The Bloody Violence of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre

On August 24, 1572, the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of Protestants by Roman Catholics began in Paris and later spread to the French provinces. An excerpt from the article:

"The Massacre
Coligny was among the first to die. Swiss Guards pulled him from his sickbed and slashed at him with axes before throwing his dead body out the window into the courtyard below. His head was cut off and taken to the Louvre to prove the deed was done.

But the killing didn’t stop there. Soldiers “all went with their men from house to house, wherever they thought they might find Huguenots, breaking down the doors, then cruelling massacring those they encountered, without regard to sex or age,” wrote the Protestant minister Simon Goulart, who took the testimony of survivors not long after the attack.

Catholic Parisians, possibly urged on by militant priests, soon joined in the slaughter. Mobs began targeting Huguenot neighbors, trying to force them to renounce their heresy and murdering them when they refused. Many tried to escape, only to find the city’s gates closed against them.

This mass slaughter went on for three days and stopped only when most of the Huguenots in the city were exterminated. “Carts piled high with the dead bodies of noble ladies, women, girls, men, and boys were brought down and emptied into the river, which was covered with dead bodies and ran red with blood,” Goulart reported. Others were tossed in a well normally used to dispose of animal carcasses.

Violence Spreads
As news of the killings in Paris spread across France, so did the violence. From late August to October, Catholics rose up and launched massacres against Huguenots in Toulouse, Bordeaux, Lyon, Bourges, Rouen, Orléans, Mieux, Angers, La Charité, Saumur, Gaillac, and Troyes.

How many were killed in the massacre has been debated for almost 450 years. Most historians believe around 3,000 were killed in Paris, and perhaps 10,000 nationwide. Others believe it might have been between 20,000 and 30,000. A large number of Huguenot survivors likely converted back to Catholicism for their own protection. Many others emigrated Protestant strongholds outside France.

The Aftermath
However unplanned it may have been, Catholics across Europe viewed the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre as a great victory for the Church. At the Vatican, the killings were celebrated by Pope Gregory XIII with special masses of thanksgiving and a commemorative medal honoring Ugonottorum strages 1572 (“Slaughter of the Huguenots, 1572”). In Spain, King Philip II was said to have laughed for one of the only times in memory upon hearing the news.

The Fourth War of Religion broke out in November 1572 and ended the following summer in the Edict of Boulogne. Under the new treaty, Huguenots were given amnesty for past acts and were granted freedom of belief. But the edict ended almost all the rights given in the Peace of Saint Germain, and restricted most Protestants from actually practicing their religion. Fighting between Catholics and the dwindling Protestant population would continue for another quarter-century until the signing of the Edict of Nantes in 1598."