regions, especially the south and west. The first national synod of the Reformed churches met secretly in Paris in 1559 and adopted a confession of faith, the Gallican Confession, and a church order.

The death of Henry II in a tournament in July 1559 left the crown to his young sons, Francis II, who died in 1560, and Charles IX, who was ten years old at his accession. Their mother, Catherine de' Medici, acted as regent and remained the dominant figure at court throughout the reign of Charles IX. The great noble families competed for influence: the Guises, led by Francis, Duke of Guise, and his brother Charles, Cardinal of Lorraine, were the leaders of the Catholic party; the Bourbons, princes of the blood, led by Antoine of Navarre and his brother Louis, Prince of Condé, and the Châtillon brothers, of whom the most prominent was Gaspard de Coligny, Admiral of France, were associated with the Protestants.

Catherine attempted a policy of conciliation. The Colloquy of Poissy in 1561 brought Catholic and Reformed theologians, including Theodore Beza, together to discuss their differences. The Edict of January 1562 granted Protestants limited freedom of worship outside towns. The massacre of Protestants at Vassy by the troops of the Duke of Guise on 1 March 1562 led to the outbreak of the first war. The wars of 1562–63, 1567–68 and 1568–70 were ended by peace treaties that granted the Huguenots varying degrees of toleration. The site's page on the French Wars of Religion describes these conflicts and their place in the history of French Bible scholarship.

The Peace of Saint-Germain in August 1570 ended the third war on terms favourable to the Huguenots, granting them freedom of worship in specified places and four security towns, including La Rochelle, for two years. Coligny returned to court in 1571 and gained the confidence of the young king, who called him "father". Coligny urged Charles IX to unite Catholics and Protestants in a war against Spain in support of the Dutch rebels in the Netherlands, a policy which Catherine and many Catholic nobles opposed as dangerous. The site's page on the Eighty Years' War describes the Dutch revolt against Spain.

II. The Royal Wedding

To seal the peace, Catherine arranged the marriage of her daughter Marguerite de Valois to Henry of Bourbon, King of Navarre, the son of Antoine of Navarre and Jeanne d'Albret and the leading Protestant prince of the blood. Jeanne d'Albret, who had established the Reformed religion in her kingdom of Navarre and in Béarn, negotiated the marriage but died in Paris in June 1572. The marriage required a papal dispensation, since the spouses were related and of different religions; Pope Gregory XIII refused it, and the ceremony proceeded without it.

The wedding took place on 18 August 1572 on a platform before the cathedral of Notre-Dame. Henry of Navarre, as a Protestant, did not attend the nuptial mass inside the cathedral. Many Protestant nobles had come to Paris for the wedding, and the city, whose population was overwhelmingly Catholic and in which preachers had denounced the marriage, was tense. The celebrations continued for several days with banquets, balls and entertainments.

The city of Paris was the largest in Europe, with around three hundred thousand inhabitants, and it was strongly Catholic. Its preachers, its confraternities, its militia and its municipal government had resisted every measure of toleration. The university's faculty of theology, the Sorbonne, had led the condemnation of Protestant teaching since the 1520s, and the Parlement of Paris had prosecuted heretics. The site's page on Bible scholarship in Paris describes the role of the university in the history of French Bible study, including the controversies over the work of Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples and Robert Estienne.

III. The Attempt on Coligny

On the morning of 22 August 1572, as Coligny walked from the Louvre to his lodgings in the rue de Béthisy, he was shot from the window of a house belonging to a dependant of the Guise family. The bullet struck his hand and arm, wounding but not killing him. The assassin, probably a man named Maurevert, escaped. The Huguenot nobles in Paris demanded justice, and the king visited Coligny and promised to punish those responsible.

The identity of those who ordered the attempt has never been established with certainty. Contemporaries and historians have suspected the Guise family, who held Coligny responsible for the assassination of Francis, Duke of Guise, in 1563; Catherine de' Medici, who feared Coligny's influence over the king and his policy of war with Spain; and the Duke of Alba, the Spanish commander in the Netherlands. It is possible that more than one of these parties was involved. The failure of the attempt created a crisis, since the Huguenots threatened retribution and an inquiry might reveal the responsibility of persons close to the crown.

IV. The Decision at the Louvre

On 23 August the king met with his mother and his closest advisers, including his brother Henry, Duke of Anjou, and several Italian-born nobles of the court. According to the accounts of participants, including Anjou's later narrative and the memoirs of Marguerite de Valois and of Tavannes, the council was persuaded that the Huguenot leaders were planning a revenge that would endanger the royal family, and that the only course was to strike first. The king, after initial resistance, agreed to the killing of the leading Huguenots.

The extent of the original plan is disputed. Most historians believe that the court intended to kill only a limited number of military leaders, perhaps a few dozen, and not to provoke a general massacre. Henry of Navarre and the Prince of Condé, as princes of the blood, were to be spared. The execution of the plan was entrusted to the Duke of Guise and to the royal guards, with the cooperation of the municipal authorities of Paris, who were ordered to close the gates, chain the river and arm the city militia.

V. The Night of 24 August

In the early hours of Sunday 24 August, the feast of St Bartholomew, the Duke of Guise and his men went to Coligny's lodgings. Coligny was killed in his bedroom and his body was thrown from the window into the courtyard, where Guise is said to have identified it. The body was later mutilated by the crowd and hung from the gibbet of Montfaucon. Other Huguenot nobles lodged in the Louvre and in the surrounding quarter were killed by the royal guards. Among them were the Count de La Rochefoucauld and Téligny, Coligny's son-in-law.

The bell of the church of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, opposite the Louvre, rang the tocsin, and the killings spread throughout the city. The militia and the population of Paris joined in attacking Protestants in their homes, in the streets and on the bridges. The killers wore white armbands and white crosses on their hats as signs of recognition. Victims were killed by sword, pike and gunfire, and many bodies were thrown into the Seine. Houses were plundered. Among those killed were the philosopher Petrus Ramus, a professor at the Collège Royal, and the composer Claude Goudimel, who had set the Psalms to music for the Reformed churches, although Goudimel died in the subsequent killings at Lyon.

Henry of Navarre and the Prince of Condé were summoned to the king and given the choice of conversion or death. Both accepted Catholicism. Navarre was kept at court as a virtual prisoner until he escaped in 1576 and returned to Protestantism. Some Huguenots in Paris were saved by Catholic friends, neighbours or patrons, and the memoirs of survivors, such as the young Maximilien de Béthune, later Duke of Sully, and Philippe Duplessis-Mornay, describe narrow escapes.

The king attempted to stop the killings on 24 August, but they continued for several days. The number of victims in Paris is estimated at around two to three thousand. On 26 August Charles IX held a lit de justice in the Parlement and declared that he had ordered the killing of Coligny and his followers to prevent a conspiracy against himself and his family. This declaration made the crown formally responsible for the killings, while presenting them as an act of justice against rebels rather than as an attack on Protestantism as such.

VI. The Provincial Massacres

News of the events in Paris reached the provinces in the following days, together with conflicting messages from the king, some ordering that the peace be kept and others interpreted as authorising further killings. Between late August and early October 1572 massacres took place in about a dozen towns, including Meaux, Troyes, Orléans, La Charité, Saumur, Angers, Lyon, Bourges, Rouen, Romans, Toulouse, Gaillac and Bordeaux. In each town the killings followed the arrival of news or rumours from Paris and were carried out by the local militia and population, sometimes with the encouragement of local officials and sometimes in spite of their efforts to prevent them.

At Lyon, where the Protestants had been imprisoned for their protection, the prisoners were killed between 31 August and 2 September. At Rouen several hundred were killed in mid-September. At Toulouse the Protestant councillors of the Parlement were killed in early October, and at Bordeaux the killings followed a sermon by the Jesuit Edmond Auger. In some towns the governors prevented killings; in Burgundy and in Auvergne, for example, the royal governors refused to allow massacres. The total number of victims in the provinces is estimated at around three thousand to seven thousand, giving a total for France of perhaps five thousand to ten thousand.

VII. Catherine de' Medici

Catherine de' Medici has been the central figure in the historiography of the massacre. Born in Florence in 1519, the daughter of Lorenzo de' Medici, Duke of Urbino, and a niece of Pope Clement VII, she married the future Henry II in 1533 and became queen in 1547. After her husband's death she governed France for her sons through three decades of civil war. Protestant writers of the sixteenth century presented her as a Machiavellian Italian schemer, and the pamphlet known as the Discours merveilleux de la vie, actions et déportements de Catherine de Médicis, published in 1575, accused her of planning the massacre and of many other crimes. This image dominated later accounts and was popularised in the nineteenth century by novelists and historians.

Modern historians, among them N. M. Sutherland, Robert Knecht and Denis Crouzet, have presented a more complex picture. They emphasise Catherine's long efforts to maintain peace between the religious parties, her advocacy of toleration in the early 1560s, and her conception of royal authority as standing above the factions. On this view her role in the decision of 23 August was the act of a ruler who had come to believe that the survival of the dynasty required the elimination of the Huguenot military leadership, rather than the culmination of a long-planned design. Her part in the decision is not in doubt, but its motives remain debated.

VIII. The Refugees and Geneva

The massacre produced a wave of Protestant refugees from France. Geneva, which had already received many French Protestants since the 1540s, became a refuge for thousands of survivors, as did Lausanne, Basel, Strasbourg and the cities of the Palatinate. In England the French Protestant church in Threadneedle Street in London, founded in 1550, and the Walloon and French churches at Canterbury, Norwich and Southampton received refugees. In the Netherlands and the Rhineland French-speaking congregations grew in size.

The Genevan pastors, led by Theodore Beza, organised relief for the refugees, collected funds from other Reformed cities, and corresponded with the surviving churches in France to sustain their morale. The printers of Geneva, many of them refugees themselves, issued pamphlets, histories and polemical works that shaped the Protestant interpretation of the massacre. The French Bible of Geneva, revised by the company of pastors and published in many editions in this period, was among the books that the refugees carried and that continued to be smuggled into France. The site's page on Bible scholarship in France describes the Genevan revisions of the Olivétan Bible and their importance for French Protestants.

IX. Accounts of Survivors

The memoirs of survivors provide vivid evidence for the events in Paris. Maximilien de Béthune, later Duke of Sully, was a student of twelve at the Collège de Bourgogne in 1572. He escaped by carrying a book of hours under his arm, which led those he met to take him for a Catholic, and he was sheltered by the principal of his college. Philippe Duplessis-Mornay, a young Huguenot nobleman, hid in the house of a Catholic acquaintance and escaped from Paris in disguise. Marguerite de Valois, in her memoirs written many years later, described how a wounded Huguenot gentleman burst into her chamber in the Louvre pursued by archers, and how she saved his life by sheltering him.

The memoir of Charlotte Arbaleste, later the wife of Duplessis-Mornay, describes her own escape from Paris with her young daughter and the deaths of members of her family and household. These accounts, written by survivors in later life, are coloured by memory and by the purposes of their authors, but they show the experience of the massacre from within and the role of individual Catholics who protected Protestant friends and neighbours.

X. The Massacre as Religious Violence

The historian Natalie Zemon Davis, in an influential essay published in 1973, analysed the massacres of the French Wars of Religion as "rites of violence". She argued that the crowds who killed Protestants saw themselves as purifying the community from pollution, and that their actions often took ritual forms drawn from religious practice and from the punishments inflicted by the authorities. Protestants were drowned in rivers, as if in a parody of baptism, their bodies were dragged through the streets, and their books were burned. Davis also noted that Protestant crowds attacked Catholic images, relics and clergy in comparable ways.

Denis Crouzet developed this analysis further in his study Les guerriers de Dieu, arguing that the Catholic violence of the period was driven by an eschatological anxiety, a belief that the end of the world was near and that the presence of heresy invited divine punishment on the whole community. On this view the massacres were understood by the participants as acts of devotion that would avert God's wrath. Barbara Diefendorf's study of Paris, Beneath the Cross, showed how the preaching of the Paris clergy, the activity of confraternities, and the experience of the earlier wars created a climate in which the population of Paris regarded the Protestants as enemies of God and the city.

These interpretations have been debated, but they have shifted attention from the decisions of the court to the beliefs and actions of the participants. They show that the massacre, while initiated by the crown's decision to kill the Huguenot leaders, became a popular movement whose participants acted from religious conviction as well as from political and economic motives.

XI. Reactions in Europe

The news of the massacre was received with rejoicing in Rome and Madrid. Pope Gregory XIII ordered a Te Deum to be sung and had a medal struck commemorating the slaughter of the Huguenots, and he commissioned frescoes by Giorgio Vasari in the Sala Regia of the Vatican depicting the events. The pope's reaction was based on the reports he received, which presented the events as the suppression of a Protestant conspiracy against the king. Philip II of Spain is reported to have laughed for the only time in his life on hearing the news.

In Protestant Europe the reaction was one of horror. In England, Elizabeth I received the French ambassador in mourning, and the massacre confirmed the fears of English Protestants regarding Catholic intentions. In the Netherlands it ended the hopes of William of Orange for French support. In Geneva, Theodore Beza and the pastors received refugees and wrote letters of comfort to the churches. In the Holy Roman Empire, the Lutheran princes and the emperor Maximilian II expressed disapproval. The massacre was later dramatised by Christopher Marlowe in The Massacre at Paris, around 1593.

XII. The Huguenot Response

The massacre deprived the Huguenots of many of their leaders and led to the abjuration of many others. The number of Reformed congregations declined, and many Protestants emigrated to Geneva, England, the Netherlands or Germany. But the Huguenots of the south and west resisted. La Rochelle refused to admit a royal governor and was besieged by the royal army under the Duke of Anjou from November 1572 to July 1573. The siege failed, and the Peace of La Rochelle in July 1573 granted the Huguenots limited freedom of worship in La Rochelle, Nîmes and Montauban. The site's page on the Huguenot rebellions describes the later history of these towns.

The Huguenots of the south organised themselves into a political federation, known as the United Provinces of the Midi, with their own assemblies, taxes and armies. In alliance with moderate Catholics known as the Politiques, led by the Montmorency family, they continued the war. The Peace of Monsieur of 1576 granted them broader rights, including freedom of worship throughout France except in Paris, and mixed courts in the parlements. This peace in turn provoked the formation of the Catholic League.

XIII. The Monarchomachs

The massacre led to a significant development in Protestant political thought. Before 1572 the Huguenots had generally professed loyalty to the king and attributed their persecution to evil counsellors. After the massacre, which the king had acknowledged as his own act, several Huguenot writers argued that subjects had the right to resist a tyrannical king. These writers were later called "monarchomachs", fighters against monarchs, by their opponents.

The most important works of this school were the Francogallia of the jurist François Hotman, published in 1573, which argued that the French monarchy had originally been elective and limited by the estates; Du droit des magistrats sur leurs sujets, published anonymously by Theodore Beza in 1574, which argued that lesser magistrates had the right and duty to resist a tyrant; and the Vindiciae contra tyrannos, published in 1579 under the pseudonym Stephanus Junius Brutus and attributed to Philippe Duplessis-Mornay or Hubert Languet, which developed a theory of a double covenant between God, the king and the people.

These works drew extensively on Scripture. The Vindiciae based its theory on the covenants described in 2 Kings 11:17, where the priest Jehoiada made a covenant between Jehovah, the king and the people, and on the history of the kings of Israel, who were bound by the law of God and could be resisted when they broke it. Beza appealed to the examples of the prophets and of the people of Israel, and to the principle stated in Acts 5:29, "We must obey God as ruler rather than men". These writers had to address the teaching of Romans 13:1-7 on obedience to the authorities, which they interpreted as applying to lawful rulers exercising legitimate authority and not to tyrants.

The monarchomach theories influenced later political thought in the Netherlands, Scotland and England. The Dutch Act of Abjuration of 1581, by which the States General renounced Philip II, drew on similar arguments. In Scotland George Buchanan developed related arguments in his De jure regni apud Scotos of 1579. Ironically, in the 1580s and 1590s, when Henry of Navarre, a Protestant, became heir to the French throne, Catholic writers of the League adopted similar theories of resistance to justify their opposition to him.

XIV. Scripture in Catholic Preaching

The Catholic preachers of Paris in the years before and after the massacre also drew on Scripture to interpret events. They presented the Huguenots as heretics who had rebelled against God and the king, and they compared them to the enemies of Israel and to the false prophets condemned in the Hebrew Scriptures. The preachers invoked the zeal of Phinehas in Numbers 25:7-13, who killed an Israelite and a Midianite woman and thereby turned away God's wrath, as an example of zeal for the purity of the people of God. They also cited the destruction of the prophets of Baal by Elijah in 1 Kings 18:40.

After the massacre, Catholic writers defended the king's action as the punishment of rebels and presented it as a providential deliverance from conspiracy. Some, such as the poet Jean Touchard, celebrated it in verse; others, such as the jurist Pierre Charpentier, a former Protestant, wrote justifications. However, many Catholics regarded the massacre with discomfort, and the moderate Catholic tradition represented by Michel de L'Hôpital, the former chancellor who had advocated toleration and who died in 1573, and later by Michel de Montaigne, regarded the violence of the wars as a betrayal of both religion and humanity.

XV. Huguenot Martyrology and Memory

The massacre became a central event in Huguenot memory. Simon Goulart, a pastor in Geneva, compiled the Mémoires de l'estat de France sous Charles neufiesme, published in 1576, a collection of documents and accounts of the massacre and its aftermath. Jean Crespin's Histoire des martyrs, first published in 1554 and continued by Goulart, included accounts of the victims. These collections, comparable to Foxe's work in England, preserved the memory of the massacre among French Protestants and their descendants in exile.

The singing of the Psalms, in the French metrical version of Clément Marot and Theodore Beza, completed in 1562, was a central part of Huguenot worship and identity, and accounts of the massacre describe victims singing Psalms as they died. The Psalter served as a source of consolation and of a sense of identity as a people under persecution, comparable to Israel in exile. Psalm 79:1-3, which laments that the nations have defiled the temple and left the bodies of God's servants as food for the birds, was among the texts applied to the massacre.

The memory of St Bartholomew remained a powerful element in French history. In the eighteenth century Voltaire made it a central example of religious fanaticism in his writings, and he claimed to suffer a fever on each anniversary. In the nineteenth century it was the subject of novels by Prosper Mérimée and Alexandre Dumas and of Meyerbeer's opera Les Huguenots. Historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries continued to debate the responsibility of Catherine de' Medici and the degree of premeditation.

XVI. Responsibility and Premeditation

The question of whether the massacre was premeditated has been central to its historiography. Protestant writers of the sixteenth century, and many later historians, argued that the royal wedding had been a trap designed to bring the Huguenot leaders to Paris for slaughter. This view was supported by the reaction of Rome and by statements made by Catholic writers after the event. Most modern historians reject long-term premeditation, noting that the court had pursued a policy of peace since 1570 and that the decision to kill the Huguenot leaders appears to have been taken in the crisis following the failed attempt on Coligny.

Nicola Sutherland, in her study The Massacre of St Bartholomew and the European Conflict, 1559–1572, emphasised the international context, especially the question of war with Spain, and argued that the crown acted to prevent a war that Coligny was promoting. Jean-Louis Bourgeon argued that the Guise family and the city of Paris, supported by Spain and the papacy, forced the crown's hand, and that the king was effectively compelled to authorise what was already under way. Crouzet presented the decision as the product of the king's conviction that he was acting as an instrument of divine justice. Arlette Jouanna, in La Saint-Barthélemy: les mystères d'un crime d'État, published in 2007, argued that the killing of the leaders was a decision of state taken to preserve the peace, which then escaped the crown's control.

These interpretations agree that the massacre resulted from a combination of political decision and popular religious violence, but they differ in their assessment of the weight of each. The evidence for the decisions of 23 August comes largely from later accounts written by participants with reasons to present their own roles favourably, and certainty may not be attainable.

XVII. Charles IX after the Massacre

Charles IX was twenty-two years old at the time of the massacre. He had been personally attached to Coligny, and the decision of 23 August seems to have caused him great distress. In the following months he issued declarations that both justified the killings as the suppression of a conspiracy and forbade further violence. He ordered that Protestants should not be molested provided they lived quietly, while at the same time prohibiting Protestant worship. Many Protestants abjured their faith under pressure in the autumn of 1572, and royal officials collected formal abjurations in many towns.

The king's health, which had never been strong, declined rapidly, and he died of tuberculosis on 30 May 1574, at the age of twenty-three. Protestant writers reported that he suffered visions of the massacre on his deathbed, a story that cannot be verified. He was succeeded by his brother, the Duke of Anjou, who had been elected king of Poland in 1573 and who returned to France to reign as Henry III. The election of Anjou in Poland had required assurances of religious toleration for Polish Protestants, given by the French envoys at a time when the memory of the massacre was fresh, and the Warsaw Confederation of 1573, which guaranteed peace among the religious groups of the Polish nobility, was concluded in part in reaction to the events in France.

XVIII. Consequences

The massacre did not destroy French Protestantism, but it changed its character. The Huguenots became a minority concentrated in the south and west, organised politically and militarily, and increasingly distrustful of the crown. The wars continued until 1598, when Henry of Navarre, who had become king as Henry IV in 1589 and had converted to Catholicism in 1593, issued the Edict of Nantes, granting the Huguenots freedom of conscience, limited freedom of worship, civil rights and security towns.

The edict was revoked by Louis XIV in 1685, leading to a large emigration of Huguenots to the Netherlands, England, Prussia, Switzerland and North America, and to the revolt of the Camisards in the Cévennes in 1702–04, described on the site's page on the War of the Camisards. Toleration for French Protestants was restored by the Edict of Versailles in 1787, two centuries after the massacre.

The massacre also had consequences for the study and printing of Scripture in France. Several Protestant printers and scholars left Paris and Lyon for Geneva, Basel and other Reformed cities, continuing a movement that had begun with Robert Estienne's departure for Geneva in 1550. The production of Protestant Bibles, Psalters and theological works in French was thereafter concentrated outside the kingdom, while Catholic scholarship within France continued through the work of the Sorbonne, the Jesuit colleges and, later, the scholars of the Paris Polyglot of 1645.

For summaries of the events and persons, readers may consult the Grokipedia entries on the St Bartholomew's Day massacre, Gaspard II de Coligny and Catherine de' Medici.

XIX. Chronology

In 1559 the first national synod of the Reformed churches met in Paris, and Henry II died. In 1561 the Colloquy of Poissy was held. On 1 March 1562 the massacre of Vassy began the first war. In August 1570 the Peace of Saint-Germain was concluded. In June 1572 Jeanne d'Albret died. On 18 August 1572 Henry of Navarre and Marguerite de Valois were married. On 22 August Coligny was wounded. On 23 August the decision was taken at the Louvre. On 24 August Coligny was killed and the massacre began in Paris. On 26 August the king declared his responsibility before the Parlement.

From late August to early October 1572 massacres took place in the provinces. In September Gregory XIII celebrated the news in Rome. From November 1572 to July 1573 La Rochelle was besieged. In 1573 Hotman's Francogallia was published, and in 1574 Beza's Du droit des magistrats. In May 1574 Charles IX died. In 1576 the Peace of Monsieur was concluded, and in 1579 the Vindiciae contra tyrannos was published. In 1598 the Edict of Nantes was issued.

XX. Bibliography

The following studies, editions and reference works underlie this account.