On the night of August 23 to 24, 1572, in Paris, the King's Council took a dramatic decision:Catherine de Medici, queen mother, supported by the Guise party and by the brother of King Henri d'Anjou, leader of the Catholics, convinces the easily influenced Charles IX, 22, that the leaders of the Huguenot party must be exterminated.
The next day, St. Bartholomew's Day - martyr flayed alive and patron saint of butchers - a terrible massacre begins, which soon reaches the province and lasts for four days.
The occasion:the failed attack on Coligny
The reason for Saint-Barthélemy is the old conflict which opposes, in France as in the rest of Europe, the Christians who have remained faithful to the Pope to those who have taken the side of the Reformation:the Catholics against the "Huguenots", as the Protestants of France were called in 1572.
Protestantism entered France in the form of Calvinism. The first Reformed Churches were formed in 1559. But, on this date, the monarchy had long since made its choice:Protestantism, since the affair of the Placards in 1534, was fought by François 1er (1515-1547) then above all by Henri II (1547-1559).
As the persecutions were not enough to stem the progress of the Reformation, the religious conflict led to a civil conflict:from 1562, France sank into the Wars of Religion.
The weakening of royal power after the reign of Henry II further encouraged this unleashing of hatred between the citizens:Henry's immediate successor, Francis II (1559-1560), was only fifteen years old when he ascended on the throne, and he dies after a few months of reign. His brother Charles IX (1560-1574) succeeded him:but he was also only a child (he was born in 1550), and the real power was exercised by the regent, the queen mother Catherine de Medici.
But this religious conflict was exasperated, at the beginning of the 1570s, by the internal and external situation of the kingdom:the question of the war that should or should not be waged against Spain, a Catholic power but a rival of France, and to the taken, then, with the revolt of the Protestant Netherlands; and that of the sharing of tendencies within the royal family, between the king's mother, won over to Catholics, and Charles IX, dominated since 1570 by a Protestant, Admiral Gaspard de Coligny. What erupted the crisis was, on August 22, a failed assassination attempt on the Admiral:at 11 o'clock in the morning, that day, in Paris, when Coligny returned alone, walking, from the game in the palm where he went to watch the king play, he bends down to retie the undone ribbon of his shoe; bullets whistle above his head; they were taken from the home of a Catholic, a close supporter of the Guises. The failed attack threatens to put an end to the civil peace that has reigned since 1570 - since the coming to power of Coligny and since the Treaty of Saint-Germain, which, for the first time, granted Protestants freedom of conscience, worship and preaching. The Catholics expect a violent revolt:they decide to take the lead.
The massacre
And this is how, on the night of the 23rd to the 24th, a list was drawn up which enumerated the future convicts of Saint-Barthélemy:they were all the Huguenot leaders, gathered in Paris for the wedding of one of them, Henri de Navarre, future Henri IV, with Marguerite de Valois, sister of Charles IX. The king, to give his consent, poses only one condition:that two princes of the blood, Henri de Navarre, who has therefore become his brother-in-law, and Henri de Condé be spared.
At dawn on the 24th, the great purge begins. The district of Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois, where the Protestant gentlemen lived, was surrounded by the troops of Duke Henri de Guise:Coligny was killed with more than 200 men. The movement, once launched, does not stop at the chiefs:on discovery of the corpses, a murderous madness pushes the Parisian people to throw themselves against all the Protestants. Wearing white armbands, individuals who claim to act in the name of the true faith, loot and kill without mercy, sometimes amputating and castrating the corpses as symbolic punishment. Henri de Navarre and Condé must abjure to save their lives. The carnage lasted three days and extended into the provinces, where, from the 25th, envoys had been dispatched with precise instructions. From one city to another, the order of the massacre is or is not followed:in Meaux, 200 Huguenots are executed; in Lyons, 700; in Bourges and Orleans, the victims also number in the hundreds. But entire regions remain safe from violence:thus Picardy, Auvergne, Limousin or Périgord. In Paris, the murderous madness ceased on August 28, by order of the king; but, in the provinces, the murders continue, sporadically, until the first days of October.
A good operation for Catholics
The event, which horrifies us today, aroused very little reaction, in this era accustomed to violence. The German princes and the Swiss cantons expressed their consternation, but the court of Madrid welcomed the event, which the pope celebrated with a Te Deum and by striking a commemorative medal. From the point of view of the French Crown, the murder of the Protestants proved beneficial:as that was the goal, the Huguenot party emerged decapitated from the massacre. Henri d'Anjou himself (Henri III), who had, with the queen mother, inspired the carnage, retired a few months later from the affairs of France, was elected king of Poland, but soon after returned to power, succeeding on the throne to his brother Charles, who died in 1574. The revenge of the Protestants was not to intervene until later, in 1589, with the accession of Henry IV, that is to say Henry of Navarre:still the former leader of the French Protestants had to abjure definitively Protestantism to ascend the throne of France.
The Wars of Religion
The Wars of Religion bloodied France from 1562 to 1598, i.e. for thirty-six years. Saint-Barthélemy is one of the most dramatically significant episodes, but, throughout the conflict, violence, attacks, assassinations and massacres have not ceased, on one side or the other.
The first Wars of Religion (1562-1574)
It was the massacre of Protestants in Wassy on March 1, 1562 that triggered the first war of religion. That day, having learned that some 500 Protestants were celebrating their worship in a barn near the town of Wassy, Duke François de Guise went to the barn, where his men, responding to the stone throwing of the Huguenots with arquebus, kill 23 Protestants and wound a hundred. The event caused the Protestants to take up arms, and, from then on, the war raged on, interrupted by more or less important but always provisional truces:the years 1570-1572 constituted one of these truces, prelude to the great massacre of Saint Barthélemy.
The reign of Henry III (1574-1589)
The struggle continues after the death of Charles IX; but the king wavers between the two parties. The concessions he granted to the Protestants led the Catholics to group together in a League. The king, to annihilate this League, had its leader, Henri de Guise, assassinated in December 1588:he thus provoked the uprising in Paris, entirely controlled by the League. It was while trying to reconquer his capital that he was stabbed by a fanatical monk, Jacques Clément (August 10, 1589).
The reconquest of the kingdom by Henry IV (1589-1598)
The sons of Henry III having died without an heir, Henry of Navarre succeeded Henry III. To be consecrated, he must agree to abjure Protestantism on July 25, 1593, and he then negotiates with the Leaguers to submit the kingdom to his authority. Religious peace was definitively restored by the Edict of Nantes (April 13, 1598), which authorized Protestant worship; but the king was assassinated by Ravaillac, a madman, perhaps manipulated by fanatical Catholics, on May 14, 1610.