Remembering the St. Bartholomew Day Martyrs

A contemporary portrait of the St. Bartholomew Day Massacre

It was on this date in 1572 that one of the most tragic episodes in the history of the Christian Church occurred. The slaughter of tens of thousands of Protestants began in Paris at 3am on St. Bartholomew's Day, August 24th to the sound of church bells. One of the first victims was Gaspard de Coligny, the Admiral of France and the leader of the French Calvinists, the Huguenots. Admiral Coligny was arguably the most powerful man in France at the time and one of the closest advisors to Charles IX.

Paris was full of thousands of French Calvinists who were in the city to celebrate the marriage of Henry, King of Navarre, a Protestant, to the Princess Marguerite, the sister of Charles IX. The wedding was held on August 18th much to the dismay of Charles' mother, Catherine de Medici - the she-wolf of European politics and a staunch Roman Catholic. The marriage was intended to resolve tensions between the competing religious factions in France.

When an assassins bullet struck Coligny as he walked the streets of Paris on August 22nd, taking off one of his fingers, Catherine de Medici saw an opportunity to strike against the Protestants while their leader was recovering from his injuries. She pressured her son, Charles, with the help of the Duke of Guise and the Duke of Anjou. She convinced Charles that a Calvinist revolt was imminent. The Huguenot leadership must be eliminated, she argued. She threatened to leave her 23-year old son and return to Italy if he refused to act. Finally, Charles cracked, shouting, "By the death of God, since you choose to kill the Admiral, I consent! But then you must kill all the Huguenots in France, so that not one shall be left to reproach me...Kill them all! Kill them all!"

With that, the butchery began. The king's Swiss Guards were summoned to dispatch the Huguenot leaders, including Coligny (pictured left), who was murdered in his bed by the Duke of Guise. Coligny's body was beheaded, his head presented to Charles, and his body hung up on display.

Spurred on by the Roman Catholic clergy, the masses soon seized upon any Huguenot that could be found. One Protestant witness who survived, Jacques-Auguste de Thou, who would later become a prominent Huguenot leader in his own right, described the horror:

"...the streets and ways did resound with the noise of those that flocked to the slaughter and plunder, and the complaints and doleful out-cries of dying men, and those that were nigh to danger were every where heard. The carkasses of the slain were thrown down from the windows, the Courts & chambers of houses were full of dead men, their dead bodies rolled in dirt were dragged through the streets, bloud did flow in such abundance through the chanels of the streets, that full streams of bloud did run down into the River: the number of the slain men, women, even those that were great with child, and children also, was innumerable."

Within days, 5,000 Huguenots lay dead in Paris alone. In the weeks and months that followed, the mass violence spread to virtually every region of France. In Lyon, Dijon, Tours, Troyes, Rouen, Bourges, and Toulouse, few Huguenots were spared from the savagery. The numbers of those murdered are estimated to be between 30,000-100,000.

The reaction to the massacre in Europe ranged from horror to jubilant celebration. The Spanish Ambassador in Paris rejoiced at the savagery: "As I write, they are killing all of them, they are stripping them naked...sparing not even the children. Blessed be God!" In Rome, Pope Gregory XIII welcomed the news of the massacre with a singing of the Te Deum. Pope Gregory also authorized the striking of a commemorative medal honoring the "Slaughter of the Huguenots" and commissioned the painter Giorgio Vasari to paint a mural of the massacre in the Vatican, bearing the inscription, Pontifex Colbni necent probat ("the Pope approves the killing of Coligny"). A portion of Vasari's painting is shown below to the right.

Commemorative medal struck by Pope Gregory XIII honoring the massacre of the Huguenots

The massacre had more impact amongst the Protestants across Europe. Perhaps one of the most important legacies of the event was the shift in Protestant political theory. For the next thirty years, printing presses would flow with new books contending against the "divine right of kings" and contending for constitutional monarchies. Francois Hotman's Franco-Gallia would argue that French kings were bound to follow the law and to protect their subjects. Calvin's successor in Geneva, Theodore Beza, argued in his The Right of Magistrates over Their Subjects (1574) from classical, medieval and contemporary history that subjects had a right to defend themselves against unbridled monarchical tyranny and that kings were not due unconditional obedience. Phillipe de Plessisis du Mornay -- another French Calvinist -- wrote in his Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos that Scripture allowed for the murder of a tyrannical monarch to defend liberty of conscience. In Scotland, George Buchanan authored a dialogue, De Jure Regni Apud Scots, dedicated to his pupil, King James of Scotland (later King James I of England). As many Founding Fathers attest to, these monarchomach treatises would play an important ideological role in the America War for Independence two centuries later.

The massacres did not have the intended effect in France that Catherine de Medici and her Roman Catholic supporters hoped for. Within two months, the French Wars of Religion flared again as Huguenots were forced by sheer survival to oppose Charles. Within a year, the Protestants had secured from Charles a guarantee of freedom of religion. In 1574, Charles IX died, which began what is known as the "War of the Three Henries". In the end, Henry of Navarre, who had survived the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre by "converting" to Roman Catholicism, became Henry IV of France. He had joined Protestant forces fighting against the Catholic League after again claiming his allegiance to the Protestant faith. When it became clear that Paris would not tolerate a Protestant king, he reconverted to Roman Catholicism in 1594, remarking, "Paris vaut bien une messe" ("Paris is worth a Mass") and was crowned King of France at Chartres on February 27, 1594. This act united the country and laid the ground for the prosperity that occurred under Henry's reign.

In 1598, Henry signed the Edict of Nantes, which granted official toleration of the Huguenots and purchased civil and religious peace for France for a century until Louis XIV revoked the edict in 1685, which prompted most Protestants to leave France forever (who were warmly welcomed by Protestant countries, including England, Germany, Switzerland, the Dutch Republic, South Africa and America).