France > French History > Wars of Religion > Saint Bartholomew Massacre

French History - Wars of Religion, St Bartholomew Massacre

Part 2, 1572 - 1588

The St Bartholomew Massacre: On the 24th August 1572, forces acting for the King executed several thousand Huguenots in Paris. These included Coligny, the nobleman that Catherine de Medici had tried to have assassinated. In the days that followed a further 20,000 Huguenots were tracked down and executed.

Rarely to this day has such a sytematic 'witchhunt' been as rapid and brutal as those few days in 1572.

It was also a turning point for the Huguenots, until that point generally as peace-loving as was possible in those turbulent times. From  the time of the St Bartholomew Massacre things changed, with the Huguenots newly enthused to battle against a church that they now saw as being dominated by the devil.

This launched the fourth and fifth civil wars, until in 1576 the Huguenots were granted freedom to worship anywhere in France except Paris.

But history repeats itself, and the Catholics formed a Holy League, and succeeded in convincing Henry III - Henry III, the younger brother of Francis II and Charles IX had taken the throne in 1576 - that he should repeal the earlier freedoms. Inevitably this led to a further Huguenot uprising, a further peace agreement (that Henry III failed to carry out), and further civil wars.

Saint Bartholomew Day Massacre, 1572

But the wars were now being fought between two almost fanatical opposed groups, and it was not at all clear how a solution could emerge. Henry III, like Catherine de Medici before him, tried to find compromise positions among and between the less radical groups.

In 1584 Henry III acknowledged that Henry of Navarre, a protestant, would be his heir. This prompted Henri de Guise to renew the Holy League, and a new civil war began (1585 - 1589). This time with the help of Philip II of Spain, the Catholic extremists took control of France, drove the King out of Paris, and again set forth on a series of terrible massacres of ordinary citizens.