Peter Conroy

Saint Bartholomew

Chicago Literary Club, 25 January 2010

 

Saint Bartholomew is the title of my paper. Bartholomew was one of the original twelve Apostles. Little mention of him is found in the Gospels, and nothing that he said is recorded there. According to tradition he evangelized in Armenia and was martyred in Baku, Azerbaijan in a most cruel manner. He was tortured and flayed to death: that means his skin was peeled off and entirely removed from his body. Iconographically we recognize statues and pictures of him because he is represented with the tools of his martyrdom, a large knife and his skin draped like a cloak over his arm. Bartholomew himself is not however the topic of my talk this evening, although the particularly grueling manner of his martyrdom is apropos. I am interested in his feast day, which is August 24. More particularly I am interested in that date in 1572, a date known in French as “le Saint Barthélémy,” the horrific massacre of Saint Bartholomew’s Day.    

          France was not immune to the religious hatreds that divided almost all of Europe in the 16th century and that we know today as the Wars of Religion. The Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre was however the most deadly of many battles and aggressions  that divided France and bloodied her soil throughout the second part of the sixteenth century.

          After breaking with Catholicism, Protestants in France were demanding the right to exercise their religion freely and without constraint. Called Huguenots, they belonged to a particularly austere version of Calvinism.[1] Accepting only what they found in the Bible, the Huguenots were adamantly opposed to what they considered Catholic deviations from Christian orthodoxy. And they were prepared to support their beliefs with armed violence. They rejected, for example, the entire cult of Mary, the Virgin Mother of God, which was an essential element in Catholicism. Nor did they believe in saints: when they attacked Catholic churches, they systematically disfigured their statues as idolatrous. They called the Pope the Antichrist. If forced to take communion, they would spit out the host which Catholics considered the real body and blood of Christ.

          The Catholics, in accordance with the political theory of the time, believed that a single state could have only one religion, a theory neatly summed up in the phrase “one king, one nation, one religion” or its Latin equivalent “cujus regio ejus religio.” They regarded Huguenots as a possible fifth column, potential traitors whose first loyalty would be to Protestant England, their traditional enemy, and to its Queen Elisabeth. Some of the Catholic attitude can be seen in their designation of Protestantism as the RPR, la religion prétendue reformée (the supposed reformed religion). No less than the Huguenots, the Catholics were ready to defend their faith by force of arms.

          Geographically, the Huguenots were strongest in the south and southwest. The latter region especially had a tradition of religious dissention and rebelliousness. The fifth century heresy, Albigensianism, took its name from the town of Albi which is in that area. The Catholics were strongest in the north, especially in Paris, and in the east, in the province of Lorraine near the Rhine.

          Religious dissension between French Protestants and Catholics had begun in the early years of the sixteenth century. However, strong kings were able to keep this religious dissonance in check. Both François I and Henri II kept a firm hand on the reins of government. Henri died in a freak accident in 1559, however. During a friendly jousting match, part of a shattered lance penetrated his eye and skull. He died leaving a 16 year old as successor, François II. Sickly and inexperienced, François was immediately besieged by advisors and various courtiers pulling him in diverse directions. François was married to Mary Stuart, the Catholic Queen of Scotland, who was experiencing her own difficulties with Elizabeth, the Queen of England. François died after one year on the throne, and was followed by another youngster, Charles IX, who was only ten at the time. His mother, Catherine de Medici, stepped in as Regent because Charles was too young to rule in his own name.

          Dissentions not to say violent conflict between Protestants and Catholics overflowed immediately into this power vacuum defined by an under-age monarch and a foreign (and therefore distrusted) Queen Mother as Regent. In addition to being immature and inexperienced, Charles was frail both physically and mentally. Under these stressful conditions his weaknesses were magnified.  Making his situation even more difficult was the fact that the French royal court seethed with intrigue and infighting. Instability around the throne compounded the religious tensions and vice versa. Armed conflict between Protestants and Catholics broke out in 1560 and continued until a definitive peace was established in 1598.

          Historians count up to eight separate wars in this 38 year period, with no interval of peace lasting longer than a few years. To make bad matters worse, there were three not two sides in this nearly continuous warfare.

          Because Charles tried to pacify Catholics and Protestants, he and the Queen Mother were denounced by both sides for partisanship. Even though he was king, Charles was not supreme because his military and political powers were limited by powerful families who were nominally dependant but in fact co-equal or even superior to him in military strength and financial resources. One such family was the Guise from the mighty House of Lorraine in eastern France. They were committed to continuing Catholic domination and eliminating all Protestants. Mary Stuart was their niece. When she became Queen of France, the Guise family assumed a position of power and influence at the court that they were determined to never lose. All their thinking and policies were fanatically pro-Catholic.

          Staunch, intransigent, and dour Calvinists, the Huguenots demanded the right to worship as they pleased despite the Catholic hegemony. According to Marshall Dill[2], a “good proportion of the nobility and probably a majority of the middle class had converted to Calvin’s teachings. The great bulk of the French people remained steadfastly Catholic …” If Catholics were from the lower classes and more numerous, the Protestants were wealthier and more influential. Historians estimate that there were two million Protestants, a bit more than 10% of the total population of 18 millions. The Amiral Gaspard de Coligny was their leader.

          The Queen Mother and the King formed the third side, a moveable middle that favored one part of the opposition and then another as it served their own best interests, as defined by Catherine. A master at this political game, Catherine dominated her neurotic and emotionally unstable

son Charles.

          Catherine has been judged harshly by subsequent historians, but probably not as harshly as her contemporaries who regarded her as treacherous, deceitful, and power-hungry. Very superstitious, she indulged in occult rituals and regularly consulted astrologers. As a young woman she was told she would be the wife of one king and the mother of three others. Anxious to believe so flattering a prophecy, especially as the details proved true one after the other, she became wildly protective of her sons and was prepared to do anything to help them. It was commonly thought that she trafficked in poisons and used them against her enemies. Poisoning was a difficult crime to prove back then. Hence in the popular imagination it only became more fearsome and suspicions of it more credible. The reasons are not hard to find. Death was an ever present scourge that struck without warning. This was an age that largely ignored the most basic sanitary practices so that infectious diseases, especially air-born ones, spread easily. Both men and women ate and drank to excess. The medical profession had but a rudimentary grasp on the causes of non-violent death, either immediate illnesses (infection, stroke, heart attack) or long-range pathologies (chronic diseases, major organ failure). Poison was an easy diagnosis for sudden, apparently inexplicable deaths, especially in the political domain.

          The pattern for these wars was always the same. A single incident, an armed confrontation between the two factions, each of which had its own army, would provoke additional conflicts that would endure two, three, or more years and then subside in a tenuous peace that would last only until the next incident.

          In 1560 the Protestants organized what became known as the “conspiracy of Amboise,” a plot to assassinate Catholic leaders. It was led by a Protestant nobleman, La Renaudie, and it was to take place in the chateau of Amboise on the Loire river. The plot was discovered, the conspirators arrested. Only their leader Louis I de Bourbon, Prince de Condé escaped. Some of the captured Huguenots were hanged from the terrace of the chateau, others decapitated, cut into pieces, and thrown into the river. The event is still recounted during visits to the chateau. The Michelin green tourist guide retells the story and provides a contemporary depiction of the event. The Catholics took further revenge in March 1562. François de Guise, the leader of the principal Catholic clan, surprised about a hundred Protestants who, forbidden to worship inside their city limits, were attending religious services in an open field. He gathered them in a barn at Wassy, then burned it down.

          Later that same year Guise kidnapped Charles and Catherine while they were at Fontainbleau. His ostensible reason was to protect them from possible Protestant violence. In fact, he intended to keep them prisoners. He led them back to Paris, giving the appearance that the King and his Regent supported the Catholics over the Protestants. The following year François was assassinated while attending a meeting of the Estates General (a kind of national parliament) at Orléans.

          On 8 August 1570, the peace treaty known as the Edit de Saint Germain was negotiated. It granted the Protestants some religious freedom as well as civil authority over several cities, like La Rochelle on the Atlantic coast, where they were in the majority. Shortly thereafter, Coligny, the leader of the Protestants and the head of the Chatillon family, returned to the Louvre, the royal palace, and took up his duties as close advisor to the King. Immediately the Catholics denounced this as favoritism. They feared his strong influence over the king, who often referred to Coligny as his father. In addition, Coligny wanted to bring France into a war against Spain. The Protestant Spanish Netherlands were in revolt against the Catholic king of Spain, Philip II. French Catholics did not want to antagonize their co-religionists and ally to the south, which had the most powerful army of that period. Nor did they want to offer any aid to the Dutch house of Orange on their northern border, which was allied to their traditional enemy, England

          The Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre was not the final episode in these religious wars. On the contrary, it happened almost in the middle and was the highpoint of these paroxysms of hatred. As the most violent, the most bloody, and the most devastating of these calamities, it exemplifies the partisan passions involved in these wars.

          Almost unbelievably given the intensity of the passions involved, one moment of possible reconciliation was found in 1572. To confirm the royal policy of peace and reconciliation proclaimed in the treaty of 1570, the royal family announced the marriage of their daughter, the princess Margaret (better known to history as la Reine Margot), to one of the Protestant leaders, Henri de Navarre. I have to warn you that here we are dealing with a number of Henri: Henri, Duc d’Anjou, who will become King Henri III of France in 1574 when his brother Charles dies; Henri, the Protestant King of Navarre; and Henri de Guise, son of the assassinated François, leader of the Catholic faction.

          Navarre was a small independent kingdom in the Pyrenees mountains that ran along the Spanish border. France was not yet unified and areas that would subsequently become part of France the hexagon were still separate. At this time, marriages, especially royal ones, were not matters of love, but rather of politics, analogous to treaties and other alliances. Neither Navarre nor Margot had any sentimental attachment to each other; both freely and notoriously engaged in amorous liaisons and flagrant infidelities. Henri de Guise and Margot were in fact at this time lovers. It was widely believed also that she had sexual relations with one or all of her brothers. But love had nothing to do with her marriage to Navarre. Their wedding was meant to seal the peace between Protestants and Catholics, reconcile the two parties, and end the divisions the war had created. The hopes of the nation, at least that part of it that wanted reconciliation and peace, focused on Margot and Henri.

          Placing their confidence in a truce and the promise of safe conduct that would protect those who attended this wedding, all the Protestant leaders converged on Paris with a large number of retainers, friends, and even family members. The city was overcrowded and did not have enough rooms to loge all its VIP guests who numbered in the thousands. The most prominent were lodged at the Louvre, near the bride and groom. Others were spread throughout the city, taking over all the accommodations available in taverns, inns, and auberges. Others moved in with friends and relatives living in Paris. Not all could sleep in the city. These visitors were obliged to stay outside the city walls in neighborhoods called faubourgs (false cities) or suburbs.

          Like so many other cities of the time, Paris still had defensive fortifications. They ringed what is now central Paris, approximately the first through fifth arrondissements. They dated back to the fortifications built by Philippe Auguste between 1180 and 1210 and the additions of Charles V in the 1390s. Jumping ahead of my story, I’ll add that by the end of the seventeenth century, militarily useless, they had fallen into ruin. Louis XIV had what remained razed and built in their place open, grassy areas called “boulevards,” which was at that time a military term for ramparts, from the Dutch bolwerc, which has given us the English bulwark. Whatever remained of Louis’ boulevards was enlarged in the 1850s when Baron Haussmann built his famous “grands boulevards,” which were wide, tree-lined streets, the moden meaning of the term.

          Back now to 1572: the Bastille would have been part of the eastern section of these fortifications, while the Tuileries lay just outside the western wall. Les Champs Elysées, as their name indicates, were in the fields, outside the walls. To the north the line would have followed the present day boulevards Haussman, Saint Denis, Saint Martin to the Place de la République. On the south the wall ran just behind what is now the church of Saint Etienne du Mont and the Sorbonne. Present-day monuments like the Sainte Madeleine church and the old Opera (the Palais Garnier) would have been outside the wall, as would the Assemblée Nationale and the Luxemburg Gardens south of the Seine.

          Numerous festivities and celebrations marked the last weeks of August. The wedding itself took place on the 18th,  after the official engagement on the 17th. Paris was suffering through a heat wave that made the city a stifling oven. Parisians had cleaned the streets of the garbage which usually floated odoriferously in the near permanent rivulets that flowed in their center. Banners and flags hung from windows and balconies. Temporary but elaborate triumphal arches, constructed out of wood for this single occasion, spanned many streets.

          The wedding procession began in the courtyard of the Louvre and proceeded east toward l’Hotel de Ville, situated on the Place de Grève. This public square was so named because it was a low lying embankment (grève means bank) that sloped down to the edge of the Seine. This large open area provided the etymology for the term “being on strike” (faire la grève) since unemployed workers would mill about there waiting for work. Construction of the municipal building in the middle had been started in 1533 but was still incomplete. The current Hotel de Ville is a late nineteenth century replica of the original design by Dominico da Cortona.

          Before reaching the Place de Grève, however, the cortege turned onto the Rue Saint Denis, the traditional path for royal entries into Paris and other solemn processions. Even main streets were narrow and first floor windows were only slightly higher than the heads of those passing on horseback. Such close proximity gave the parade intimacy while augmenting its spectacular impact. The procession then crossed over to the Ile de la Cité on the Pont Notre Dame, where a bridge had existed since Gallo-Roman times. The oldest extant bridge in Paris today, the Pont Neuf, was still not yet built. It then continued the short distance to the parvis or large open space in front of Notre-Dame Cathedral.

          Crowds lined the path of the royal procession. Henri de Guise was greeted with shouts and hurrahs because Paris, even though it had a significant Protestant minority, was a rabidly Catholic town. Henri de Navarre would not have been so positively welcomed, despite the magnificent yellow silk  suit he was wearing, but he was riding next to Charles, similarly dressed in yellow, and the enthusiastic crowds dared not to appear to boo their King. Queen Margot was loudly acclaimed too: she was a great beauty and popular with the crowd despite her scandalous reputation.

         The marriage was celebrated in great pomp and splendor. A huge platform had been erected in front of the cathedral’s main doorway. There the royal couple knelt and exchanged vows. Behind  and around them unfurled a sea of brilliant colors. Catholics were resplendent in the rich, vivid colors of their elaborate and costly garments: red and green brocades, dark and light blue costumes, yellow silks, satins, with precious jewels and pearls sewn on the ladies’ robes with golden thread. In stark and sober contrast, the austere, unsmiling Protestants formed large masses of somber black. Their frugal and dull garb was enlivened only slightly by a white lace collar or cuff.

          Margot refused to say “yes” to the question “do you take Henri …” She remained silent the second time it was asked. Sitting behind her with the rest of the royal family, her brother Charles rose up and pushed her face forward. The presiding prelate accepted Margot’s forced inclination as affirmation.

          The exchange of vows took place outside the church because as a Protestant Henri refused to enter it. These preliminaries over, the Catholics paraded into the cathedral to hear mass while the Huguenots milled about outside. Inside Notre Dame was resplendent. At least a dozen bishops assisted at the mass, elaborate golden chasubles or copes on their shoulders, a tall miter on their head, and a crosier in their right hand. The latter was an elaborate modification of a simple shepherd’s crook that symbolized the bishops’ authority and their role as shepherds of their flock. The nave was filled with the same scintillating colors as outside, but now no black patches dulled the spectacle. Like Henri, the Huguenot guests chose to remain outside.

          After the wedding, a number of festivities and banquets took place. The Duc d’Anjou (the future Henri III) gave a huge ball in honor of his sister at his own palace. Aristocrats, both Protestant and Catholic, joined in the drinking and games there, at the Louvre, and at other noble residences. The general public was also treated to food and drink at several venues throughout the city like the Place de Grève. The public entertainments included the usual treats: bear-baiting, dog and cock fights, tight-rope walkers, acrobats, jugglers, fire eaters. With glee and abandon the lower classes gave in to the rowdy behavior induced by the wine, the entertainment, and the intoxication inspired by the close proximity --this is the original definition of “promiscuity”-- of both sexes. Aristocrats didn’t mind slumming and joined in these public balls too.

          The intransigent on both sides could not be mollified by these public examples of tolerance and reconciliation, however. On August 22, even as the last of these celebrations finally ended, Coligny, the Huguenot leader, was shot as he walked toward the Louvre for his daily audience with Charles. His arm was shattered and he lost a few fingers, but he did survive. He was carried to his lodgings and received immediate medical attention. The Huguenots angrily accused the king of treachery. The following morning Charles and Catherine hurried to Coligny’s bed to check on his recovery and to reassure the Huguenots that they were not complicit in the attack. Nonetheless the Huguenots were skeptical and continued to demand vociferously that the attacker be punished.

          He was never found, but historians today agree that his name was Maurevel (Maurevert), a fanatic Catholic and a soldier in the pay of the Guise. Who hired him to assassinate Coligny is less clear and more open to speculation.

          What is perfectly clear is that the royal council did meet on the 23rd. The members decided to execute a preemptory strike against the Huguenots who, they feared, would attack the Catholics in their anger over the attempt on Coligny’s life and the failure to find the culprit. At first, the decision was limited to a dozen or so Huguenot leaders. But the list grew. As his own mental state reached the breaking point, Charles screamed “kill them all” so no one would be left to accuse him of the crime. The source for that information is Henri, Duc d’Anjou, Charles’s brother, and one of the participants in those council deliberations.

          If the ultimate decision to launch the attack was only made on the 23rd, there can be no doubt that it, or something like it, had been planned a long time in advance. The preparations were too thorough, their execution too efficient for it to have been spontaneous.

          During the night of the 23rd to the 24th, Saint Bartholomew’s Day, the massacre began. The signal to launch the attack was the tolling of the bells just after midnight at Saint Germain l’Auxerois, the church in front of the Louvre and thus the King’s own parish church. The doors or portes in the fortified walls were locked to prevent any Huguenots from escaping. The Swiss guards at the Louvre were already armed. So were the large retinues that always accompanied both Anjou and Guise. Weapons --knives, swords, muskets, and pistols-- were distributed to the Parisian bourgeois, who did have some military training as the city’s militia. Catholics sewed a white cross on their hats or white arm bands on their jackets to identify themselves in the coming combat. Houses and other lodgings that were safely Catholic had a white cross marked on the door. Doors without the cross were thus identified as harboring Huguenots.

          Taken unawares despite the Coligny incident and after days of partying, the Huguenots were easy targets. As dawn broke, armed bands of Catholic soldiers and Parisian bourgeois knocked on the doors where Protestants were staying. When they answered, they were dragged into the street, where they were stabbed or shot to death.  Others were surprised in their beds and cut down before they could reach their own weapons. Given all the noise and confusion generated by the merrymaking from the wedding, these executions at first passed unnoticed. Men, women, and children --numerous families were in Paris for the wedding-- were murdered without pity. Not only the Protestants from the provinces, but even those who were residents in Paris were slaughtered. Parisian bourgeois seized this opportunity to settle old debts and antagonisms with their neighbors, both Huguenot and Catholic.

          Located on the Pont aux Changes were both the shops and the dwellings of the city’s Catholic goldsmiths. Jewelers often functioned as pawn brokers, hence the name for their street Exchange Bridge. This was too easy and too tempting a target. Looters pillaged the shops, killed whatever jewelers they found, and dumped their bodies off the bridge and into the Seine. Pierre de la Ramée, usually called Ramus, the Latinized version of his name, was a Huguenot and an eminent mathematician. Out of his personal fortune he had endowed a chair of mathematics at the university. After two days of hiding in a cellar, he was found, killed, and cut into pieces by students pushed to violence by another scholar named Charpentier. This jealous rival was the current holder of the chair Ramus had endowed. Thus the scholarly and generous Huguenot was assassinated by the man whose salary he was paying.

          Troops under the direction of Guise went to Coligny’s dwelling and dragged the wounded man out of bed. He was shot and run through with swords. Then he was thrown from the window of his upstairs room. Later, marauding crowds discovered the dead body and mutilated it, cutting off his head and his private parts. What remained was thrown into the Seine.

          Inside the Louvre the same slaughter was taking place, with the Swiss guards using their long pikes. Dead bodies were carried out of the building, stripped naked, and piled up in the courtyard. Later they too were thrown into the Seine so that the river did literally run red with blood. According to legend, Charles and Catherine watched the bloodshed from a balcony window.

          Few Huguenots survived. Henri de Navarre was safe at the Louvre because he was now the King‘s brother-in-law. Both Margot and Charles defended him and saved him from execution. Only one other prominent Huguenot, Louis de Condé, was spared because he was a prince of the blood (a close royal relative).

          Thus the Protestant elite disappeared over night. Huguenots who had not been able to find lodging in Paris proper were marginally luckier because, being outside the walls, it took longer for the Catholics to reach them. Once the flood gates were opened, the flow of blood continued unchecked and unabated. The slaughter in Paris lasted three days. Signs of the massacre were evident and widespread: doors ripped off their hinges, homes ransacked, windows broken. Streets were littered with the booty looters had left behind: pieces of furniture thrown about, chests split open, empty wardrobes, clothes strewn here and there. Day and night marauders wandered through the city, searching for the last bit of plunder, ready to attack anyone not wearing the white cross or armband. Bodies, stripped naked, that had not been thrown into the Seine piled up in the streets. As they decayed in the summer heat, these cadavers were devoured by stray dogs and rats.

          From Paris the massacres spread to provincial cities. The last atrocities ended in mid-October. At least three thousand Huguenots were killed in Paris in those first three days, another seven thousand in the provinces. Some historians think that the real total might have been as high as twenty to thirty thousand. After the massacres, there were wholesale conversions and massive emigration. The number of remaining Huguenots dropped precipitously. In Rouen, there were 16,500 Protestants before Saint Bartholomew’s Day; a year later, 3,000. 

          As a point of comparison we might mention that on 9/11 approximately 3,000 Americans were lost in the Twin Towers out of a population of 300 million. Three thousand Huguenots in Paris alone were lost in the Saint Bartholomew’s massacre out of a total Protestant population of two million.

          The Protestant leadership was totally decimated. Although  Henri de Navarre did survive, he was kept prisoner in the Louvre. To save his own life, he was obliged to renounce Protestantism, acknowledge that it was a heretical religion, and convert to Catholicism. 

          When word of the Saint Barthélémy reached Rome, Pope Gregory XIII had a Te Deum sung, which is a hymn of thanksgiving. Supposedly he was also sent Coligny’s severed head as a trophy. When the news reached Madrid, Philip II, Charles’s brother-in-law, said it was the happiest day of his life. In Paris, in the cemetery of the Saints Innocents (the Holy Innocents), which used to be not far from today’s Forum des Halles, a hawthorn bush, which normally blooms only in the spring, burst into flower in these final days of August. Parisians saw in this flowering bush a sign that God had blessed their efforts. They considered it a miracle that validated the massacre.

          Of course, the massacre did not succeed in eliminating all the French Protestants or in making the Catholics supreme. Henri de Navarre finally escaped from the Louvre in January 1576. In February he renounced his new religion and took up arms again in the Protestant cause.

          After the massacre, the cycle of provocation and revenge continued. Charles died in May 1574, tortured and debilitated by regrets about le Saint Barthélémy. Perhaps he was poisoned. His brother Anjou succeeded him as Henri III.

          As the brutally fanatic Catholic Ligue grew more powerful under the leadership of Guise, Henri III began to sympathize more with the Protestants. Exhausted by the religious fanaticism that was devastating the country and despite his own culpable involvement in the Saint Barthélémy, Henri now wanted to reconcile his countrymen and bring peace to the nation. On 12 May 1588 King Henri was chased out of Paris by the most intransigent and bellicose Catholics, who denounced him as too indulgent toward the Huguenots. Their passions had been fanned to white heat by zealots in the Church hierarchy, especially monks who were preaching hatred and conflict.

          On 22 December 1588, Henri de Guise, le Balafré (Scarface) was attending another meeting of the Estates General at Blois. He was hoping that the Estates would elect him to replace the king, Henri. At about 6’4” Guise was an imposing figure, a giant, especially at that time when the average man’s stature was not above 5’5”. As he crossed a large room and headed toward Henri sitting at the far end, he was attacked and killed by a half dozen assailants. Visitors today can visit the room where the event took place and listen to the guide’s vivid retelling of it.

          When Henri III’s last brother Alençon had died in 1584, he realized that the Valois family reign was doomed to end. His three brothers had all died without a male heir. As a notorious homosexual, Henri himself was unlikely to have a child. He did, however, want to maintain the royal lineage and not let it default to a distant blood line like the Guise. Hence, out of favor with the militant Catholics, he finally acknowledged his cousin Henri de Navarre as his legitimate successor on 30 April 1589.

          Shortly thereafter, the king was himself assassinated by a rabid Catholic monk, Jacques Clement. Extreme Catholic leaders in Paris had called for Henri’s death; priests and monks preached the virtues, not to say the moral duty, of regicide. Henri de Navarre became in theory the king of France on 1 August 1589.

          A few more military victories were needed to validate Navarre’s claim to the crown. Legends were born in these battles. At Ivry, 14 March 1590, at a decisive moment in the midst of intense fighting, Henri rallied his troops to victory by calling out “Suivez mon panache blanc” (Follow my white plume). He then led a decisive charge in this most ostentatious headgear.

          Battlefield victories were not sufficient, however. In the basilica of Saint Denis, Navarre once against changed religion, re-converting back to Catholicism on 25 July 1593. His comment on his (re)conversion has become famous as an example of Realpolitik: “Paris is surely worth going to mass for.” (Paris vaut bien une messe)  

          On 22 March 1594 Navarre entered Paris at the head of his victorious army. Fanaticism on both sides had finally worn itself out; cooler and calmer heads began to prevail. So Henri’s re-conversion to Catholicism combined with his military victories made him a king acceptable to the Catholic majority.

          His accession to the throne marked the end of the Valois dynasty. Joining his own kingdom to France, Henri de Navarre became Henri IV and initiated the Bourbon line of Louis XIII, XIV, XV, and XVI, which lasted until the Revolution and the abolition of the monarchy in 1793. Almost immediately, Henri brought peace to the country with a policy of generous pardons for former enemies and wide-ranging, effective economic reforms. Quickly becoming prosperous after half a century of war and strife, France easily forgot its religious disagreements. Henri promulgated the Edict of Nantes in 1598, which is one of the great documents about religious tolerance. It wrote into law the freedom to worship and tolerance for individual religious beliefs, while it removed public and official onus for those professing Protestantism. This was landmark legislation for its time, a model for enlightened political arbitration of religious differences. It was abolished a century later by Louis XIV, a decision usually regarded as one of his worst. Its repeal opened a period of narrow-minded thinking that led to economic hardship, increasing civic acrimony, a debilitating Huguenot diaspora, all of which were underlying causes of the Revolution of 1789.

          Thus out of the horrific slaughter of Saint Bartholomew’s Day was born an egalitarian society that placed nationhood before confessional allegiance and that valued citizenship over religious identity. The hatreds that afflicted France then are not too different from those that bedevil the whole world today. In too many countries now horrible cruelties are inflicted by men on their fellow men in the name of God and religion. Let us hope that reflecting upon Saint Bartholomew martyred so cruelly and his feast day that marks so terrible an example of religious fanaticism will help us find peace and sanity in the midst of our own religious crises.


[1]  The origins of the term Huguenot  deserve some discussion. Many of today’s reference books point to  Eidgenossen (confederate), the term used to describe French-speaking Genevans when they joined the Swiss Federation. However, this etymology was discredited as long ago as 1910 in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which proposed several alternatives. The name of a prominent Swiss leader and Calvinist was Hugues, who died in  1533. According to the sixteenth-century historian Henri Estienne, the word would refer to the Porte de Hugues (gate of Hugo) in Tours, where these Protestants gathered. The word huguenote existed already in the fifteenth century and designated a small earthenware pot with a long handle, in English a pipkin.

[2] Marshall Dill, Jr, Paris in Time (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons,  1975), p. 57.