St. Bartholomew's Day massacre facts for kids
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 Queen Catherine de' Medici, the mother of King Charles IX, the massacre started a few days after the marriage on 18 August of the king's sister Margaret to the Protestant King Henry III of Navarre. Many of the wealthiest and most prominent Huguenots had gathered in largely Catholic Paris to attend the wedding.
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. King Charles IX ordered the killing of a group of Huguenot leaders, including Coligny, and the slaughter spread throughout Paris. Lasting several weeks in all, the massacre expanded outward to the countryside and other urban centres. Modern estimates for the number of dead across France vary widely, from 5,000 to 30,000.
The massacre 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 many rank-and-file members subsequently converted. Those who remained became increasingly radicalized. Though by no means unique, the bloodletting "was the worst of the century's religious massacres". Throughout Europe, it "printed on Protestant minds the indelible conviction that Catholicism was a bloody and treacherous religion".
Contents
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 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.
Unacceptable peace and marriage
The Peace of Saint-Germain put an end to three years of civil war between Catholics and Protestants. This peace, however, was precarious since the more intransigent Catholics refused to accept it. The strongly Catholic Guise family was 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 practical in their support of peace and Coligny, as they were conscious of the kingdom's financial difficulties and the Huguenots' strong defensive position: 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 Henry of Navarre (the future King Henry IV), son of the Huguenot leader Queen Jeanne d'Albret. 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 Huguenot policy as well.
Tension in Paris
The impending marriage led to the gathering of a large number of well-born Protestants in Paris, 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 to a Protestant. The Parlement's opposition and the court's absence from the wedding led to increased political tension.
Compounding this bad feeling was the fact that the harvests had been poor and taxes had risen. 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. In the massacres of August, the relatives of the Gastines family were among the first to be killed by the mob.
The court itself was extremely divided. Catherine had not obtained 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. On August 20, he left the capital and retired to Chantilly.
Shift in Huguenot thought
In the years preceding the massacre, Huguenot political rhetoric had for the first time taken a tone against not just the policies of a particular monarch of France, but monarchy in general. In part this was led by an apparent change in stance by John Calvin in his Readings on the Prophet Daniel, a book of 1561, in which he had argued that when kings disobey God, they "automatically abdicate their worldly power" – a change from his views in earlier works that even ungodly kings should be obeyed. This change was soon picked up by Huguenot writers, who began to expand on Calvin and promote the idea of the sovereignty of the people, ideas to which Catholic writers and preachers responded fiercely.
Nevertheless, it was only in the aftermath of the massacre that anti-monarchical ideas found widespread support from Huguenots, among the "Monarchomachs" and others. "Huguenot writers, who had previously, for the most part, paraded their loyalty to the Crown, now called for the deposition or assassination of a Godless king who had either authorised or permitted the slaughter". Thus, the massacre "marked the beginning of a new form of French Protestantism: one that was openly at war with the crown. This was much more than a war against the policies of the crown, as in the first three civil wars; it was a campaign against the very existence of the Gallican monarchy itself".
Huguenot intervention in the Netherlands
Tensions were further raised when in May 1572 the news reached Paris that a French Huguenot army under Louis of Nassau had crossed from France to the Netherlandish province of Hainaut and captured the Catholic strongholds of Mons and Valenciennes (now in Belgium and France, respectively). Louis governed the Principality of Orange around Avignon in southern France for his brother William the Silent, who was leading the Dutch Revolt against the Spanish. This intervention threatened to involve France in that war; many Catholics believed that Coligny had again persuaded the king to intervene on the side of the Dutch, as he had managed to do the previous October, before Catherine had got the decision reversed.
Attempted assassination of Admiral de Coligny
After the wedding of Catholic Marguerite de Valois and Huguenot Henry de Navarre on August 18 of 1572, Coligny and the leading Huguenots remained in Paris to discuss some outstanding grievances about the Peace of St. Germain with the king. An attempt was made on Coligny's life a few days later on August 22 as he made his way back to his house from the Louvre. He was shot from an upstairs window, and seriously wounded. The would-be assassin, most likely Charles de Louviers, Lord of Maurevert(c. 1505–1583), escaped in the ensuing confusion. Other theories about who was ultimately responsible for the attack centre on three candidates:
- The Guises: the Cardinal of Lorraine (who was in Rome at the time), and his nephews, the Dukes of Guise and Aumale, are the most likely suspects. The leaders of the Catholic party, they wanted to avenge the death of the two dukes' father Francis, Duke of Guise, whose assassination ten years earlier they believed to have been ordered by Coligny. The shot aimed at Admiral de Coligny came from a house belonging to the Guises.
- The Duke of Alba: he governed the Netherlands on behalf of Philip II. Coligny planned to lead a campaign in the Netherlands to participate in the Dutch Revolt to free the region from Spanish control. During the summer, Coligny had secretly dispatched a number of troops to help the Protestants in Mons, who were now besieged by the Duke of Alba. So Admiral de Coligny was a real threat to the latter.
- Catherine de' Medici: according to tradition, the Queen Mother had been worried that the king was increasingly becoming dominated by Coligny. Amongst other things, Catherine reportedly feared that Coligny's influence would drag France into a war with Spain over the Netherlands.
Coligny was killed several days later, falling a victim of the massacre.
Massacres
Death toll
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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 Maximilien de Béthune, who himself barely escaped death. Accurate figures for casualties have never been compiled, 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 and 3,000 in the provinces, the latter figure an estimate by Philip Benedict in 1978. Other estimates are about 10,000 in total, with about 3,000 in Paris and 7,000 in the provinces. At the higher end are total figures of up to 20,000, or 30,000 in total, from "a contemporary, non-partisan guesstimate" quoted by the historians Felipe Fernández-Armesto and D. Wilson.
Among the slain were the philosopher Petrus Ramus, and in Lyon the composer Claude Goudimel.
See also
- Michelade, a massacre of Catholics by Protestants in Nîmes in 1567
- Sack of Magdeburg in 1631
- Grenoble's Saint-Bartholomew's Day, a massacre during World War II that was named after the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre
