The Massacre of St. Bartholomew: Reappraisals and Documents (International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d'histoire des idées, 75)

On 18 August 1572, Marguerite de Valois, sister of King Charles IX, was married in Paris to Henri de Navarre, "first prince of the blood" and a Protestant. This union, which was to cement the provisions of the Peace of St. Germain (1570) ending the third of the French wars of religion, was the occasion of an extraordinary influx of French Calvin­ ists into the notoriously Catholic capital. Hundreds of Huguenots had journeyed to Paris to honor their titular leader and participate in the wedding celebrations. Tensions were already running high when the court made the fatal decision to take advantage of the situation and assassinate the admiral of France, Gaspard de Coligny, the recognized leader of the Huguenot armies which had helped plunge the country into ten years of intermittent civil war, and who now threatened to embroil the kingdom in a full-scale foreign war with Spain. On Friday the twenty-second, as he returned from the Louvre to his lodgings, Coligny paused in the street - some say to receive a letter, others to doff his hat to an acquaintance or to adjust his hose - and was fired on by a hired assassin hidden in a house known to belong to one of the ultra-Catholic Guise faction. The arquebus shot missed its mark and succeeded only in wounding the admiral in his hand and arm, where­ upon he was carried by his followers to his bed. On 18 August 1572, Marguerite de Valois, sister of King Charles IX, was married in Paris to Henri de Navarre, "first prince of the blood" and a Protestant. This union, which was to cement the provisions of the Peace of St. Germain (1570) ending the third of the French wars of religion, was the occasion of an extraordinary influx of French CalvinƯ ists into the notoriously Catholic capital. Hundreds of Huguenots had journeyed to Paris to honor their titular leader and participate in the wedding celebrations. Tensions were already running high when the court made the fatal decision to take advantage of the situation and assassinate the admiral of France, Gaspard de Coligny, the recognized leader of the Huguenot armies which had helped plunge the country into ten years of intermittent civil war, and who now threatened to embroil the kingdom in a full-scale foreign war with Spain. On Friday the twenty-second, as he returned from the Louvre to his lodgings, Coligny paused in the street - some say to receive a letter, others to doff his hat to an acquaintance or to adjust his hose - and was fired on by a hired assassin hidden in a house known to belong to one of the ultra-Catholic Guise faction. The arquebus shot missed its mark and succeeded only in wounding the admiral in his hand and arm, whereƯ upon he was carried by his followers to his bed Front Matter....Pages I-XI Introduction....Pages 1-12 Front Matter....Pages 13-13 The Massacre of St. Bartholomew and the Problem of Spain....Pages 15-24 Reactions to the St. Bartholomew Massacres in Geneva and Rome....Pages 25-51 The Elizabethans and St. Bartholomew....Pages 52-70 Imperialism, Particularism and Toleration in the Holy Roman Empire....Pages 71-95 Front Matter....Pages 97-97 Tomasso Sassetti’s Account of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre....Pages 99-154 The Discourse Dedicated to Count Guido San Giorgio Aldobrandini....Pages 155-178 Front Matter....Pages 179-179 Martyrs, Myths, and the Massacre: the Background of St. Bartholomew....Pages 181-202 The Rites of Violence: Religious Riot in Sixteenth-Century France....Pages 203-242 The Wars of Religion in Seventeenth-Century Huguenot Thought....Pages 243-251 Conclusion: St. Bartholomew and Historical Perspective....Pages 252-255 Back Matter....Pages 259-269