On the night of August 24, 1572, that is, on the eve of St. Bartholomew's Day, in the capital of France, according to various estimates, from 2,000 to 4,000 Protestants were massacred, who arrived in Paris for the wedding of King Henry of Bourbon of Navarre.
Since that time, the phrase "St. Bartholomew's Night" has become a household name, and what happened never ceases to excite the imagination of writers and filmmakers. But, spellbound by the bacchanalia of violence, artists tend to overlook a number of important details. They were recorded by historians.
If you carefully study the historical data, it will become clear that the massacre on St. Bartholomew's Night had a completely non-religious background. But religion was a wonderful banner for people who want to achieve their goal by any means. The end justifies the means - this motto has been known from time immemorial to not very clean politicians and other public figures. But what was achieved as a result of the wild massacre in the distant 1572?
Congress of winners
The terrible and seemingly unmotivated massacre, staged in France by the peaceful inhabitants of the capital on the night of St. Bartholomew, will become more understandable if we consider that for a decade the country has not emerged from a bloody war. Formally religious, but essentially civil.
More precisely, during the period from 1562 to 1570, as many as three devastating religious wars took place in France. Catholics, who were in the majority in the north and east of the country, fought against the Protestant Calvinists, nicknamed the Huguenots in France. The ranks of the Huguenots were, as a rule, representatives of the third estate - the provincial bourgeoisie and artisans, as well as nobles from the southern and western provinces, dissatisfied with the formation of the vertical of royal power.
The feudal parties were headed by the feudal nobility, which sought to limit royal power: the Catholics - the Duke Henry de Guise and his relatives, the Huguenots - the King of Navarre Antoine Bourbon (father of the future Henry IV), and after his death - the Prince de Condé and Admiral Gaspard de Coligny. In addition, Queen Mother Catherine de Medici, a fanatical Catholic who actually ruled France on behalf of her weak-willed son, King Charles IX, played an important role in the intrigue.
Promotional video:
The outwardly religious nature of the wars clearly revealed a long-standing dynastic conflict. The threat loomed over the royal house of Valois: the sickly Charles IX had no children, and the unconventional sexual orientation of his probable heir - brother Henry (Duke of Anjou and future King Henry III) - was known to everyone. At the same time, the fading and degenerating family was challenged by two passionary lateral branches of the reigning house: the Bourbons and Giza.
The young king of Navarre, Henry of Bourbon, was dangerous for the queen mother not as a heretic, but rather as a likely contender for the throne, moreover, known for his lovingness and enviable vitality. No wonder the rumor attributed to Catherine the poisoning of Henry's mother - Jeanne D'Albret.
But closer to the autumn of 1570, there was a short break in the war. Under the Saint-Germain Peace Treaty, signed in August, the Huguenots received a number of important concessions from the royal power. They were granted partial freedom of worship, a number of fortresses were transferred, and Coligny was inducted into the Royal Council, which at that time was playing the role of the French government. As a conciliatory PR action (as well as in order to limit the growing influence of the Guesses), Catherine de Medici advised the king to marry his sister Margaret to the young leader of the Huguenots, Henry of Navarre.
In the camp of his associates, euphoria reigned, it seemed to them that they had won the victory. Coligny even made an offer to rally the Catholic and Huguenot nobility to oppose the King of Spain Philip II, who, while supporting the Catholics of France, at the same time constantly threatened French interests in Italy and Flanders. But the admiral could not take into account that in the soul of Catherine, maternal feelings will prevail over state interests. All because her second daughter, Elizabeth, was married to the king of Spain. And besides this, in the event of a possible victory over the Spaniards, the influence of Coligny on the king, who dreamed of military exploits, could become irresistible.
However, the ostentatious friendship with the leader of the Huguenots was also only a tactical trick of the weak-willed king, who was trying with all his might to get out of too dense maternal care. And finally, appointed back in 1569, in the midst of the third religious war, the royal reward for the head of the admiral - 50,000 crowns - has not been officially canceled.
Nevertheless, by mid-August 1572, the entire bloom of the Huguenot aristocracy, as well as hundreds of middle and small nobles, had gathered in the capital of France for the wedding celebration. They arrived in Paris with their wives, children and servants and, like all provincials, sought to throw dust in the eyes of the Parisians. The arrogance and outrageous luxury of the Huguenots provoked irritation: after devastating wars, the cities of France (in contrast to the rapidly rebuilding province) went through hard times, becoming centers of poverty, hunger and social stratification fraught with an explosion.
The spontaneous and unconscious murmur of the impoverished and starving Parisians was skillfully channeled into the charitable channel by numerous Catholic preachers, generously paid for by the Guesses, the Spaniards and the Pope. Curses flew from the chairs of the Sorbonne and the city pulpits against the "persons of Huguenot nationality" who had flooded the city; on them, the heretics, were blamed for the hardships experienced by France.
Rumors spread throughout Paris about a conspiracy allegedly discovered to assassinate the king and seize power, about alarming signs that threatened the Parisians with unprecedented trials. At the same time, the provocateurs did not skimp on colorful descriptions of the riches allegedly brought with them by the Huguenots.
According to the plan of the people's wrath
In this atmosphere, on August 17, the marriage of Henry of Navarre and Margaret of Valois took place. The pomp of the ceremony, which was planned as an act of civil reconciliation, aroused in Parisians not awe and delight, but anger and irritation. And after the unsuccessful assassination attempt on August 22 on Coligny, who escaped with a slight wound, passions ran high.
The order of the leader of the Huguenots, the Queen Mother, her youngest son and the Duke de Guise, was openly discussed in Paris. And the failure of the assassination attempt caused irritation in both groups. The Huguenots wanted satisfaction, and the king, whom the ordering parties of the assassination presented with a fait accompli, was forced to visit the wounded together with his brother, mother and retinue. At Coligny's bedside, he publicly expressed sympathy to the admiral and promised to take all his companions under the royal protection. Left alone with the king, the admiral advised him to get out of his mother's care as soon as possible.
The content of this private conversation reached the ears of the Queen Mother, who had managed to establish an exemplary knocking system in the capital, and Coligny's fate was sealed. Meanwhile, the Huguenots were so inspired by royal humiliation that they began to behave even more defiantly. There were even calls to urgently leave Paris and begin preparations for a new war.
These sentiments also reached the palace, and then Charles himself began to get nervous, which was not used by Coligny's enemies. Having chosen the moment, the mother and brother imposed on the king the ideal, in their opinion, solution to the problem that had arisen: to bring the work started to the end. This was a decision quite in the spirit of the ideas of Machiavelli, which captured Europe at that time: the right is always strong, the end justifies the means, the winners are not judged.
At first, it was decided to kill only Coligny and his inner circle for preventive purposes. According to the organizers of the action, this will frighten the rest of the Huguenots and suppress the revanchist sentiments in their ranks. The widespread version that the king exclaimed in irritation: "Since you could not kill one Coligny, then kill them all to one, so that no one dares to throw in my face that I am an oath-breaker," is based on only one single eyewitness testimony. Which was the Duke of Anjou, who dreamed of a throne and, for the sake of achieving his cherished goal, was ready to launch and support any incriminating evidence on brother Charles.
Most likely, the idea of a "final solution to the Huguenot problem" matured during the discussion in the head of the queen mother and was supported by the Duke de Guise. But whose head came up with another far-reaching idea - to involve the "broad masses" in the planned action, giving it the image of popular indignation, and not just another palace conspiracy - remained a mystery. As well as why the author of such a tempting proposal did not come up with the idea of the obvious consequences of the provoked popular anger. Historical experience shows that the orgy of sanctioned violence very quickly becomes uncontrollable.
On the evening of August 23, immediately after it was decided to attract the masses, the Louvre was secretly visited by the former foreman of the city merchant class, Marseille, who enjoyed enormous influence in Paris. He was entrusted with organizing the townspeople - the bourgeois, the merchants and the poor - to conduct a large-scale action against the Huguenots who had come to large numbers in Paris. The faithful Parisians were divided into groups according to their place of residence, an armed man stood out from each house. All groups were given lists of pre-marked houses where the heretics lived.
And only after dark, the Louvre summoned Marseille's successor, the merchant sergeant-major Le Charron, to whom the Queen Mother presented the official version of the "Huguenot conspiracy." To prevent it, the Parisian municipality was ordered: to close the city gates, to tie all boats on the Seine with chains, to mobilize the city guards and all the townspeople who are capable of carrying weapons, to place armed detachments in the squares and intersections and to put up cannons on the Place de Grève and at the city hall.
All this completely refutes the version launched over time about the spontaneous nature of the massacre that began. In fact, it was carefully planned, and preparations were made surprisingly quickly. And by the onset of twilight, it was no longer about selective political murder, but about the total destruction of the infection, a kind of religious and political genocide.
An "inconclusive solution" to the Huguenot problem
All events of St. Bartholomew's Night are known to the details, meticulously collected and recorded in the monographs of historians.
Hearing the prearranged signal - the bell ringing of the Church of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, a detachment of nobles from the retinue of the Duke de Guise, who was reinforced by the Swiss mercenaries, went to the house where Coligny lived. The assassins hacked the admiral with swords, threw his body onto the pavement, and then chopped off his head. The disfigured body was then dragged along the metropolitan streets for a long time, before being hung by the legs at the usual place of executions - the Place de Montfaucon.
As soon as Coligny was finished, the massacre began: the bell alarm of the churches of Paris responded with a funeral ring for several thousand Huguenots and their families. They were killed in bed, in the streets, throwing their bodies onto the pavements, and then into the Seine. Often the victims were subjected to brutal torture before death, and numerous cases of abuse of the bodies of those killed were also recorded.
The Swiss stabbed the retinue of the King of Navarre in the chambers of the Louvre, where the distinguished guests spent the night. And he himself and Prince de Condé were spared by the king and Catherine de Medici, forcing, under threat of death, to convert to Catholicism. In order to finally humiliate the new converts, they were taken on an "excursion" to the hanged decapitated body of the admiral.
And yet, despite a carefully drawn up plan, it was not possible to exterminate all the heretics in the capital of France in one night. For example, several of the admiral's associates, who stopped in the suburb of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, were able to break through the lines of the city guards and leave the city. The Duke de Guise personally pursued them for several hours, but could not catch up. Other survivors of St. Bartholomew's Night were finished off for almost a week. The exact number of casualties remains unknown; According to a number of details that have come down to us (for example, 35 livres were paid to the gravediggers in only one Parisian cemetery for the burial of 1,100 bodies), historians estimate the number of killed at 2,000-4,000 people.
After the capital, a wave of violence went like a bloody wheel across the province: from the blood spilled in Lyons, Orleans, Troyes, Rouen and other cities, the water in local rivers and reservoirs became unfit for drinking for several months. In total, according to various estimates, in two weeks in France, between 30 and 50,000 people were killed.
As expected, the massacre for religious reasons soon turned into a simple massacre: having tasted blood and impunity, armed shopkeepers and city plebs killed and robbed the homes of even faithful Catholics, if there was something to profit from.
As one French historian wrote, "In those days, anyone with money, a high position and a pack of greedy relatives who would stop at nothing to quickly enter into inheritance could call himself a Huguenot." The settling of personal scores and general denunciations flourished in full bloom: the city authorities did not bother themselves checking the received signals and immediately sent teams of killers to the indicated address.
The rampant violence shocked even its organizers. Royal decrees demanding an end to the massacre came out one after another, priests from church pulpits also called on faithful Christians to stop, but the running flywheel of the street elements was no longer able to stop any government. Only a week later, the murders of themselves began to decline: the flame of "people's anger" began to die out, and yesterday's murderers returned to their families and daily duties.
Already on August 26, the king officially accepted responsibility for the massacre, declaring that it was done on his orders. In letters sent to the provinces, to the pope and to foreign monarchs, the events of St. Bartholomew's Night were interpreted as just a preventive action against an impending conspiracy. The news of the mass murder of the Huguenots was met with approval in Madrid and Rome, and with condemnation in England, Germany and other countries where the positions of Protestants were strong. Paradoxically, the actions of the French royal court were even condemned by such a famous "humanist" in history as the Russian Tsar Ivan the Terrible.
Investing in religious fanaticism
The atrocities committed on St. Bartholomew's Night are colorfully described in dozens of historical novels, including the most famous: "Queen Margot" - Alexander Dumas and "The Young Years of King Henry IV" by Heinrich Mann. There are also enough screen adaptations of the first novel: from the leafy and combed domestic series to the brutally naturalistic French film by Patrice Chereau.
But in almost all artistic evaluations of St. Bartholomew's Night, the authors are so mesmerized by external irrationality and the massive nature of violence that they rush to explain them by the rampant religious fanaticism, in general, by the influence of dark demons on human nature pliant to evil.
Meanwhile, the Parisian bourgeois and rabble, who methodically massacred not only the Huguenot nobles, but also their wives and children, had other motives. Including purely material ones.
First, there is no doubt that St. Bartholomew's Night was a deliberately provoked revolt of the "lower classes" against the "upper classes", only skillfully transferred from social rails (otherwise the Catholic nobility and the fattening clergy would not seem a little) to religious. The Parisians, as already mentioned, in the summer of 1572 became pretty starving and impoverished, and the arriving Huguenots served as an obvious social irritant. Although not all of them could boast of wealth, each of the newcomers, be it the very last ruined nobleman, preferred to drop the last sous in Paris, just to make the necessary impression.
Second, the Catholic Parisians were generously paid for the murder of the Huguenots. During a visit to the Louvre, the ex-foreman of the merchant class, Marseille, received several thousand crowns from Guise and the clergy (the royal treasury was, as always, empty) to distribute to the captains of the assault groups. There is evidence that the murderers were paid "over the heads", like some scalp hunters in the New World, and in order to receive the desired "cash" without gimmicks, one had to present a weighty confirmation of their claims, for which heads, noses, ears and other body parts of victims.
And the answer to the question why the pogromists began to kill their wives, children and other relatives along with the Huguenot noblemen, some researchers suggest looking in the then royal legislation. In particular, in those articles of it that determined the procedure and nature of inheritance of movable and immovable property.
Without going into subtleties, all the property of the vassal of the French crown after his death passed to the relatives, and in the absence of them, after a certain period of time, they entered the royal treasury. So, for example, they dealt with the property of the executed conspirators, which was not formally subject to confiscation: the set period passed, and the applicants from the relatives were not announced (because this threatened them with the loss of their heads: it was a piece of cake to declare them accomplices), and all property went to the treasury.
There is no reliable evidence that any of the organizers of St. Bartholomew's Night deliberately and in advance thought out including such a mercantile issue. But it is known that the pogromists received clear instructions from Catherine de Medici and the dukes of Anjou and de Guise, the essence of which boiled down to one thing: not to leave anyone alive - including the relatives of the sentenced. On the other hand, it could be additional insurance, understandable in times of blood feud.
The bloody experience of St. Bartholomew's Night was firmly learned by at least two of the high-ranking eyewitnesses. One was the English ambassador to Paris, Sir Francis Walsingham. Struck by the unjustified carelessness of the Huguenots, who allowed themselves to be lured into a primitive trap and did not even have spies in the enemy camp, he thought about the intelligence service, which he created years later in England.
And the second - Heinrich of Navarre, who happily escaped the fate of most of his associates. Much later, after fleeing from the French capital, returning to the fold of Calvinism, another religious war that broke out, the violent death of two kings (Charles IX and Henry III) and the Duke de Guise, he would defeat the Catholic League. And at the cost of one more (this time voluntary) conversion to Catholicism, he will take the French throne, pronouncing his historic phrase: "Paris is worth the Mass."
V. Gakov