St. Bartholomew's Massacre Book Summary
PART ONE Introduction: Saint Bartholomew’s Day and the Problem of Religious Violence Early on the morning of August 24, 1572 (Saint Bartholomew’s Day by the church calendar), Catholic troops began to slaughter unarmed Protestants who had gathered in Paris for a royal wedding. These actions led to a wave of popular violence that resulted in the deaths of an estimated two thousand to three thousand men, women, and children. Contemporary observers recount atrocious scenes of brutality. According to one often reproduced early account, “The streets were covered with dead bodies; the river tinted with blood; and the doors and gates to the king’s palace painted the same color” (Document 22). The killing subsequently spread to other French towns in waves that left as many as five thousand to six thousand people dead. These figures are not large when compared with the twentieth century’s horrific episodes of mass murder, and yet they remain profoundly disturbing. Why did anyone need to die for their religious beliefs in sixteenth-century France? Why did religious differences introduced by the Protestant Reformation result not just in official persecution but also in popular religious animosities strong enough to provoke the slaughter of neighbor by neighbor? Why did the king, who claimed to be the protector and father of his people, take credit for ordering the killings? And why do these events still have such historical resonance that the pope was forced to address lingering resentments when he said Mass in Paris exactly 425 years later? The Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre poses challenging questions about historical causation, responsibility, and meaning. There were no impartial observers. All of the accounts we have of these events—and there are many—are consciously or unconsciously slanted so as to frame the actions of various participants in particular ways. This was done to cast blame on certain individuals and exonerate others, but it was also done to manipulate perceptions of the fundamental motives behind the massacre, which was presented on one hand as the necessary response to an impending coup and on the other hand as premeditated and unprovoked murder. If the former interpretation aimed to justify the slaughter, the latter aimed to justify the Protestant revolt that occurred in its wake. It is necessary to read conflicting accounts of the massacre critically and to realize that the authors’ interpretive biases influenced not only the ways they depicted the principal parties involved in these events but also the ways they represented popular participation in the killing, the role of both local authorities and the aristocratic clans competing for power at court, and the international ramifications of the massacre. The primary sources surrounding the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre thus raise broad questions about religious violence and the domestic and international repercussions of religious persecution, but they also raise more specific questions about the relative responsibility of the king and his advisers, the governing elites, and the French populace for a complex chain of rapidly unfolding events. To address these questions properly, we need first to examine the role that religion played in late medieval society and the changes introduced by the Protestant Reformation. We will then look at the buildup of religious tensions in France, the outbreak of civil war, and the events that led up to the massacre. Because there are no impartial sources, we will examine the murders that took place in Paris and various provincial cities through a variety of Protestant and Catholic accounts and then look more closely at the repercussions of the massacre in France and abroad.
Sixteenth-Century Paris With a population of 250,000 to 300,000 people, sixteenth-century Paris was the largest city in northern Europe. The area enclosed by its walls nevertheless remained compact enough that one could walk around it in about three hours.
RELIGIOUS FAITH IN AN INSECURE WORLD In the later Middle Ages, people lived precarious lives, vulnerable to disease, famine, and many other sources of hardship and early death. Religion provided the first line of defense against these vulnerabilities. It helped people to cope with the uncertainties of life by giving meaning to a world that often seemed chaotic, harsh, and unfair. It legitimated social hierarchies and political authority, facilitated social order by establishing codes of right and wrong, and offered hope to those struggling on the margins, who would get their reward in the life to come, if not here below. The church sought to meet these challenges through both doctrine and ritual. The vast majority of people were poorly educated, if not totally illiterate, and had only a rudimentary understanding of church doctrine. The church assured them, however, that by participating fully in its rituals, they could enjoy its benefits in this life and the next. Jesus died on the Cross to redeem the sins of the world, and priests reenacted Christ’s sacrifice in the sacrament of the Eucharist every time they celebrated Mass. When the priest said the holy words of consecration over the bread and wine of the Eucharist, these elements were transformed into the body and blood of Christ, as Jesus had promised his disciples at the Last Supper. By witnessing the ritual of the Mass, Christians believed, they shared in the special grace, or blessings, with which God rewarded this repetition of Christ’s sacrifice. With God’s grace, Christians were taught, they might lead good lives, doing good works and earning more grace, so that when they died, they would have their reward in heaven. They were taught that humans are frail and prone to sin; they would falter many times, despite their best intentions. The church offered a remedy for this in the sacrament of penance. By confessing one’s sins to a priest and doing the penance he prescribed, the penitent sinner could receive absolution and set out once more on the path to heaven. People who did not confess their sins and receive absolution for them were condemned to work out their penalties in purgatory or—if guilty of serious, or “mortal,” sins—condemned to the fires of hell forever. If the church sought to offer people reassurance and the hope of reward, it also sought to keep them in line by the threat and fear of punishment. Both sides of the coin of religion—reassurance and fear—are evident in the later Middle Ages. Some historians have identified a kind of bookkeeping mentality—an arithmetic of salvation—in the attempts of late medieval clerics and laypeople to try to calculate just how much punishment various sins might entail. At the same time, the church attempted to ease the burden of penance by increasingly allowing people the option of substituting cash payments for acts of reparation, such as going on pilgrimage or reciting certain prayers. Martin Luther’s challenge to this practice, known as the “sale of indulgences,” began the Protestant Reformation and permanently divided Western Christendom.
THE ORIGINS AND SPREAD OF THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION Luther did not intend to divide the church when he spoke against indulgences in 1517. He wanted only to reform a practice he thought harmful to the spiritual health of Christian believers, who might be tempted to think they could free themselves of the burden of sin by paying a fine instead of repenting in their soul. But the sale of indulgences was profitable to the church, which naturally fought back. So did Luther, whose theology became more radical as he sought to defend himself. Taking the Bible as his sole authority, Luther argued that all the indulgences people buy, all the ceremonies they witness, all the good works they do cannot get them into heaven. People are saved by faith, God’s gift of grace, as revealed directly in scripture. This posed a direct threat to the church’s theology of salvation and also to the sacred character of the priesthood and the supreme authority of the pope in religious matters. Such a challenge could not go unanswered. The pope condemned Luther as a heretic, but because of the political situation in the Holy Roman Empire, Luther escaped the traditional punishment of death by burning and was allowed to live. Though forced into hiding, he wrote prolifically. Treatises and polemics streamed from his pen and were published, translated into other languages, and distributed across Europe. Meanwhile, a growing circle of followers sought to put Luther’s ideas into practice by restructuring religious services according to this new theology. The same political turmoil that allowed Luther to escape execution for heresy allowed these followers to begin to implement his ideas in the Holy Roman Empire, whose decentralized government permitted great opportunity for local initiative. By contrast, in the more centralized kingdom of France, the monarchy was able if not to eliminate Luther’s ideas, at least to drive them underground. The theology faculty at the University of Paris formally condemned Luther’s teachings in 1521. France burned its first “Lutheran” heretic two years later. And yet the new ideas continued to spread, especially among merchants with contacts abroad, skilled artisans, and university students and faculty. John Calvin was one of those student converts. When persecution made France too dangerous for him and his friends, they fled to safer places in Switzerland and the Holy Roman Empire. Although Calvin still considered himself a neophyte in the new faith, he was soon invited to take direction of the Reformation in progress in Geneva, just across the border from France. Organizing the new church, negotiating relations with secular authorities, and elaborating a systematic Reformed theology took a lot of Calvin’s energy during the years that followed, but he never lost sight of a goal dear to his heart: to convert his native France to the Reformed faith. He directed special appeals to the high nobility in the hope that they might lead a top-down reformation as some German princes had done. He also trained ministers in Geneva and smuggled them back into France. As a result, when French converts to the new ideas began to organize clandestine churches in the 1550s, they tended to adopt Calvin’s theology and the organizational structures of Geneva’s Reformed church. The printing press played a key role in disseminating the new ideas. French printers risked their lives by secretly printing forbidden books. So did booksellers who trafficked in the theological and polemical works that began to be published in Geneva and smuggled into France. Some of these polemics attacked the corruption and venality represented by the sale of indulgences and other Catholic practices; others offered instruction in Protestant ideas through derogatory comparisons with Catholic teachings (Document 1). Protestants were not alone in wielding the weapon of polemic. Catholic propagandists denounced the new beliefs as heresy and derided those who adopted them as atheists who had abandoned God to follow their own perverse inclinations. They represented the new ideas as a war being waged against the City of God by its carnal enemies (Document 2) and recirculated stories that had first arisen in the early church associating heresy with debauchery. Although there was no foundation for the accusation that Protestants were sexual libertines, a great many French Catholics accepted the idea without question. When Protestants were arrested for attending clandestine religious services in a house in Paris’s rue Saint-Jacques in 1557, Catholics gleefully circulated rumors that they had been caught practicing a “fraternal charity” that was sexual in nature, offering “their belongings and bodies to those who wished to follow them” (Document 3). A report from the Reformed church of Paris asking Protestant leaders in Switzerland to intervene with the king on their behalf tells a very different story of the affair of the rue Saint-Jacques and of the church’s history and practices (Document 4).
Huguenot revolts were most successful in the south, where Calvinism had made the deepest inroads. By May, most of Guyenne, Dauphiné, and Languedoc were in Huguenot hands; only the key cities of Toulouse and Bordeaux eluded the Protestants. Some of the takeovers were accomplished peacefully, but many involved violence on both sides. Where successful, the Huguenots took over churches and city governments, prohibiting Catholic worship and frequently forcing Catholic elites to flee. Protestant crowds engaged in iconoclastic sprees, destroying altars, relics, and other objects the Catholics held as holy. Meanwhile, cities such as Paris that remained in Catholic hands expelled members of the opposing faith and violently attacked anyone suspected of siding with the enemy. Civil war was thus not just being fought on the battlefield, and making peace would require pacifying cities and not just convincing military leaders to lay down their weapons after they reached a stalemate in the field. French Reformed churches, it was founded when Protestant converts, tired of participating in Catholic rituals in which they no longer believed, decided to create the institutional structures that would allow them to worship according to their beliefs. To do so entailed new risks, because the authorities judged participation in the Protestant sacraments of baptism and Communion a more serious crime than listening to heretical sermons or reading forbidden books. Reformed church members accepted these risks because they accepted Calvin’s refusal to separate inward belief from the outward manifestations of this belief. In a number of influential treatises and sermons, Calvin railed against those who sought to avoid persecution by outwardly continuing Catholic practices while secretly subscribing to the new ideas. Joining the concept of sanctification to Luther’s notion of justification by faith, Calvin insisted that true faith made itself known only in the process of living out one’s beliefs. Faced with persecution, the faithful had just two choices: They could flee to a place where they could practice their religion freely, or they could accept the prospect of persecution and steel themselves for martyrdom. In all, approximately 450 men and women were executed for heresy in RELIGIOUS WAR AND THE INTENSIFICATION OF RELIGIOUS HATREDS By 1562, the theological differences between French Catholics and Protestants had become thoroughly entangled with political rivalries. This does not mean that religious issues had become lesser problems. Because religion was the fundamental mechanism through which people interpreted, or gave meaning, to their world in early modern times, it is impossible to neatly separate religion and politics. Of course, some people chose sides in the war out of calculated self-interest or gain, but the prevailing motivation on both sides was a fundamentally religious one. Protestants and Catholics alike interpreted their political allegiances in terms of obedience to God’s will and believed they were fighting to ensure God’s will on earth and access to salvation and eternal life for themselves and their fellow citizens. This made the stakes in the war very high. When the first war broke out in March 1562, Catherine de Medici hesitated between the two sides, uncertain how best to protect twelve-year-old Charles IX’s authority. But Condé, in retreating to Orléans, rejected her overtures. Forced into an uneasy alliance with the duke of Guise and other Catholic princes, Catherine nevertheless continued to attempt to negotiate peace. Meanwhile, the Huguenots followed up the seizure of Orléans by capturing other defensible towns at strategic points on road and river systems. They staged revolts in key cities such as Lyons and Rouen and took still others through military action. Catherine’s attempts to negotiate a compromise succeeded in March 1563. The Protestants may have been numerically weak, but they still held enough cities that the Catholics could not afford to fight on. The Peace of Amboise promised Protestants freedom of conscience but permitted them to worship only in certain circumstances. Protestant nobles could hold private religious services on the estates where they resided, but public worship was permitted only in cities that Protestants held at the end of the war and in the suburbs of one town in each governmental district. The edict also attempted to put an end to the desire for revenge that each side harbored against the other by consigning the past to oblivion. It nevertheless proved easier to legislate oblivion than to enforce it. Both sides were unhappy with the settlement and demonstrated this by their reluctance to comply with the edict’s terms. Catholics were angry because the edict allowed the continued existence of two religions in the kingdom, and they often refused to allow Protestants who had fled in the war to return to their homes or resume official functions, as the edict promised they might. Protestants, meanwhile, proved just as unwilling to restore the Mass in cities they controlled as Catholics were to accept even the limited right to public worship accorded Huguenots by the peace. Protestants also remained aggrieved because the Peace of Amboise gave them less opportunity for worship than they had enjoyed under the edict of January 1562. Chafing under these restrictions and convinced that Catholic leaders were only biding their time and waiting for the proper moment to eliminate Protestant worship altogether, the Huguenots took up arms again in 1567. Francis, duke of Guise, had been assassinated at the end of the first religious war, but his brother Charles, cardinal of Lorraine, had achieved a dominant position at court. Determining once again to “rescue” the king from his anti-Protestant advisers, Huguenot leaders planned to seize Charles IX while he was hunting outside Paris at Meaux. As at Amboise, word of the conspiracy leaked out in advance. The king hastily summoned reinforcements and retreated to the security of his capital (Document 12). Although Huguenot leaders later claimed that they had sought only to meet with the king and not to kidnap him, the fact that they had simultaneously seized towns elsewhere in France made it impossible for the king and queen mother to doubt their treacherous intentions. In the long term, the Huguenots’ failed attempt to seize Charles IX at Meaux was an important reason why the king and his mother reacted so decisively when the rumor spread that Protestants planned another attempt to seize the king in August 1572. In the shorter term, the “surprise of Meaux” touched off the second civil war. Horrible Cruelties of the Huguenots in France This image of Protestants burning a Catholic church and breaking up the art and tombs in another church was part of a series of prints, Horrible Cruelties of the Huguenots in France, published by Richard Verstegan in his Theater of the Cruelties of the Heretics of Our Time (Antwerp, 1587). The verses below the image read: "The rage of the wicked does not leave to rest/The sacred bones of the saints enclosed in their tombs,/O mutinous rebels, despising the laws!/Their bodies entombed for some years past/You have burned into ashes and thrown to the winds/Having no respect for lords or kings."
THE SAINT BARTHOLOMEW’S DAY MASSACRE IN PARIS AND THE PROVINCES The wedding involved elaborate festivities—tournaments, costume balls, and other entertainments—but also gave Admiral Coligny the opportunity once again to lobby the king to aid the Protestants fighting in the Netherlands. The trouble began when a would-be assassin fired on Coligny as he returned from a meeting with Charles IX on the morning of August 22. A chance move on the admiral’s part saved his life by confining the injuries to a hand and arm. Huguenot leaders nevertheless reacted angrily, blaming the Guises and insisting on retribution (Document 15). The accusation was grounded in old rivalries but also in the known fact that the house from which the shot had come belonged to a Guise family retainer. The Huguenots’ initial claim has been much disputed. Some observers instead blame the king’s own mother, Catherine de Medici, on the grounds that she was jealous of Coligny’s increasing influence with Charles IX and fearful that he would drag France into a dangerous war with Spain. According to the Venetian ambassador, “The whole thing was the work of the queen” (Document 16). The accusation is puzzling but hard to dismiss. As a woman and a foreigner, Catherine was vulnerable. Her enemies denounced her as a Machiavellian Italian capable of any deceit, and yet everything she had worked for in the previous months and years aimed at the pacification of religious tensions and not their inflammation, as a strike against Coligny was bound to cause. Would she really have changed tactics so suddenly and dramatically? We will never know for certain who was behind the attack on Coligny. In the end, however, the question of who was responsible for this initial shot pales before the chain of events it touched off. As word of the attack spread around the city, the Huguenots’ angry response was thought to portend a Protestant uprising. A rumor that Protestant troops waited outside the city for the signal to seize the royal family and avenge themselves against their enemies drove tensions to a fever pitch. Although there was no truth to the story, it appears to have been widely believed, even in the highest circles (Document 17). Or perhaps, as some have claimed, the purported threat of a Huguenot coup was merely an excuse to purge France of a troublesome minority. Whatever the crown’s intentions, late in the evening of August 23 a preemptive strike was ordered against not only Coligny but also the rest of the Huguenot leadership. Early the next morning, Saint Bartholomew’s Day by the church calendar, Henry, duke of Guise, led troops to Coligny’s lodgings to finish the murder attempted two days earlier. After killing the admiral, the duke’s men tossed his body out the window, so that Guise, waiting below, might confirm his identity. The corpse was later mutilated and dragged through the streets by riotous youths. Meanwhile, members of the king’s guard and other bands of soldiers set out to find and kill other Huguenot leaders quartered in the city. The noise they made in a night already tense with fear touched off a wave of popular violence. The duke of Guise, urging his men on, was heard to say that they killed by the king’s express command. These words quickly spread through the populace, who took them as permission—even an order—to rid themselves of the pollution of heresy by slaughtering their Protestant neighbors. Members of the civic militia, stationed about the streets to help keep order, were among the first to take up their weapons against the Protestants, but other citizens joined in as well. Although some observers accused city officials of abetting the killing, other sources suggest that they tried to keep order but were overwhelmed by the popular violence. City records confirm that they stationed militia companies around the city on the night of August 23, but these records suggest that the militia’s intended mission was to ward off an anticipated Huguenot coup and not to attack Protestant civilians (Document 18). The following morning, city officials protested to the king that “a number of persons attached both to His Majesty and to the princes, princesses, and grandees of the court, . . . along with all sorts of other people who had joined with them and used their cover, were pillaging and sacking houses and killing people in the streets.” The king in reply instructed officials to mount a patrol with city troops so as to put an end to the unrest. They organized the patrol and issued orders forbidding anyone to harm the Protestants or pillage their property. The following day, they sent out district officers to make a list of everyone residing in their district and instruct householders to protect Protestant lodgers. None of these efforts stanched the wave of violence, which continued for most of a week, and some had negative consequences. The list of names, for example, appears to have been used to round up and imprison Protestants—in theory to protect them, but more often resulting in their deaths. Whether city officials acted in good faith and whether they could have done more must remain open questions, and we should be wary of easy generalizations. Surely, some officials did work hard to calm the situation and protect vulnerable Protestants (Document 20), but others were negligent and tolerated or even supported the violence. Many of the killings had a didactic or ritual character. Killers forced their victims to recant their faith or repeat Catholic prayers and made bonfires of Protestant books. They also subjected their victims’ bodies to crude parodies of religious and judicial rites. We read of infants “baptized” in the blood of their parents or cut from their mothers’ wombs and “baptized” in the Seine. The youths who dragged Coligny’s corpse through city streets are reported to have conducted his trial as they dragged him along. Repeating their sentence against him at major crossroads, they burned his body in a parody of the conventional!
REPERCUSSIONS OF THE MASSACRE IN FRANCE AND ABROAD Many ardent Catholics also interpreted the massacre as a punishment from God, but unlike the Huguenots, they celebrated the success of the coup as a sign of God’s hatred for heresy and a promise that the unity of the church would be restored (Document 29). When a hawthorn tree in a Parisian cemetery suddenly bloomed out of season, Parisians rushed to view the “miracle” and interpreted it as a sign of divine favor. Protestant commentators suspected trickery but were in no position to prove their claims. The rejoicing of French Catholics was echoed in foreign capitals when word of the massacre spread abroad (Document 30). Masses were sung at the Spanish court and in Rome, where Gregory XIII, recently elected pope, commissioned two more permanent commemorations of Saint Bartholomew’s Day. The first was a medal celebrating the extirpation of the Huguenots, with a bust of the pope on one side and an avenging angel on the other. Similar in content if not in scale were three frescoes that Gregory commissioned from Giorgio Vasari for the Sala Regia in the Vatican palace, the room where the pope formally received ambassadors and kings. Not all Catholic leaders reacted with the same enthusiasm. The Holy Roman emperor Maximilian II’s principal reaction was a dismay made all the more acute by the fact that he had married his daughter to Charles IX. The massacre would never have happened, he wrote Elector August of Saxony, if his son-in-law had consulted him first: “To settle religious disputes by the sword or through force is neither possible nor morally justifiable.” Though couched in terms of moral absolutes, Maximilian’s position was in effect a defensive one. His empire was divided, and he feared that the massacre might destabilize its tenuous religious peace. It is, moreover, striking that neither he nor other German princes publicly chastised Charles IX or broke off diplomatic relations with France. Nor did England’s Protestant Queen Elizabeth, although her courtiers did make a silent protest by dressing in mourning and stonily refusing to acknowledge the presence of France’s ambassador when he first reappeared at court.
Medal Struck in Rome to Commemorate the Massacre Pope Gregory XIII had this medal struck with his own portrait on one side and an avenging angel, sword in hand, advancing on a crowd of dead, dying, and fleeing Huguenots on the other. The inscription, “Ugonottorum Strages 24 Augusti Anno 1572,” lauds the extirpation of the Huguenots. Although several women are included among the fallen, the depiction of a broken sword in the hand of one Huguenot and fallen weapons at the feet of others suggest that the Huguenots were killed in battle and not murdered in their beds. Within a short time, publicists began to tell the story of Saint Bartholomew’s Day from a variety of points of view. Just two months after the massacre, a papal courtier named Camillo Capilupi rushed a narrative titled The Stratagem of Charles IX into print in Italian. Crediting the king with cleverly leading the Huguenots into a trap, the work reflects the joy with which many committed Catholics greeted the first news of the massacre. No documents have ever surfaced to substantiate Capilupi’s claim of premeditation, and the work is now viewed as part of the propaganda campaign issuing from the massacre rather than as a factual account of events. Its claims of premeditation nevertheless reinforced the already strong conviction in Protestant circles that the murders had been plotted in advance. Protestant writers quickly translated the pamphlet into French and, reversing its original intent, used it to denounce the king’s treachery. A number of Protestant-authored accounts of the massacre also appeared, for it was the Huguenots who had the strongest incentive to recount the outrages they had suffered. Despite the decimation of
MEMORIES OF THE MASSACRE Historical memory recalls the massacre in three distinct but related ways: as a story of the persecution of French Protestants, as a tale of royal treachery, and as a warning against intolerance. From the beginning, French Protestants had identified with David against the Catholic Goliath and viewed persecution as a trial imposed by God and a mark of his covenant. After the shock of Saint Bartholomew’s Day, they built upon and expanded the image of themselves as a chosen people by collecting accounts of their suffering in histories and martyrologies (Document 20). Despite the sad truth that many Huguenots did recant under the pressure of the massacre, they presented themselves as a people whose faith could be tested but not broken. Seventeenth-century Catholic writers looked back on the massacre through different eyes. Most histories of France by Catholic authors took up the crown’s argument that the massacre was a necessary response to a planned Huguenot coup. At the same time, the image of Charles IX as a tyrant-king, first evoked by Huguenot publicists, survived and even grew in importance as the negative image with which Henry IV and subsequent Bourbon kings might be compared. Louis XIV’s historians, for example, used Charles IX as an object lesson in bad kingship. Depicting him as poorly educated and badly raised, corrupted by his foreign mother and her decadent court, they made of him the very antithesis of the Bourbon kings, who knew how to be obeyed and brought peace and order to their troubled realm. To drive the lesson home, they borrowed from the Protestant Wake-Up Call the dubious story of Charles IX personally firing on fleeing Huguenots (Document 22). The same image was used to discredit monarchy entirely at the time of the French Revolution. During the Revolution’s most radical stage, for example, journalist Jean-Paul Marat justified the popular violence then occurring in Paris with an explicit comparison to Saint Bartholomew’s Day: "What are the few drops of blood that the populace has spilled in the current revolution by comparison with the torrents . . . that the mystical frenzy of a Charles IX caused to be spread.” Such narratives of royal treachery tended to portray Charles IX as weak and unbalanced. They completed the gender reversal by depicting Catherine de Medici as the scheming power behind the throne—a woman usurping a man’s role. At the same time, they played on her “womanly weakness” by attributing her actions to an obsessive and even unnatural maternal love. These exaggerated portraits of Catherine and Charles can still sometimes be found in popular literature and films. Of greater long-term historical significance is the gradual emergence of the massacre as a prime example of and warning against the dangers of intolerance. From the beginning, the massacre was a shocking event. If some Catholics celebrated it as a necessary strike against heresy, others deplored it and wanted the religious conflicts to end, even if it meant tolerating the existence of the Reformed church in France. At this point, however, “toleration” was understood only in the most limited sense of putting up with something one did not like but could not change. It did not mean accepting that the deeply held beliefs of others could be as valid and deserving of recognition as one’s own. This broader notion of religious tolerance could only emerge after people were willing to abandon their claims to the unique possession of religious truth. The philosopher Michel de Montaigne took an important step in this direction as he explored the question “What do I know?” at length in his Essays. Montaigne experienced the Wars of Religion firsthand; they ravaged his native Bordelais, leaving him disillusioned and skeptical about claims to superior truth (Document 36). Both parties, he observed, “were so identical in excesses and injustices” that they made it hard to believe that they really were quarreling over essential matters of religious truth. Religious belief remained important to Montaigne as he contemplated the limits of human reason. He remained a committed Christian and a Catholic, and yet the very logic with which he justified remaining in the religion of his ancestors implicitly admitted that he did this for human reasons—because he was “born in a country where it was in practice”—and not because he had any certain knowledge of its superior truth. Montaigne’s admission that being born in another region or having different experiences “might imprint upon us in the same way a contrary belief” was a big step toward the modern idea of religious tolerance, because it recognized religious truth as relative and tacitly cautioned against negative judgment or coercion. Montaigne’s skepticism had some faint echoes in the seventeenth century, but only with the eighteenth-century Enlightenment did the moral absolutism of traditional ways of thinking receive a serious challenge. Enlightenment writers criticized the sort of unquestioning belief that previous generations had praised and urged people to think for themselves—to be more open-minded and rational. Religious intolerance became one of their principal targets and religious wars their prime example of the harm intolerance could do. The philosophe Montesquieu, for example, observed "that the history books are full of religious wars; but it should be carefully noted that these wars are not produced by the fact that there is more than one religion, but by the spirit of intolerance, urging on the one which believed itself to be dominant." Voltaire went further. He came to detest all organized religions, believing them responsible for many of society’s ills. In the article “War,” which Voltaire published in his Philosophical Dictionary in 1764, he wrote, "Artificial religion encourages all the cruelties which are committed in company—conspiracies, seditions, pillagings, ambushes, taking towns by surprise, plundering, murders. Everyone marches gaily off to crime under the banner of his saint." The article “Fanaticism,” in the same work, explicitly cites the events of Saint Bartholomew’s Day as evidence of religion’s crimes (Document 37).
In more recent times, the symbolic importance of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre as an evocation of the horrors of intolerance has broadened. This was made clear in 1997, when French Protestants learned that Pope John Paul II would close World Youth Day, being held that year in Paris, with a huge outdoor Mass on Sunday, August 24, a date that coincided with the 425th anniversary of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. Determined that the tragic events that had occurred on that date should not be overlooked, Protestant youth
List of Major Figures
Catherine de Medici (1519–1589): Queen of France 1547–1559 and queen mother 1559–1589. The wife of Henry II, she was briefly regent for her son Charles IX and then the power behind the throne through most of his reign and that of Henry III. She has often been accused of taking a leading role in plotting the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.
Charles IX (1550–1574): King of France 1560–1574. He inherited the throne as a child of ten and was just beginning to free himself from his mother’s domineering guidance when the massacre broke out. His role in these events is much debated.
Charles of Guise, cardinal of Lorraine (1524–1574): The brother of Francis, duke of Guise, he served the Catholic cause at court and was a leading adviser of Francis II. He was in Rome at the time of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, but those who believe that the massacre was premeditated tend to assume that he played a role in planning it.
Coligny, Admiral Gaspard de Châtillon (1519–1572): A nephew of Constable Anne de Montmorency, he was the leader of the Huguenots after the death of Louis of Bourbon, prince of Condé, in 1569. An attempt to assassinate him in 1572 touched off the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.
Francis II (1544–1560): King of France 1559–1560. Came to the throne following the accidental death of his father, Henry II, in 1559. During his brief rule, Francis, duke of Guise, and Charles, cardinal of Lorraine, the uncles of Francis II’s wife, Mary, Queen of Scots, had great influence at court.
Francis, duke of Alençon (later duke of Anjou) (1555–1584): The youngest son of Henry II and Catherine de Medici; a moderate Catholic whose death in 1584 touched off a succession crisis because it left the Protestant Henry of Navarre next in line for the French throne.
Francis of Lorraine, duke of Guise (1519–1563): A military leader and head of the Catholic faction at court until an assassin took his life during the first War of Religion.
Henry II (1519–1559): King of France 1547–1559. Much of his reign was spent finishing up the wars with Habsburg Germany and Spain begun by his father, Francis I. Making peace with Spain in 1559, he hoped to put an end to the Protestant “heresy” in France but instead died as a result of a jousting accident at the tournament intended to celebrate the peace. His wife, Catherine de Medici, was left to deal with the building factional and religious conflicts on behalf of his young sons.
Henry, duke of Anjou; Henry III of France (1551–1589): King of France 1574–1589. The third son of Henry II and Catherine de Medici, he won a (probably undeserved) reputation as a military leader in the third War of Religion and was believed by many to have played a more active role on Saint Bartholomew’s Day than his brother Charles IX. He proved more moderate and less ardently Catholic once king and came to be opposed by the Holy League, which chased him from Paris in 1588. An ultra-Catholic assassin killed him in 1589.
Henry, duke of Guise (1550–1588): The son of Francis, duke of Guise, he had begun to assume his father’s role as leader of the Catholic faction at the time of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. Many believed he was behind the initial attempt on Coligny’s life because he blamed the admiral for his father’s death. The Holy League organized under his leadership subsequently challenged the rule of Henry III, who had him assassinated in 1588.
Henry of Bourbon, king of Navarre; Henry IV of France (1553–1610): King of Navarre 1572–1610; king of France 1589–1610. His wedding to King Charles IX’s sister, Marguerite of Valois, provided the occasion for the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. Raised a Protestant, he was forced to convert after the massacre but returned to the Protestant faith and took on leadership of the Huguenot rebellion once he escaped from court in 1576. As first prince of the blood, he inherited the crown of France when the Valois line was extinguished on Henry III’s death in 1589, but he had to fight the Holy League, which was then in open rebellion, to claim the throne. His conversion to Catholicism in 1593 appeased many of the rebels, but some fought on until 1598. An assassin took his life in 1610.
Louis of Bourbon, prince of Condé (1530–1569): An uncle of Henry of Navarre, he converted to Protestantism during the Habsburg wars and allowed himself to be named protector of the French Reformed churches. He led the Huguenots into war in 1562 and served the cause until slain on the battlefield in 1569.
Marguerite of Valois (1553–1615): The daughter of Henry II and Catherine de Medici; her marriage to Henry of Navarre provided the occasion for the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. The couple had effectively separated long before Henry came to the throne of France, so she was never crowned queen. A belated annulment allowed Henry to remarry in 1600.
PART TWO: The Documents CHAPTER 1: Religious Divisions in Sixteenth-Century France Opposing Views of the True Faith
1 SIMON DU ROSIER The Antithesis of Jesus Christ and the Pope 1561: The Antithesis of Jesus Christ and the Pope instructs readers in Protestant doctrine through derogatory comparisons with Catholic teachings. Published in at least eight Latin and French editions, it enlarged on a German satire against Rome first published in 1521. The Antithesis pairs illustrations of the life of Jesus Christ with images depicting parallel situations in the lives of the popes. One pair, for example, contrasts an image of Christ washing the feet of his disciples with one of courtiers kissing the pope’s feet, effectively contrasting Christ’s humility with the worldly vanity of the popes. The scenes reproduced here are intended to teach the reader the true meaning of Christ’s Last Supper and to denounce the misuse of this ceremony in the Catholic Mass. At issue is Catholics’ belief that the priest’s consecration of bread and wine in the Mass transforms these elements into the body and blood of Christ, thereby renewing the salvation promised at his death. The illustration on the left-hand page depicts the Last Supper; that on the right depicts the pope celebrating Mass. The verses below the left-hand scene explain that Christ instituted the Lord’s Supper in commemoration of his death, which washed his followers clean of sin, but warn that he never intended the equation between body and bread or blood and wine to be taken literally. The verses under the right-hand image more directly attack the Catholic teaching that, in giving his disciples bread and wine and telling them that they were his body and blood, Christ was giving them (and, by extension, priests of the church they founded) the power to replicate his own sacrifice on the Cross and thus to convey saving grace. Why did Protestants believe that these theological differences were so essential that they left the Catholic Church on this account? And why, from the Catholic perspective, were these Protestant teachings not mere misunderstandings but heretical deviations that, if unsuppressed, threatened the very foundations of the church?
2 ARTUS DESIRÉ Description of the City of God Besieged by the Wretched Heretics 1550: In this treatise, Artus Desiré (ca. 1510–1579), one of the most prolific Catholic polemicists, calls on Catholics to contemplate the war that is being waged against the City of God by its carnal enemies. He first describes the City of God, which he equates with the Catholic Church, as resting on foundations of faith, with walls of chastity and a deep surrounding moat of humility. The gate through which one enters the city is the sacrament of baptism. Depicting the city as besieged from all sides by armies of heretics, Desiré calls on good Catholics to come to the city’s defense. The argument is made graphically in the illustrations reproduced here. Employing a slander first used in ancient times, Desiré then goes on to denounce the heretics as sexual libertines who seduce others to join them in their debauchery. Why might people have found such a charge credible? We will have accomplished nothing if we do not work still harder to further reinforce the fortress, and all Christians must work with us. We need to raise a strong wall, which we will make out of full virginity, to resist the carnality of the unfortunate and errant priapists, who use this to seduce the papists, and make them believe in their damnable errors. The majority of these miserable people, such as apostates and renegade monks, carnal priests and the excommunicated, only left the Catholic Church so as to live in debauchery and follow their sensuality.
3 CLAUDE HATON A Catholic View of Clandestine Protestant Services 1557: Claude Haton (b. 1534), a priest in the town of Provins, about forty miles southeast of Paris, describes the religious practices he attributed to French Protestants in the following passage from his memoirs. Haton did not begin to write his memoirs for some years after the events he describes, although he may have kept notebooks or journals that have since disappeared. This account necessarily reflects some hindsight then, and is not a strictly contemporaneous view of events. It nevertheless shows a common Catholic understanding of the origins and character of the new religion. Like Artus Desiré (Document 2), Haton closely associates heresy with sexual debauchery. How is Haton’s understanding of what occurred when Protestants met in the rue Saint-Jacques colored not only by these assumptions about debauchery but also by certain assumptions about gender and class? One of the principal reasons for the aforementioned jubilee, in addition to those already mentioned, was heresy, which was taking root in Christendom, in some provinces publicly, such as in the German and Swiss states, in other provinces secretly, as in Italy, Spain, France, and Navarre. The kingdoms of Scotland and England were already divided in two, with one part heretics and the other Catholics. The French heretics, who were called Lutherans, were striving greatly to enlarge their numbers and win over princes or great lords, in order to sustain and defend them in all ways and against all enemies. At the same time, their expansion and other strategies were worked out as secretly as possible out of fear of getting caught, for anyone caught was immediately thrown into jail, tried, and sentenced to be burned to death. Seldom did a month go by without a burning in Paris and two or three in Meaux and Troyes in Champagne, and in some months there were more than a dozen. And yet despite this, the others did not cease to pursue their enterprise of putting forward their false religion, and through their efforts managed to seduce a large number of persons of all sorts, including bishops, abbots, priors, monks, and priests, as well as laymen and laywomen, both nobles and commoners, small and great. And the means that they found most useful for bringing in large numbers and attracting so many clerics of all sorts was the generosity with which they offered their belongings and bodies to those who wished to follow them, and principally to monks and churchmen, to whom the men of this false Lutheran religion gave and abandoned their wives to take carnal pleasure with and their belongings to live from. And they were taught to do this by their ministers and preachers, who were all apostate priests and monks who had been enticed away from the true religion. This carnal liberty, which the heretic Lutherans called “fraternal charity,” corrupted several ecclesiastics of various sorts and caused them to follow the aforesaid heretics. Most followed them only on account of this carnal and voluptuous charity. Those who had had their fill broke with them; the others remained and married women whom they then loaned to others, as had been done for them. And these heretic Lutherans were not even ashamed to be known as cuckolds, seeing as how their wives lent and abandoned themselves to win over men who wished to follow their false religion. For this purpose, these Lutherans often held secret assemblies day and night in which they sermonized one another, both inside and outside of cities, in one of their members’ houses, so as, they said, to serve the Lord and praise him. One of them would read some chapter of the Old or New Testament from a Bible written or printed in French which seemed to him suitable for the pleasure of the assembly. Once this was completed, it was permitted for men to approach the women and women the men, each as their pleasure led them; and after they had greeted and expressed affection for one another, the minister or preacher who was in charge would announce the charity of body and goods that they owed one another so as to belong to that religion, and, blowing out and extinguishing the candles before him, he would say words such as these: “In the name of God, accomplish the fraternal charity, each of you enjoying what he or she likes best.” This being said and done, each would accommodate the other and satisfy their desires. It is worth noting that during this time, a number of women in French cities and princes and gentlemen of the country, even at court and among the king’s attendants, were beguiled by that Lutheran religion. These women, in order to attend the assemblies, would steal away from their husbands, who were totally unsuspecting because they remained Catholics. Some were accompanied by their chambermaids, others by their own daughters, so as to avoid awakening their husbands’ suspicions when they went to the aforesaid secret assemblies, which took place largely at night and during the evening. Most, when they first went, were chaste wives and girls, but on their return were whores and sluts on account of the charity. At the beginning, in the city of Paris and elsewhere, the Lutherans assembled only once or twice a month and principally at night, for fear of being surprised and discovered, but then they began to go out of the city in the daytime, under the pretext of going out for a walk together in the country, so as to give themselves over more freely to their pleasures and the satisfaction of their desires. Still, after some time, they found their numbers strong enough and sufficiently protected by great lords and ladies to undertake to assemble more often at night, principally within the city of Paris, where they held their assemblies first in one quarter of the city and then in another, so as not to be easily discovered. But because nothing can be done so secretly that it is not known at last, these Lutherans were discovered and fallen upon on several occasions; though sometimes because of their great numbers they could not all be arrested and other times only a few women remained, who, being useless, were permitted to leave after having charitably given satisfaction to two or three good fellows. One of these times, during the current year, the king, who was in Paris, was advised of the Lutherans’ nocturnal assemblies and gave orders to set watch in all the quarters of the city and especially near the houses where the Lutherans were accustomed to gather, without making any noise or seeming to keep watch over them, so that when they had assembled it would be possible to lay hands on them and make a public example of their punishment. Following the king’s orders, such an effort was made that one night the aforesaid charitable Lutherans were found assembled in a house in the university quarter, in or near the rue Saint-Jacques, I believe, and the king, who was lodging in the Louvre, was notified and sent his provost with several guardsmen and members of the Paris night watch, both on foot and on horseback, to take prisoner without exception all of these practitioners of charity. The aforesaid provost, guardsmen, and members of the night watch, following the king’s orders, proceeded to invade the lodging where the charitable ones had assembled, who, finding themselves surprised, no longer desired to accomplish their fraternal charity but rather advised all of the brothers to flee, leaving their sisters in danger. Some climbed up the drain spouts and fled over the rooftops; others hid in the attics, cellars, and recesses in walls; still others threw themselves out the windows, some dying in the process, others breaking their legs or arms. In sum, those who were able to escape without being caught or recognized could consider themselves quite lucky. Once the lodging had been forced so as to effect entry, the ladies of charity were found, abandoned by their charitable accomplices and completely dumbfounded by the embarrassment of being recognized. Those who were most noble hoped to escape with their faces veiled and hidden, but the officers did not permit this. The officers were astounded when they recognized some of the ladies, who were believed to be among the greatest in the kingdom and of almost royal blood, and whom they allowed to return home in whatever company pleased them and without other proceedings. These [ladies] wanted and indeed demanded that the provost abandon his enterprise without taking any prisoners, but he did not dare to do this, for fear of the king’s reproach. He nevertheless allowed the other ladies to leave as well, as a favor to them and on account of their social standing, and took prisoner only a large number of men, most of whom were priests, monks, Franciscans, Dominicans, and other clerics, who were taken to various prisons, which were so full that no room remained in them. And yet very little punishment was handed out. Some were publicly whipped through the streets, others sent to the galleys, and still others banished from the kingdom, so as to conceal from the king the involvement of the aforementioned persons of high standing, who intervened in favor of the other prisoners.
4 Report to the Swiss Delegation concerning the Affair of the Rue Saint-Jacques 1557: When Protestant leaders in Switzerland learned that a good number of French Protestants had been imprisoned for participating in religious services in Paris, they dispatched ambassadors from four key cities—Zurich, Bern, Basel, and Schaffhausen—to intervene on behalf of their coreligionists. At the same time, they requested further information from the leaders of the French Reformed church, so as to be better informed when they presented their case to the king. This is the report the French church sent them. How does this report differ from Claude Haton’s account (Document 3), not just in its basic narrative of events but also in its representation of both the role played by women and the social profile of Paris’s Protestant church? Magnificent Lords Happy to comply with your desire to better acquaint yourselves with the events to which you intend to attract the attention of our king, we present you with a brief account of the sensations we experienced and the ferocity of the enemies of Christ. You will be particularly edified by the manner in which [these enemies] determined to ruin our unfortunate church. You will then be able to oppose the outrages committed by those who calumny us in the eyes of our sovereign. About two years ago, God caused the seeds of the true church (as all of yours are) to sprout in the sight and knowledge, so to speak, of all of France. We learned little by little how much God approved of these beginnings despite their paltriness and great weakness. Indeed, in very little time, he made the church progress to such a point that Christ’s harvest appeared nowhere more abundant. For the crowd that gathered in our assemblies included not only common people with little education but also—in appreciable numbers—the French elite, including many nobles and magistrates; in brief, all those whom papism had begun to disgust. Our meetings were only disdained by those whom Catholic ceremonies dazzled to the point of blindness, or who closed their eyes in order to feast on their rich religious benefices. Until now, then, in all conscientiousness and with an extraordinary desire to enlarge the kingdom of God, we have enjoyed this inestimable help from on high. For during all of this time, Providence has protected us—we who were in the very mouth of lions avid to gorge on our blood. We are confident that it will continue to be so. Thus it was that on September 5, when some four hundred of us were gathered for Communion, several priests, accompanied by others out of the same swamp, invaded and observed us. The next morning at daybreak, as everyone was returning home, we suddenly met with a hail of stones. Armed commoners of the most wretched sort attacked unarmed [worshippers] and tried to commit all sorts of cruelties against us. They doubtless thought to accomplish a brilliant exploit in obliterating or throwing into prison some Lutherans, heretics, brigands, assassins—such are the slanders they heaped upon us. At first we were not able to approach our brothers enclosed in a black prison to console them and aid them in their distress. If we solicited a meeting with them, we were immediately charged with heresy—a difficult suspicion to avoid. And it wasn’t one unique Cerberus, but several intractable ones, who stood before us. Their insurmountable hatred for holy doctrine obliged us to renounce visiting our brothers. From this they suffered greatly, and still do. While the faithful were treated in a cruel and horrible fashion in prison, the king chose twenty judges, animated above all by an ardent hatred for our doctrine, and who, less well educated than the others, greatly surpassed them in cruelty. Invested with a specific charge, they first gave three of our number over to be burned at the stake for the sole reason that (in their own words) they had “abandoned the customs of their ancestors.” These judges did not refer to any scriptural authority; what is more, confounded by numerous citations, they replied only with threats. They continually urged [the prisoners] to recant or suffer the penalty of being burned to death. The three faithful responded that they were ready to retract their beliefs if they were convinced by the evidence of scripture. As they persisted in that attitude, they were publicly burned on September 26, after having their tongues cut out. Two of them were elders of our church, of a remarkable piety and moral purity. They were joined by a woman truly noble by birth and spirit who, animated by an extraordinary ardor, allowed CHAPTER 2: Religious War and the Intensification of Religious Hatreds, 1562–1570 11
Song on the Massacre of Vassy 1562 In a culture in which the large majority of the population was illiterate, songs sung in public venues such as inns and taverns remained an important means of communicating news and stirring up popular opinion. This song celebrates the brutal attack that troops serving Francis, duke of Guise, made on a group of Protestants gathered for worship in a barn outside the town of Vassy, east of Paris, on March 1, 1562. By most accounts, the attack was not premeditated. The duke, stopping for Mass in the town church on his way to Paris with his family, was angered to learn that some five hundred people had assembled for Protestant services in a nearby barn and sent soldiers to order them to disperse. Greeted roughly and promptly evicted, the soldiers responded by gathering troops to attack the Protestant worshippers, who barricaded themselves in the barn and gathered a supply of stones to rain down on the returning soldiers. Stones, however, were a paltry defense against the guns of the duke’s troops, and by the end of the day, some twenty-three worshippers were dead and more than a hundred wounded. Ignoring the Protestant outcry, the duke proceeded on to Paris, where city leaders and residents alike gave him a hero’s welcome.
Honor be to God and to the king our lord, Who protects us from the wrath of malicious Huguenots. They want to kill us, but a day will come When they will be made to die laughing. We have a good lord in this country of France, And a prince of great honor; valiant and humane. He is the duke of Guise, who, by his great mercy, Defended the Holy Mother Church at Vassy. Sunday, March first, Huguenots came from all around To gather in a barn for preaching and feasting On meat and fat lard, like so many rats, Though it was a time for Lenten fasting. And when the good prince of Guise went to hear a Mass, And the priest his vestments were donning, The Huguenots, ignoble toads, rang the bells for worship, Preventing God’s service in the Holy Mother Church. And so Monsieur de Guise said to his gentlemen: Go over there and tell them to have patience, Give us a moment’s peace, so to render God
Grace, honor, and reverence. But the cursed Huguenots did something else instead And replied that they did not have to stop; They struck and molested these noble persons; With cannons and sticks they attacked them basely. Monsieur de Guise went over there in haste, And on those wicked ones took vengeance; He killed most of their party, and his troops By their conquests did something great. 12 FRANÇOIS GRIN A Catholic View of the Surprise of Meaux 1567 The first War of Religion ended in March 1563 with a compromise peace that left both sides dissatisfied. Protestant leaders, convinced that the king was just waiting for a good chance to attack them, provoked the second war by deciding to strike first. The journal left by François Grin (ca. 1536–1611), a monk in Paris’s ancient abbey of Saint-Victor, shows how Catholics interpreted this Huguenot offensive. Friday, September 26, 1567, the town of Montereaux-sur-Yonne was taken by some disturbers of the public peace, otherwise known as Huguenots. The following Saturday, the 27th, by the same persons and their accomplices, the city of Soissons was taken by surprise at four in the morning, during which [events] there were several massacres, churches and abbeys pillaged, and clerics murdered and killed. The same day, at four or five in the evening, the town of Lagny-sur-Marne was similarly taken by the same conspirators, under the leadership of Monsieur Dharles, the abbot of the city’s abbey and a great Huguenot. During the taking of the city, several citizens of Lagny were killed, among them clerics and monks from the abbey, and the abbey was ruined. Sunday, the 28th, at three or four in the afternoon, the city of Orléans was taken by treachery by citizens of the city itself who were rebels and conspirators and enemies of God, the king, and the public peace. They afterward sacked and destroyed and pulled down all of the churches and abbeys in the city, like godless, kingless, and lawless madmen on whom the wrath of God will justly fall one day.
CLAUDE HATON The Execution in Effigy of Gaspard de Coligny 1569 In the summer of 1569, during the third War of Religion, the Parlement of Paris tried the Protestant leader Admiral Gaspard de Coligny in absentia, so that his extensive properties could be confiscated to the profit of a penurious crown. Claude Haton left the following account of the trial and subsequent execution in effigy of Coligny. (Internal evidence suggests that this passage was composed sometime between August 1570, when the Peace of Saint-Germain was announced, and September 1571, when Coligny returned to court.) Haton begins by quoting verbatim the Parlement’s judgment against the admiral and then goes on to recount attempts that were rumored to have been made to collect the reward that the king promised to anyone who could deliver Coligny to him dead or alive. The document is especially interesting on two counts: first, because the acts carried out against the straw effigy in 1569 very closely resemble the punishments to which the admiral’s real body was subjected on Saint Bartholomew’s Day; second, because the man explicitly mentioned as hoping to collect the reward for capturing Coligny was the man commonly believed to have attempted to assassinate him on August 22, 1572, in the incident that touched off the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. “The Parlement of Paris having reviewed the proceedings against Gaspard de Coligny, the so-called admiral of France and lord of Chastillon-sur-Loing, including the evidence against him, the conclusions of the king’s attorney general, and his noncompliance with the summons to appear, the aforesaid court declares him guilty of the crime of lese majesty against God and the king, retracts his titles of nobility, and declares him and his children non-noble and commoners forever. The court further orders that his coat of arms be dragged through the streets of Paris tied to the tail of a horse and that his body be dragged on a pallet through the streets of Paris from the Parlement’s prison to the place de Grève, where it is to be hanged from a gallows and strangled until dead, and his estates, properties, castles, and houses, along with all of his revenues, confiscated to the profit of the king our lord.” The sentence was carried out not on his person, but in effigy.
A straw man was made and dressed in the colors the admiral usually wore, with a face painted to resemble his portrait. It was brought out of the prisons of the Conciergerie and put on a pallet, which was harnessed to a horse to drag, while another horse had [the admiral’s] coat of arms attached to its tail. The effigy and arms were dragged through the city of Paris to the place de Grève, in front of the City Hall, where they were strung up by the executioner and left until after the conclusion of the present peace. I saw them there several times when I was in Paris. When the effigy was spoiled by rain, the admiral’s portrait was painted on a canvas, on which were written his name, family name, titles, and the reason he had been condemned, and the painting was attached with an iron chain to the aforesaid gallows. The straw effigy was taken out to the gallows of Montfaucon, outside the gates of Paris. And from the time of the aforesaid execution, all of [the admiral’s] revenues were seized and turned over to the king, who took the profits and added them to the revenues from his domain. And inasmuch as, despite the above sentence rendered against this rebel of an admiral and his execution in effigy, he did not desist in his rebellion but rather tried to completely overthrow the state of France, the king and the court of Parlement passed the following edict against him: That His Majesty would give ten thousand gold crowns to any persons, of whatever rank or quality they might be, who could apprehend or take him alive so as to turn him over to the law. Even if those who captured him were the worst criminals in the world, His Majesty would forgive their crimes, however grievous and enormous they might be. And if they could not take him alive but killed him dead, His Majesty promised to give them two thousand gold crowns, along with his forgiveness for any crimes, as stated above. This edict was published and posted on the street corners of Paris and in the king’s camp. Once the admiral knew this, he immediately hired a number of men to guard him day and night, so as to avoid being taken in this manner. They were named archers of his guard, and he had them take an oath of loyalty, just as if he were king, and he paid them very well, so as not to be betrayed by them. They served him so faithfully that anyone wanting to capture or kill him could not do so, even though more than a hundred tried, so as to have the king’s forgiveness for their crimes, as well as the money he promised. Among others who tried to execute the aforesaid order and proclamation was Monsieur de Maurevert, a Huguenot nobleman who was in the admiral’s camp and one of the wickedest sorts there. **[Maurevert was] an enterprising man who, once he knew of the king’s proclamation and promise, sought a means to surprise the admiral so as to kill him, in part to have the money but also to regain His Majesty’s favor, because he had left his service voluntarily. He did not dare do so, however, without the right opportunity. One day, he found himself in the presence of the aforesaid admiral and Lord Mouy, who were rather poorly guarded while conferring about the war. Seeing such a good opportunity and thinking to shoot the admiral, [Maurevert] instead killed Mouy, his lieutenant, and fled to the camp of the duke of Anjou, the king’s brother, whom he told of his deed and asked for mercy. And the duke pardoned him and sent him to his brother [the king] to confirm his forgiveness and give him the promised two thousand gold crowns, even though he knew well that the admiral had suffered no harm. Maurevert was well received and paid the aforesaid sum by the king. He took an oath to serve the king faithfully in all his affairs and never to undertake anything against his will.
CHAPTER 3: The Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in Paris and the Provinces The Attempt to Kill Admiral Coligny 15 FRANÇOIS HOTMAN A True and Plain Report of the Furious Outrages of France 1573 After the massacre, Protestant publicists hastened to send accounts of the events in Paris to their allies in other parts of Europe. The following narrative of the wedding of Marguerite of Valois and Henry of Navarre and the initial attempt on Admiral Coligny’s life comes from the first and most widely circulated of these Protestant accounts. Though published anonymously, it has been identified as the work of François Hotman, a distinguished legal scholar who barely escaped with his life when the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre spread to Bourges, where he taught law at the university. First published in Latin, the international language of Europe’s learned elites, the work was translated into French, English, and German in 1573 so as to reach a broader audience. The following excerpt comes from the first English edition. When the day came, the marriage was with royal pomp solemnized before the great Church of Paris, and a certain form of words so framed as disagreed with the Religion of neither side was by the king’s commandment pronounced by the Cardinal of Bourbon, the king of Navarre’s uncle, and so the matrimony celebrated with great joy of the king and all good men, the bride was with great train and pomp led into the church to hear mass, and in the meantime the bridegroom, who disliked these ceremonies, together with Henry Prince of Condé, son of Louis, and the admiral, and other noble men of the same religion, walked without the church door, waiting for the bride’s return.
After the marriage ended at Paris, which was the time that the admiral had appointed to return to his own house, he moved [requested permission from] the king concerning his departure. But so great was the preparation of plays, so great was the magnificence of banquets and shows, and the king so earnestly bent to those matters, that he had no leisure, not only for weighty affairs, but also not so much as to take his natural sleep. For in the French court, dancings, maskings, stage plays (wherein the king exceedingly delights) are commonly used in the night time, and so the time that is fittest for counsel and matters of governance is, by reason of nightly riotous sitting up, of necessity consumed in sleep. So great also is the familiarity of men and the women of the queen mother’s [Catherine de Medici’s] train, and so great liberty of sporting, entertainment, and talking together as to foreign nations may seem incredible and be thought of all honest persons a matter not very convenient for preservation of noble young ladies’ chastity. Moreover, if there come any panderer or bawd out of Italy, or any schoolmaster of shameful and filthy lust, he wins in short time marvelous favor and credit. And such a multitude is there begun to be of Italians commonly throughout all France, specially in the court, since the administration of the realm was committed to the queen mother, that many do commonly call it French-Italian, and some term it a colony, and some a common sink of Italy. These madnesses of the court were the cause that the admiral could not have access to the king’s speech, nor entrance to deal in weighty matters. But when they that were sent from the Reformed churches to complain of injuries commonly done to those of the [Protestant] religion understood of the admiral’s purpose to depart, they did with all speed deliver to him their books and petitions and besought him not to depart from the court till he had dealt with the cause of the churches and delivered their petitions to the king and his council. For this cause the admiral resolved to defer his going for a while, till he might treat with the king’s council concerning those requests, for the king had promised him that he would shortly attend those matters and be present with the council himself. Besides this delay, there was another matter that stayed him. There was owing to the Reiters of Germany, which had served on the part of the Religion in the last war, great sums of money for their wages, in which matter the admiral travailed with incredible earnestness and care.