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Matthew Monk Prof. R. LaMance FRE 123-001 Part III-Report on a Moment in French History 3 December 2013 The Saint Bartholomews Day Massacre The Reformation of the early sixteenth century was not merely confined to Luthers Germany, but rather spread its ideas of religious reform across Europe, first in the Germanspeaking lands or Northern Europe, Scandinavia, England, and finally Switzerland and France. The Swiss and French Protestants, as they would come to be called, followed the teachings of a theologian named John Calvin. Calvin preached a faith alone doctrine as well as the new idea of Predestination, a belief that God knew a persons place in the afterlife before their birth. Calvinists believed that they were the Select living on Earth, and that they were to demonstrate this status to others by living hard-working, modest, and moral lives. Calvins teachings appealed to the growing middle-class of Frances towns and cities and even to some important members of the nobility (Oberhofer). Religious disagreement led to religious wars throughout Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In France, a series of religious wars pitted cousin against cousin ultimately resulting in the end of the Valois dynasty and the expulsion and attempted extermination of the French Calvinists, known as Huguenots, on the 24th of August 1572 (Goyau). This event has forever been labeled The Saint Bartholomews Day Massacre. At this time the young and rather impressionable Charles IX and his mother, queen mother Catherine de Medici ruled France. Admiral Coligny led the Huguenot faction in France with the support of the Henri, king of Navarre and the prince of Cond. The duke of

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Guise headed up the Catholic faction. For more than a decade three separate religious conflicts had erupted in France driving the two camps further and further apart. The young king and his mother vacillated from side to side in an attempt to keep some kind of tenuous peace (Goyau, Oberhofer). The royal court eventually struck a truce with the Huguenots in 1570 at St. Germain, where intermarriage between the Protestant Henri of Navarre and the Catholic princess Margaret of Valois was arranged. The marriage finally took place on the 18th of August 1571, just days before the massacre. Historians believe Admiral Coligny forced the royal families hand based on his desire to involve France in the struggle to liberate the Protestant Low Countries from Spanish, and therefore Catholic, control (Goyau). Catherine used her influence to arrange an assassination attempt on Coligny on the 22nd that was ultimately unsuccessful. She was, however, able to persuade the king to agree to a purge of the Protestants. Charles was reported to have finally said, I consent; but (kill) all the Huguenots in Paris as well in order that there remain not one to reproach me afterwards (Oberhofer). President of the Parlement of Paris, De Thou wrote a contemporary account of the Massacre and declared that it was the queen mother who issued the order for Guise to exterminate all the Protestants. Guise mustered Catholic Swiss mercenaries and his own French troops and made an immediate assault on the home of Admiral Coligny, who was not so lucky this time. According to De Thou, Coligny was stabbed through the abdomen and mouth, his head cut off, his body defiled in numerous ways, and then burnt without allowing it to be consumed by the flames. Colignys brutal murder was but the first of thousands (De Thou). For two days, citizens and troops hunted down and murdered Protestant families. Henri of Navarre and his new bride barely escaped with their lives. Estimates of the death

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toll in the city of Paris were between one and four thousand, but when news of the Massacre spread outside the city, other purges ensued across the country. The countrywide death toll has been harder to calculate, but scholars have estimated it to be between thirty and one hundred thousand. Many Huguenots fled France for England and later to the British Colonies in the New World. Religious conflict would continue to haunt the Valois court. Charles IX died soon after the Massacre, and his younger brother Henri III assumed the throne, only to be murdered by a zealous monk. The Valois dynasty ended with Henri III, and passed to his cousin Henri of Navarre, the same Huguenot who had barely survived the Massacre years before. Henri converted to Catholicism, assumed the title Henri IV, and founded the Bourbon dynasty, which would last until the French Revolution. The religious wars in France were at an end (Oberhofer). The Saint Bartholomews Day Massacre has been a contentious issue among historians for centuries. Who ordered the attack, was there papal involvement, was the marriage between Navarre and Valois a plot, and was Guise really the brains behind the operation? Scholars have posed all these questions, but they have never quite been able to pin down any conclusive answers. What can be known for sure is that the Massacre represented the pinnacle of religious violence in France during those religious wars that plagued Europe during Early Modern history. The Massacre is symbolic in French history because it marked the beginning of the end for the Valois dynasty as well as the establishment of France as a singularly Catholic nation. The last vestiges of medieval France were shaken away, and a new Bourbon France stood ready to dominate Enlightenment Europe.

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Works Cited From De Thou, Histoire des choses arrivees de son temps, (Paris, 1659), 658 sqq, in Robinson, 2 vols. (Boston: Ginn, 1906), 2:180-183. Scanned by Brian Cheek, Hanover College, November 12, 1995. Edited by Paul Halsall. Internet Modern History Sourcebook. Fordham University. New York City. 1998. Online. 27 November 2013. <http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1572stbarts.asp>. Goyau, Georges. "Saint Bartholomew's Day." The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 13. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1912. 29 Nov. 2013. <http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/13333b.htm>. Oberhofer, Tom. Paris and the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre: August 24, 1572. Eckerd College. St. Petersburg, Florida. 2010-2013. Online. <http://home.eckerd.edu/~oberhot/paris-siege-stbarth.htm>. J.H.