St. Bartholomew's Day massacre

Beginning in Paris on the night of 23–24 August 1572, the eve of Saint Bartholomew's feast day, Catholic soldiers and crowds killed thousands of Huguenots, the French Protestants who followed the teachings of John Calvin. The killings started as a royal strike against Huguenot leaders and spread through the capital and then to a dozen provincial cities over the following weeks. Modern estimates of the dead range widely, from about 5,000 to 30,000. The killings changed the course of France's religious civil wars and left a deep mark on relations between Catholics and Protestants across Europe.

The Peace of Saint-Germain in August 1570 ended the third of the civil wars between French Catholics and Protestants, but many committed Catholics rejected it. The Huguenot leader Admiral Gaspard de Coligny returned to the royal council in 1571, while the strongly Catholic Guise family lost favour at court. To seal the peace, the queen mother Catherine de' Medici arranged for her daughter Margaret of Valois to marry the Protestant Henry of Navarre, the future Henry IV. The pope and Philip II of Spain opposed the match. The wedding took place on 18 August 1572 and drew many leading Huguenot nobles to Paris, a fiercely Catholic city where poor harvests, rising taxes and anti-Protestant preaching had already raised tensions.

Further alarm came from the Netherlands, where Huguenot troops had joined the revolt against Spain that became the Eighty Years' War, and Catholics feared Coligny would draw France into war with Spain. On 22 August Coligny was shot and wounded from an upstairs window as he walked home from the Louvre. Who ordered the attack remains uncertain; historians have pointed to the Guise family, the Spanish Duke of Alba and Catherine herself. Huguenots demanded justice, and fears of a Protestant reprisal spread at court.

On the evening of 23 August, after meeting his mother and her advisers, King Charles IX apparently agreed to eliminate a group of Huguenot leaders. The city gates were closed and the citizen militia armed. During the night the king's Swiss mercenaries drove Protestant nobles out of the Louvre and killed them in the streets. A party led by the Duke of Guise dragged Coligny from his bed, killed him and threw his body from a window. The killing then spread through the city as militants and crowds hunted down Protestant men, women and children, and bodies were thrown into the Seine. The violence lasted about three days despite royal efforts to stop it. Henry of Navarre and his cousin the Prince of Condé survived by agreeing to become Catholics. On 26 August the king told the Parlement of Paris that he had ordered the action to prevent a Huguenot plot against the royal family.

Between August and October similar massacres took place in twelve other cities, including Toulouse, Bordeaux, Lyon, Rouen and Orléans, mostly in towns with Catholic majorities and sizeable Protestant minorities that had suffered religious conflict in earlier wars. Thousands more Huguenots converted or emigrated; in Rouen, the Protestant community shrank from about 16,500 to under 3,000.

Pope Gregory XIII celebrated the news with a Te Deum and a commemorative medal, while the Emperor Maximilian II condemned the killings as a shameful bloodbath. Protestant countries were horrified, and the ambassador of Elizabeth I, Francis Walsingham, narrowly escaped. A new civil war began before the end of the year. Huguenot writers accused the crown of long premeditation, but by the late nineteenth century historians broadly agreed that the general massacre had not been planned in advance, although responsibility for the decision to kill the leaders is still debated.

Our 1600 map shows the Kingdom of France a generation later, when Henry of Navarre ruled it as King Henry IV.