A royal wedding meant to heal France's religious split set off its worst massacre
In August 1572 Catherine de' Medici married her Catholic daughter to the Protestant Henry of Navarre to seal a fragile peace. Leading Huguenots flocked to Paris for the ceremony. Within a week a botched assassination, a panicked royal council and a furious city turned the celebration into killings that spread across France.
The Peace of Saint-Germain-en-Laye had ended the third war of religion in August 1570, but hardline Catholics never accepted it. The Huguenot leader Admiral Gaspard de Coligny returned to the royal council in September 1571, while the zealously Catholic Guise family fell out of favour. Catherine and her son Charles IX backed peace for practical reasons: the treasury was strained, and the Protestants held fortified towns such as La Rochelle and Montauban. The Pope and Philip II of Spain condemned the policy.
Paris was a powder keg. Harvests had failed, taxes had risen, and the lavish wedding on 18 August 1572 grated on hungry citizens urged on by Catholic preachers. News that a Huguenot force under Louis of Nassau had seized Mons and Valenciennes stoked fears that Coligny would drag France into the Dutch revolt against Spain. On 22 August Coligny was shot and wounded from an upstairs window of a house owned by the Guises. Suspects included the Guises, who blamed him for their father's murder, the Duke of Alba, and, by tradition, Catherine herself.
Fearing Protestant revenge, especially from a 4,000-strong army led by Coligny's brother-in-law camped outside the city, Charles and his mother apparently decided on the evening of 23 August to eliminate the Huguenot leaders. The historian Mack Holt estimated the target list at two or three dozen noblemen. The city gates were shut, the king's Swiss guards moved against the named men, and Coligny was killed by a band led by the Duke of Guise. Popular violence then took over and lasted three days in Paris despite royal attempts to halt it, before spreading to other towns for weeks. Modern estimates of the dead range from 5,000 to 30,000.
Holt found no evidence that anyone at court intended a general slaughter, and recent research by Jérémie Foa points to organised militants carrying prepared lists. The consequences were lasting. Stripped of many aristocratic leaders, the Huguenot movement weakened, many members converted, and those who stayed became more radical. Across Europe, Protestants came to see Catholicism as treacherous and bloody.
Source: St. Bartholomew's Day massacre
