Michon, Heather. "Holding a lit de justice, Charles declared that he had ordered the massacre in order to thwart a Huguenot plot against the royal family. d. Ausg. Swiss Guards pulled him from his sickbed and slashed at him with axes before throwing his dead body out the window into the courtyard below. On the evening of 23 August, Catherine went to see the king to discuss the crisis. The massacre killed more than 10,000 people over a period of two months in the fall of 1572. The massacre caused a "major international crisis". On 22 August, an attempt was made on Coligny's life as he made his way back to his house from the Louvre. At this time more than a third of the French population had adopted the Protestant faith. Persecution continues periodically until Edict of Nantes (1598) gives Huguenots religious freedom (until 1685). That morning, Coligny attended a meeting of the royal council at the Louvre and left with his bodyguards at around 11 am. The story was also taken up in 1772 by Louis-Sébastien Mercier in his play Jean Hennuyer, Bishop of Lizieux, unperformed until the French Revolution. St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre—thousands of Huguenots murdered (1572). But the killing didn’t stop there. [65] In fact there is little trace of Machiavelli in French writings before the massacre, and not very much after, until Gentillet's own book, but this concept was seized upon by many contemporaries, and played a crucial part in setting the long-lasting popular concept of Machiavellianism. Coligny was among the first to die. St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre: Causes, Events, Impact. His head was cut off and taken to the Louvre to prove the deed was done. Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre . [54], The massacre "spawned a pullulating mass of polemical literature, bubbling with theories, prejudices and phobias". All the best people took a hand in it, the King and the Queen Mother included."[92]. [89], Joseph Chénier's play Charles IX was a huge success during the French Revolution, drawing strongly anti-monarchical and anti-religious lessons from the massacre. Catholic Parisians, possibly urged on by militant priests, soon joined in the slaughter. [78] In the previous ten years there had already been three outbreaks of civil war, and attempts by Protestant nobles to seize power in France. With these words, the most popular preacher in Paris legitimised in advance the events of St. Bartholomew's Day". I am convinced that only forgiveness, offered and received, leads little by little to a fruitful dialogue, which will in turn ensure a fully Christian reconciliation. The Peace of Saint Germain, signed August 1570, granted Huguenots control of four fortified cities across France and allowed them to once again hold office. On August 20, he left the capital and retired to Chantilly. (2020, August 27). [18] Other historians are reluctant to speculate on the composition or size of the group leaders targeted at this point, beyond the few obvious heads. [23], Although Charles had dispatched orders to his provincial governors on August 24 to prevent violence and maintain the terms of the 1570 edict,[24] from August to October, similar massacres of Huguenots took place in a total of twelve other cities: Toulouse, Bordeaux, Lyon, Bourges, Rouen,[25] 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. 75). They forced the hand of a hesitant and weak-willed king in the decision of that particular execution. [79] Some blame the complete esteem with which the sovereign's office was held, justified by prominent French Roman Catholic theologians, and that the special powers of French Kings "...were accompanied by explicit responsibilities, the foremost of which was combating heresy". The massacre of Saint Bartholomew’s Day marked the resumption of religious civil war in France. Author. This peace, however, was precarious since the more intransigent Catholics refused to accept it. At the low end are figures of about 2,000 in Paris[36] and 3,000 in the provinces, the latter figure an estimate by Philip Benedict in 1978. Adding to the pressure, Catherine spent hours alone with her son, urging him to order a strike against the Huguenots. In Spain, King Philip II was said to have laughed for one of the only times in memory upon hearing the news. A 1966 serial in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who entitled The Massacre of St Bartholomew's Eve is set during the events leading up to the Paris massacre. It was the result of political intrigue, sexual jealousy, human barbarism and … Chains were used to block streets so that Protestants could not escape from their houses. Many Protestants were nobles or bourgeois and Frieda adds that "a number of bourgeois Catholic Parisians had suffered the same fate as the Protestants; many financial debts were wiped clean with the death of creditors and moneylenders that night". [46], Pope Gregory XIII also commissioned the artist Giorgio Vasari to paint three frescos in the Sala Regia depicting the wounding of Coligny, his death, and Charles IX before Parliament, matching those commemorating the defeat of the Turks at the Battle of Lepanto (1571). According to Reuters and the Associated Press, at a late-night vigil, with the hundreds of thousands of young people who were in Paris for the celebrations, he made the following comments: "On the eve of Aug. 24, we cannot forget the sad massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day, an event of very obscure causes in the political and religious history of France. Den Haag 1974) Nicola M. Sutherland: The Massacre of St Bartholomew and the European Conflict 1559–1572. Kluwer, Amsterdam 2002, ISBN 90-247-1652-7. 78-79; Calvin's book was "Praelectiones in librum prophetiarum Danielis", Geneva and, Garrisson, pp. [7] The rise in food prices and the luxury displayed on the occasion of the royal wedding increased tensions among the common people. Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre (French religious war) August 24, 1572, was the date of the infamous St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in France. Body counts relating to other payments are computed from this. The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1913 was still ready to endorse a version of this view, describing the massacres as "an entirely political act committed in the name of the immoral principles of Machiavellianism" and blaming "the pagan theories of a certain raison d'état according to which the end justified the means". Soldiers “all went with their men from house to house, wherever they thought they might find Huguenots, breaking down the doors, then cruelling massacring those they encountered, without regard to sex or age,” wrote the Protestant minister Simon Goulart, who took the testimony of survivors not long after the attack. He was shot from an upstairs window, and seriously wounded. It seems probable that 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. ), p. 95, citing Benedict (2004), pp. The Elizabethan dramatist Christopher Marlowe knew the story well from the Huguenot literature translated into English, and probably from French refugees who had sought refuge in his native Canterbury. But kill them all! Inchbald kept the historical setting, but The Massacre, completed by February 1792, also reflected events in the recent French Revolution, though not the September Massacres of 1792, which coincided with its printing. The wound to his arm was not mortal, but the admiral was bedridden and in severe pain. Many of the most wealthy and prominent Huguenots had gathered in largely Catholic Paris to attend the wedding. Ostara publications. “Carts piled high with the dead bodies of noble ladies, women, girls, men, and boys were brought down and emptied into the river, which was covered with dead bodies and ran red with blood,” Goulart reported. It was remade in 1994 as La Reine Margot (later as Queen Margot, and subtitled, in English-language markets), starring Isabelle Adjani. Lasting several weeks, the massacre expanded outward to other urban centres and the countryside. It is difficult today to determine the exact chronology of events and to know the moment the killing began. Those who remained were increasingly radicalized. The man, true to his beliefs, gently refuses her. Neither faith had a monopoly on cruelty and misguided fervour". On his way back to his rooms on the Rue de Bethisy, an assassin jumped out of an alley and shot Coligny in the arm. The common people began to hunt Protestants throughout the city, including women and children. ThoughtCo. 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. [31], 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. Most historians believe around 3,000 were killed in Paris, and perhaps 10,000 nationwide. Ken Follett's 2017 historical fiction novel A Column of Fire uses this event. [86], One historian puts forward an analysis of the massacre in terms of social anthropology - the religious historian Bruce Lincoln. Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, a nobleman who led Huguenot troops in the late war, became friendly with Charles IX in the years following the Peace of Saint Germain, much to the dismay of the King’s formidable mother Catherine de Medici and the anti-Huguenot faction lead by the powerful Guise family. This serial is missing from the BBC archives and survives only in audio form. However, in a more recent work than his history of the period, Holt concludes: "The ringleaders of the conspiracy appear to have been a group of four men: Henry, duke of Anjou; The Parisian St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre resulted 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. [29] 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. It’s not clear when Catherine de Medici and the Guises determined Coligny needed to be removed, but by the morning of August 22, there was a plan in place. Beside this, the rivalries between the leading families re-emerged. From late August to October, Catholics rose up and launched massacres against Huguenots in Toulouse, Bordeaux, Lyon, Bourges, Rouen, Orléans, Mieux, Angers, La Charité, Saumur, Gaillac, and Troyes. 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. For the, An unacceptable peace and an unacceptable marriage, The attempted assassination of Admiral de Coligny, Holt (2005), pp. This traditional interpretation has been largely abandoned by modern historians including, among others, Janine Garrisson. [43], Among the slain were the philosopher Petrus Ramus, and in Lyon the composer Claude Goudimel. This mass slaughter went on for three days and stopped only when most of the Huguenots in the city were exterminated. Many tried to escape, only to find the city’s gates closed against them. [50] On the other hand, the Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian II, King Charles's father-in-law, was sickened, describing the massacre as a "shameful bloodbath". [91] Millais was inspired to create the painting after seeing Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots. Il apparaît à ceux-ci comme relativement banal dans l'atmosphère violente de l'époque. The Fourth War of Religion broke out in November 1572 and ended the following summer in the Edict of Boulogne. [64] Gentillet held, quite wrongly according to Sydney Anglo, that Machiavelli's "books [were] held most dear and precious by our Italian and Italionized courtiers" (in the words of his first English translation), and so (in Anglo's paraphrase) "at the root of France's present degradation, which has culminated not only in the St Bartholemew massacre but the glee of its perverted admirers". [55] Many Catholic authors were exultant in their praise of the king for his bold and decisive action (after regretfully abandoning a policy of meeting Huguenot demands as far as he could) against the supposed Huguenot coup, whose details were now fleshed out in officially sponsored works, though the larger mob massacres were somewhat deprecated: "[one] must excuse the people's fury moved by a laudable zeal which is difficult to restrain once it has been stirred up". Heliocentrism: Galileo's Battle With the Church. At a royal council meeting the next day, the members were absorbed with fear that the Huguenots within the city would launch a retaliatory attack. As the Cambridge Modern History points out about the appalling Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day in 1572 (which event Harari cites on p241) – the Paris mob would as soon kill Catholics as Protestants – and did. There were also rumors of a 4000-strong Huguenot army just outside the walls. [37] Other estimates are about 10,000 in total,[38] with about 3,000 in Paris[39] and 7,000 in the provinces. [22] According to some interpretations, the survival of these Huguenots was a key point in Catherine's overall scheme, to prevent the House of Guise from becoming too powerful. [4] The royal marriage was arranged for 18 August 1572. With Isabelle Adjani, Daniel Auteuil, Jean-Hugues Anglade, Vincent Perez. 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. He wrote in part, "St. Bartholomew's was unquestionably the finest thing of the kind ever devised and accomplished in the world. Anjou's supposed account was the source of the quotation attributed to Charles IX: "Well then, so be it! [85] He concludes that the historical importance of the Massacre "lies not so much in the appalling tragedies involved as their demonstration of the power of sectarian passion to break down the barriers of civilisation, community and accepted morality". [34] Accurate figures for casualties have never been compiled,[35] and even in writings by modern historians there is a considerable range, though the more specialised the historian, the lower they tend to be. ... Christians did things which the Gospel condemns. [51] Moderate French Catholics also began to wonder whether religious uniformity was worth the price of such bloodshed and the ranks of the Politiques began to swell. 1568 Protestant Netherlands revolts against Catholic Spain; independence will be acknowledged by Spain in 1648. Under the new treaty, Huguenots were given amnesty for past acts and were granted freedom of belief. 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. However unplanned it may have been, Catholics across Europe viewed the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre as a great victory for the Church. [12] Thus, the massacre "marked the beginning of a new form of French Protestantism: one that was openly at war with the crown. He describes how the religious divide, which gave the Huguenots different patterns of dress, eating and pastimes, as well as the obvious differences of religion and (very often) class, had become a social schism or cleavage. "[23] A jubilee celebration, including a procession, was then held, while the killings continued in parts of the city. Ordinary lay Catholics were involved in the mass killings; they believed they were executing the wishes of the king and of God. Earlier Huguenot rage at Nimes (in 1567) led to... the massacre of a hundred or so Catholics, mostly priests and prominent laymen, at the hands of their Protestant neighbours. As news of the killings in Paris spread across France, so did the violence. Koenigsberger (who until his retirement in 1984 was Professor of History at King's College, University of London) wrote that the Massacre was deeply disturbing because "it was Christians massacring other Christians who were not foreign enemies but their neighbours with which they and their forebears had lived in a Christian community, and under the same ruler, for a thousand years". 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. Many victims were also thrown into the Seine, invoking the purification by water of Catholic baptism". This play was translated into English, with some adaptations, as The Massacre by the actress and playwright Elizabeth Inchbald in 1792. It depicts the massacre as having been instigated by Catherine de' Medici for both religious and political reasons, and authorised by a weak-willed and easily influenced Charles IX.[93]. St. Helena and The Legend of The True Cross. A large number of Huguenot survivors likely converted back to Catholicism for their own protection. History records three possible candidates: The attempted assassination of Coligny triggered the crisis that led to the massacre. Another novel depicting this massacre is Queen Jezebel, by Jean Plaidy (1953). The impending marriage led to the gathering of a large number of well-born Protestants in Paris. "[81], However Raymond Mentzer points out that Protestants "could be as bloodthirsty as Catholics. Pope Gregory XIII himself refused to receive Charles de Maurevert, said to be the killer of Coligny, on the ground that he was a murderer.[48]. Follett completely clears King Charles IX and his mother Catherine of any complicity and depicts them as sincere proponents of religious toleration, caught by surprise and horrified by the events; he places the entire responsibility on the Guise Family, following the "Machiavellian" view of the massacre and depicting it as a complicated Guise conspiracy, meticulously planned in advance and implemented in full detail.

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