FILED · 1572 · CATHOLIC · HISTORICAL

The St Bartholomew's Day Massacre

Beginning before dawn on 24 August 1572, an organised killing of French Huguenot Protestants by Catholic mobs and royal troops in Paris spread over six weeks to provincial cities, killing an estimated 5,000 to 30,000. Pope Gregory XIII struck a commemorative medal of celebration.

Catholic · Reformed · Reformation · Historical violence

What happened

On the night of 23–24 August 1572 — the eve of the feast of Saint Bartholomew — a coordinated attack began in Paris on the leading Huguenot (French Calvinist) nobles assembled in the city for the wedding of Marguerite de Valois (Catholic, sister of King Charles IX) to Henri de Navarre (Huguenot, future King Henri IV). The wedding had been negotiated as a sealing-instrument for the Peace of Saint-Germain-en-Laye (1570), which had ended the third of the French Wars of Religion.

The initial target was the leadership of the Huguenot party. Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, the leading Huguenot political figure, had survived an assassination attempt on 22 August (carried out, according to the documentary consensus, on the instruction of the Guise faction); on the night of 23–24 August, Coligny was assassinated in his quarters in Paris by a group of soldiers led by the Duke of Guise. Within hours the killing spread beyond the targeted leadership to the general Huguenot population of Paris.

Over the following days the killings were repeated in approximately a dozen French provincial cities — Bordeaux, Bourges, La Charité, Lyon, Meaux, Orléans, Rouen, Toulouse, and others — through late August and into early October 1572. The cumulative death toll is contested in the historical record; modern scholarship places the range at approximately 5,000 to 30,000 victims, with most working historians settling around 10,000.

Royal and papal response

The role of King Charles IX and his mother Catherine de' Medici in authorising the initial killings has been extensively debated for four and a half centuries. The contemporary documentary evidence — letters of Coligny, of the Florentine ambassadors, of the papal nuncio Antonio Maria Salviati — supports the conclusion that the initial assassination of Coligny was authorised by the king's council on 23 August, but that the rapid expansion to general massacre was not centrally coordinated. The king publicly assumed responsibility for the killings in a lit-de-justice of 26 August.

The papal response is documented and unambiguous. Pope Gregory XIII, on receiving news of the massacre, ordered a Te Deum sung in Rome in thanksgiving. He commissioned three frescoes by Giorgio Vasari in the Sala Regia of the Vatican depicting the killings: the assassination of Coligny, the king and his mother in council, and the slaughter in the streets of Paris. The frescoes survive in situ. The pope also struck a commemorative medal (1572) bearing the legend Ugonottorum strages ("Slaughter of the Huguenots") on the reverse, with an image of an angel bearing a cross and sword over fallen bodies. Surviving examples are held in major numismatic collections.

Significance

The St Bartholomew's Day Massacre is the largest single episode of religiously-motivated killing in early modern French history and the second-largest in the European Wars of Religion (after the cumulative casualties of the Thirty Years' War, 1618–1648, which were of mixed religious and dynastic motivation). The papal commemorative response — the Vasari frescoes, the Ugonottorum strages medal, the celebratory Te Deum — is an unusually clean piece of primary-document evidence on the institutional Catholic response, since it is positive and inscribed rather than reluctant or implicit.

The massacre was a structural turning point in the French Wars of Religion: it eliminated most of the senior Huguenot political leadership, broke the Huguenot military position in the central and northern provinces, and accelerated the consolidation of the Huguenot remnant in the fortified southern cities (La Rochelle, Montauban, Nîmes). The eventual political resolution, the Edict of Nantes (1598) under Henri IV — the same bridegroom of 1572, by then converted to Catholicism — was the first major early-modern legal grant of conditional religious tolerance in Europe; it was revoked by Louis XIV in 1685.

Sources

  • Sébastien Bontemps and contemporary Florentine ambassadorial correspondence, August–October 1572 (substantially collected in Calendar of State Papers, Foreign Series, of the Reign of Elizabeth, vol. X).
  • Tocsin contre les massacreurs and similar contemporary Huguenot pamphlet literature, 1572–1574.
  • Giorgio Vasari, three frescoes in the Sala Regia, Apostolic Palace, Vatican City — primary commemorative object.
  • Papal medal Ugonottorum strages, 1572, examples in the British Museum, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Smithsonian.
  • Barbara B. Diefendorf, Beneath the Cross: Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth-Century Paris (Oxford University Press, 1991).
  • Robert M. Kingdon, Myths about the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacres, 1572–1576 (Harvard University Press, 1988).
  • N. M. Sutherland, The Massacre of St Bartholomew and the European Conflict, 1559–1572 (Macmillan, 1973).
  • Arlette Jouanna, La Saint-Barthélemy. Les mystères d'un crime d'État (Gallimard, 2007); English trans. Joseph Bergin as The Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre: The Mysteries of a Crime of State (Manchester University Press, 2013).