In Our Time - St Bartholomew's Day Massacre

Episode Date: November 27, 2003

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the infamous St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. In Paris, in the high summer of 1572, a very unusual wedding was happening in the cathedral of Notre Dame. Henri, the young Huguenot King of Navarre, was marrying the King of France’s beloved sister, Margot, a Catholic. Theirs was a union designed to bring together the rival factions of France and finally end the French Wars of Religion. Paris was bustling with Huguenots and Catholics and, though the atmosphere was tense, the wedding went off without a hitch. And as they danced together at the Louvre, it seemed that the flower of French nobility had finally come together to bury its differences.That wasn’t to be: on St Bartholomew’s Day, four days after the ill-starred nuptials, so many Protestants were killed in the streets of Paris that the River Seine ran red with their blood. Was the wedding a trap? Who was to blame for the carnage and what impact did it have on the Reformation in Europe?With Diarmaid MacCulloch, Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford University and author of a new book: Reformation: Europe’s House Divided 1490-1700; Mark Greengrass, Professor of History at the University of Sheffield; Penny Roberts, Lecturer in History at the University of Warwick.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk, forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, in Paris, in the high summer of 1572, a very unexpected wedding was taking place in the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Henry, the young Huguenot, Protestant, King of Navarre, was marrying the King of France's beloved sister Margot, a Catholic.

Those was a union designed to bring together the rival factions of France, and finally end the French wars of religion. Paris was bustling with Protestants and Catholics, and though the atmosphere was tense, the wedding went off calmly. As they danced together at the Louvre, it seemed that the flower of French nobility had finally come together to bury its differences.

That wasn't to be. On St. Bartholomew's day, four days after the ill-starred nuptials, so many Protestants were slaughtered in the streets of Paris that the River Seine, it said, ran red with their blood. Was the wedding a trap? Who was to blame for the carnation?

and what impact did it have on the Reformation in Europe and on the North-South Division of Europe? With me to discuss the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre is Dermann McCulloch, Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford University, and author of a new book, Reformation, Europe's House Divided, Mark Greengrass, Professor of History at Sheffield University, and Penny Roberts, lecture in history at Warwick University. Dermann McCulloch, can you give us some idea of the strength of the Protestant Huguenot community in France at the time of the wedding in 1572, and where it was based. The Reformation, let's say, kicked off in 1517 with Luther, and now we're in the 1560s and 70s in Paris.

Yeah, so we've had about half a century of this great European-wide revolution, which started in Germany, but now we're in France, and with a second wave of this Reformation, the Reformation sort of stalled in the 1550s in Europe, but then suddenly there's a huge wave of popular enthusiasm of great swathes of Europe, and France was part of that picture. So in the 1560s, big, popular uprisings in France, but supported by many of the nobility.

So by 1572, you haven't got a majority of Protestants in France, but you have a very strong, aggressive, well-motivated minority in strategic bits of French society, towns, cities, but particularly the nobility with powerful backing from someone like the King of Navarre. Can we see this in one way? Is it too cynical and too looking back and easy to say the warring nobility, the warring aristocracy in France, it wasn't as centralised as this country then was, England, England. The war and mobility almost seized on this division

as an opportunity to intensify their wars with each other. There's no doubt that nobility did take that line. They took sides because they wanted power. But there's far more to the Reformation than that. I mean, if we try and write off the Reformation as just politics by another means, that's not going to work. Here is a set of vibrant ideas which sees people, which of course get mixed up with all sorts of other motives. But you've really got to take the religion seriously. This is about ideas.

It's not just about who's going to be top dog. Ideas to do with... Can we break some... Come into the two principles. Is this to do the way the mass is received and the idolatry issue? Well, the basic point is how you're going to be saved. That's why Martin Luther caused all the fuss in the first place, and that's why John Calvin and his success has created such a fuss in France.

How are you going to be saved? Are you going to go with the old church and its ways of salvation, for instance, the mass, the saints around the mass, or are you going to say that, no, there's nothing that you and I can do as human beings to save ourselves? We rely on God. God gives us a gift of salvation by grace, and he justifies us, he makes us saved by grace. That's what Protestants say.

And if you say that, that means that the whole of the church's structures are irrelevant, not just irrelevant, but wicked. They're cheats, their contracts. That's what the Protestants are saying. And that is what is so explosive about the Reformation. By 1570, the lines were beginning to be drawn. Northern Europe's going to be Protestant. Southern Europe's going to be Catholic. But France is in the middle ground.

It's part of a great wave right across the continent, which could go either way. Mark Greengrass, can you take us through the troubles in France which brought us up to the wedding in 1572? We're talking about religious civil wars. Can you just give us something about that? French history in the 16th century breaks into two broad brocks. The first half of the 16th century, associated with the French Renaissance, is a period of enormous monarchical revival of successful and unsuccessful foreign wars of expansionism.

And France, very much as the hexagon as we know it, is put together in that, period after the Hundred Years' War and before 1559. 1559 is traditionally seen as the Great Rupter, and indeed, in a series of ways, it really is a significant rupture. What caused the rupture? Is that the death by this strange accident in a tournament? Exactly. Henry II is killed in a terrible accident.

At the end of a tournament, a celebration at court, Lance breaks through his visor, and it goes into his brain and two, three days later, he's dead. Why does that matter? Well, France is held together by its monarchy. In many ways it's a huge kingdom, 20 million people getting on for a large number of provinces, different dialects, different languages even.

What holds it all together is a monarchy whose expansionism and court, very large court, drives it into a kind of unity in a sense of purpose. With the death of Henry II, you not only have a king who's technically of age, as the French say, to say, capable of ruling the kingdom with advice, but he's an adolescent, and he has to take the advice for counsel, and that council is open to, exactly, Francois II, Francis II. He doesn't last long, and his brother, his even younger brother, is definitely a minor,

so that you have the prospect, Charles, yes, exactly, Charles the 9th, you have the prospect of a very long minority with the faction problems that that causes. is in addition and related, the French monarchy is bankrupt. The Saxon and foreign wars have meant that the gravy train that's kept the French nobility, in particular the term it was mentioning, on side, is no longer sufficient to keep them on side, and the battle factions are drawing up. There's an additional component that we need to put into the pub.

The threat of Protestantism tore France apart and the sectarian troubles, which begin not a few years before 1572, but a whole decade and more before 1572, they really start in 1560, and there are proto. Because again to re-emphasise, the Protestants were destroying the life of the Catholics, destroying not in their afterlife, but their present life and their meaning in life.

Absolutely, and they were also destroying the raison d'être of the monarchy itself, which is based in Catholic ritual and so on. So the whole issues of power as well as salvation come inextricably linked in the early 1560s. And the proto-masacres that take place in the 1560s really set the scene for what happens on the ground as far as we can see, determine it in 1572 in the massacre of some Bartholomew, the arch massacres.

So the building up of massacres and the assassinations going on. Penny Roberts, we have Catherine and Medici as the regent when Charles, the 10-year-old boy in 1560, Catherine and Medici rather curiously coming at the same time as Elizabeth I. Catherine and Medici, Italian, Medici, therefore we assume sort of poisoning and venality and corruption, so Machiavellian and a woman, of course.

She is central to the St. Bath, all amused their massacre, and there's a great dispute about her role. But can you tell us, in 1560, she has this boy, her son, and there's another son in waiting. What her policy, how does she try to manage the situation?

Well, I think you're right that Catherine is indeed seen as a rather vilified figure both at the time and sort of subsequently. But I think certainly viewing her position in 1560 and certainly during the first decade of the wars leading up to 1572, she's very much associated with a policy actually of conciliation between Catholic and Protestant. So there are basically three strands of opinion about how the Protestant problem, if you like, might be dealt with. But they all come to the same conclusion and that is that the ultimate aim is religious unity. There's never really a time when it's felt that you're going to have a situation in which

you're going to have Catholics and Protestants coexisting long term. The aim is always to establish a degree of unity. So the three strands of opinion, if you like, one is to advocate persecution to actually destroy the Huguenots. And in a sense, this has been partly the policy of the Crown from early in the Reformation years and has conspicuously failed by 1560. They have become very formidable force in France. Another strand of opinion is that, or argument is that they should be brought together to resolve their differences. And that's tried in 1561 in the Colloquy of Poise, which is a sort of theological meeting,

debate between the leading Catholic and Huguenot figures at the time. That doesn't resolve issues either. The third strand and that which eventually they embrace the crown under Catherine to Medici, but it's not just Catherine, there are others around to the chance, Michel de Lopital and a whole gamut of others, and the line they decide to pursue is actually one of toleration. Restricted toleration, but toleration nevertheless. And so this is introduced in the so-called January edict of 1562

against a great deal of hostility from various sources, including the Parliament of Paris, which has to actually pass this legislation. And again, this doesn't work either, because we see the dissent into civil war in April 15th. Why did Catherine, was it Catherine Domenici's idea to marry her daughter, Margot, to Henri of Nava, Henri of Navarre, sorry, was it her idea? And doesn't it seem a bit strange when, not many years earlier, the Protestants had tried to kidnap her son, Charles then 17? Briefly, yes. Indeed, it's been said that Catherine's main concern is the marriages that she arranges for her children. That is one of her central concerns.

and at the same time that she's thinking about whom she might marry Margot to, she's also arranging the marriage of Charles 9th to Elizabeth of Austria. I think there are various suitors thought to be possibly suitable for the hand of Margot. But ultimately, the important thing is to sort of get a marry to one of the royal houses of Europe. I think the Portuguese king is considered at one stage, but that doesn't work out. And finally she rests on Henry of Navarre, a prince of the blood, of course, and a king in his own right in Navarre or at least he is

by the time of the massacre. At the time the marriage is arranged, he's very much the air. Right, Mark. One of the things that is difficult to understand at first sight is why our marriage should have mattered. And I think one has to go one stage back and say that one thing that the wars of religion

had done was to damage the ideology of the monarchy, and in particular its support resting upon Catholic institutions and Catholicism, particularly when you've got a policy of toleration, as Penny was saying. A marriage offered a way through that because they called poets, the court painters,

could present a picture of love as being the harmonising of opposites, of the bringing together antonymies. And that's an ideology which is relatively unreligious, incapable of being unstitched by the side. That's fascinating. You think that would have been an important consideration? Oh, certainly in terms of the ideology as presented by Antoine Caron, for example, court painter, as presented by the playard of the famous poets at the court of Charles the 9th,

love is presented as a great force for moral virtue, bringing together the contrary passions, which hatreds and so forth. And that's moral philosophy, of course, is more important than political philosophy, part of the way in which the people are thinking. It might be said particularly to be a woman's agenda, that this is exactly what you'd expect from a woman, in other words, Catherine de Medici. Because women on the whole, they don't want to go to war.

That's not a woman's role. There are lots of women monarchs around at the time. You've got Elizabeth I first. You've had Mary in England and Mary in Scotland. And although there are lots around, generally the role is to be a sort of caretaker, to do as little as possible to disturb the status quo. Well, the status quo in France is,

fractured down the middle. So a woman's instinct is to unite, to recreate harmony. So it's a very plausible strategy for Catherine to take about marriage as a way forward. And so we have the marriage, a great public marriage, and Catherine de Mereich, as you say, great organiser,

arranges the great dances and balls and makes Protestants dance with Catholics, organises it all, as it were, sorts of all. Four days later, Collinie, who's come up, who's attempted to capture the king, is shot. wounded fatally, they discovered that the shot came from the house, wounded very badly, the shot came from the house of Gies, which is a great Catholic aristocratic family,

they find a smoking gun, which is literally a smoking gun, and it gets better and better. I mean, it gets worse now, but at the end of it being better. And so Colleen Yee has been struck by this, and that seems to set everything off. Can you briskly tell us what it sets off, and then we'll talk about the real meat of this programme? Yes, that's right. It's not the first time there's been an attempt of, on Colony's life. It's notable how many assassination attempts that the leaders on both sides experience fatally or otherwise. The story is that Colony is coming back from the Louvre,

having had a meeting with Charles A Ninth. He bends down. There are numerous arguments for why he might have done that. So it means that he doesn't get shot dead, as might have been the case. He's wounded, which is the worst possible outcome in some ways. He's taken back to his quarters, the Protestant nobilius, are furious, as you would imagine. The king immediately comes to see him and says it was nothing to do with him

and he'll find out who the perpetrators were. Very quickly, the finger points at the House of Gies as the perpetrators of this. The great Catholic house. Yes. And what's interesting about this, though, is you can see it very much in terms of a vendetta between families here.

The Gies family has long believed that colony was responsible for this. the murder of the second Duke of Gies-Faelsuil in 1563. The Crown at various points has tried to bring the families together to reconcile their differences. And indeed, once again, Colony is sort of cleared of this actually earlier in 1572, but the Gies are never resolved to this. So the finger points very easily at the Gis

because they have all kinds of interests in removing colony. So Mark Greengrass, you have a massive state of alarm now. We have these ranks of Protestant Huguenots in Paris, some of you living there camp there, but Huguen army just outside Paris. We have Paris stuff with Catholics and so on. And then there's the meeting. So can you take us through the crisis meeting and then what? And then we go to the massacre.

This crisis meeting is disputed by a lot of people. But that it took place is not disputed, but what happened and who did what is? And the buildup of tension is palpable and in all the sources after the attempted assassination. Not least because the inquiry of some, to who and what had happened begins the day afterwards. And those who might well have been involved

or feel that the fingers pointing at them are already implicated and Gis himself and his entourage say that they're going to leave Paris right away and Navarre likewise threatens to leave Paris and the civil wars which have after all only been over for two years look as though they're going to restart added to which there are international tensions

within all this because Collini has masterminded an aggressive foreign strategy, which is another part that's playing its role in all this. What exactly happens then, in the few days, between the attempted assassination, there are a series of meetings. We're not exactly sure of the sequence of them. We're not even sure what went on at them.

We have to remember that French council meetings were in secret. We don't have any records of them. Catherine de Medici's typically held some of her most important council meetings in gardens in the Twilery, a newly designed Twilery, and on the afternoon of Friday, that's where certainly, by all accounts, some meetings went on. So she wouldn't be bugged. So that she wouldn't be bugged, but so that she could be seen who she was meeting, because it's a very open environment and lots of people could see from the Louvre, exactly who was meeting who, and it was, of course, part of Kathleen's politics of spin.

and there were possibly two, even three meetings. One with Catherine in the afternoon, whether that was the moment when she was persuaded by others in her entourage or managed to persuade herself, that the only way of saving the situation was to have a strategic cull of Protestants or not, we don't know. Then what, Dermann? So if these over meetings, then they strike.

And who do you think pulled the trigger? Because in the encyclopedia Britannica, it points of Catherine, and when I was at school he pointed to Gasson. When I was a university, it wanted to Catherine. What's changed sense? It's going to be the woman, isn't it? She always get the blame.

She becomes the sort of mythological figure of all evil for Protestants, and so they're going to blame her. It's impossible to know, but at some stage someone makes a decision, and that really does finger the Queen and the young king. It's they who say yes to the proposal to murder, and therefore they must take the blame. And from that moment onwards, this is official. policy. The thing to do next is to murder, as Mark just said, to cull the Protestant leadership.

One more point, Mark, maybe you can do this. You can see, they sit down and they say, we're going to get these guys, we're going to get the leaders. Right. So that's one thing. One thing. The next thing is it becomes a sort of popular blood sport, bloodbath of an extraordinary bestial nature. When did that move? It happened in half an hour or something, but have you any evidence for that mark? First, can we just go back at one stage, and that is that deciding who and who not to call

was clearly not an easy decision. After all, if you were going to do the job effectively, you had to remove Navarre, Conde, and various other members close to the royal family. And in the court. And right at the court. And clearly, some people say we've got to go that far,

and other people say we can't go that far. And so right until the moment when, whenever it in the early morning of 24th August, the final dispositions are taken. This is not an immensely premeditated event. It's all happening on the fly. And one of the things, of course,

is when things are last minute, is that they all go wrong. And the troops that are called in in order to hold the cull and stop popular massacre starting actually aren't in place where they should be and when they should be. and also the aim had been for royal contingents of troops

to cross the bridges and secure the Huguenots that were military contingents that you mentioned in the south of Paris. They couldn't find the keys to the bridge, the gates holding the bridges. And vital quarter of about half an hour was lost then. Enough time for a Huguenot to swim the Sen as far as we know and get the message that Coini had been massacred to them. So already, by the time they arrived there, they're in a state of alarm,

and the panic spreads more widely. In addition, I think, we've got to look at the degree to which the city authorities themselves are implicated in this. I think the other issue here as well is the notorious statement that Gies is supposed to make as he leaves Coligny's quarters after his murder in saying it is the king's will and how this is then transmitted to the populace. and an understanding that actually the king has given sanction for the murder of the Huguenots. And then, of course, the Huguenots believe that a secret order was given by the king.

And again, we're back to responsibility here. So as Catherine Medici and her son, are they fanning the flames? The evidence that I've read, but you are the experts, you three, says that orders to go out and look, say, hold this, contain it. We don't want this to happen on this scale in Paris. And in other cities, the orders arrived late. They didn't have the right place. In other words, there was a double thing going in.

They seem to be appearing to try to calm it and control it and yet letting it happen. Can you take this through that? I just think it's almost irrelevant to ask that question, because you've clearly got a political decision. Yeah, let's call the leadership. But then you've got this extraordinary wave of popular fury and viciousness. I mean, it calls to mind Rwanda a decade ago that here people who, in ordinary circumstances would be peaceful, decent and honorable to their neighbours and have gone on with them for years,

suddenly turn round and show a degree of viciousness and hatred. Now that indicates that something very profound has happened in France over the previous ten years, that people see their neighbours as vermin, and with that sort of tip-off from the leadership, that they can now say that, then they'll go ahead and kill people. Mark, keeping it in its own period, keeping it at 1572 and the months out of 1572,

were people at the time, do you find in the records, themselves appalled by what they were doing to each other. I'm not only going to it. People listening to this programme were certainly aware of what we talked about and Dermot led them in that direction too. I mean, these aren't just sort of stabbing people. It's horrific.

And this is a wealthy, civilised, Renaissance society. But were they at the time themselves the day after, a week after, appalled at what they'd done to the Protestants? The Catholics of the Huguenots, for instance. One of the things that's fundamental to us as historians about the massacre is the asymmetry of the record that we have about it. Almost inevitably, because this is an event that was never judicially investigated, there was never any government inquiry about it, there was never even a commission of truth and reconciliation after it.

So we don't have any official records of what actually might have been thought to have gone on. Indeed, everything that the government wanted to do was to ensure that the events were not investigated afterwards. and the massacurers themselves, the butchers, by definition, don't tell us what they were doing. We get snatches of conversation. Tomé cruzier holds his left hand up in an inn later on and says, this hand has killed 400 or more Protestants, and he holds his right hand up and says, this hand's killed even more. That kind of is about as much as we get from that side.

On the Protestant side, what we have is incomprehension. because for them all those who survived the massacre and tell us about it, and we've only got a few firsthand testimonies of those who survived the massacre. We've got quite a few second and third-hand testimonies, but first-hand testimonies occur late from people 20 or 30 years after the event, perhaps because they're not able to confront it in their own minds anyway.

And what they say is, I can tell you what I saw, which is the gruesomeness that you've alluded to, I can answer none of the questions that I really want to answer, like how did it all begin, who was responsible, how many were killed? But I think there is one sort of long-term result, the Catholics, and that is among Catholics, there is a great revulsion against what happens, and a revulsion against Jesuits. Catholicism really gets split after that.

It gets split into extremists who form political league against the monarchy as well as against Protestants. There's a huge body of gradual revolutions. revulsion against that sort of politics. And it's really that in the end which gets Henry of Navarre on the throne as King Henri the 4th, Henry IV. Well, yes, he eventually ends up, and there's an apocryphal remark. Paris is worth a mass where he takes the, he does take the mass this time.

And as the edict of 195098, which lasts for about 100 years and legitimizes Protestantism in France. But would you like to briskly tell us, depending the effect of the massacre in France itself? Yes, well, it's estimated, and again, it's very difficult. to tell statistics are notoriously difficult in this period, but it's estimated that up to 10,000 Huguenots across France, perhaps 2 to 3,000 in Paris and 10,000, 12,000 in total across France were killed in the massacre and the echoes of that in provincial cities. But what contemporary commentators say at the time

is that that's not really the significant issue, but actually the number of converts thereafter. We see Huguenots, not surprisingly, in the immediate wake of the massacre, going to Catholic churches. Abjurations. Yes, abjurations, renouncing their faith. And this is done very publicly, of course, the Catholic Church are keen to emphasize this.

Lists are made of the people who do this. What's very interesting, it's not surprising they do that in the immediate after the mouth of the massacre. What's interesting is that it seems that they convert and they stay converted. There is not a sort of mass return to Protestantism when the toleration is reintroduced later in the 5th. 1770s. So we see a massive reduction, particularly of the communities in the north of France. Of course, it's in the south and west where we tend to think of the strength of Fugano communities.

That's the situation after 1570s. And it still lingers on now. I've been in place in the south of France where that massacre still very much thing. No, but can I ask you, the effect in Europe then, does this mean that the north-south divide, to put it, not too simplistically, the north-south divide is that the wage has been driven in and stays there? It means that the north-south divide is much more rigid, and of course the hatreds are much bigger. You can't trust either side anymore, particularly Protestants can't trust Catholics. It must be said there's much more violence on the Catholic side than the Protestant side. And that means that for monarchs who want to do business with each other, it's much more difficult to do business.

And there's now a myth, a myth of the treacherous, savage, violent Catholic, which you can transfer across state boundaries. And you can apply this mythology, for instance, the English to the Irish. Irish. They're the Irish are Catholics and they're the sort of people who massacre Protestants. And that is part of the English, British story and that sort of atrocity narrative goes down the centuries, really. And a word is invented. Massacre in French originally had meant just a butcher's block. The word massacre takes on rather like Holocaust in the 20th century a new meaning of a human massacre on a major scale and it enters the English language at about this time. Well, thank you all very much. That was fascinating.

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