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The Saint Bartholomew's Massacres in the Provinces*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Philip Benedict
Philip Benedict
Affiliation:
University of Maryland
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Abstract

As the devil never leaves unbelieving heretics in repose, they conspired in such cities as Paris, Rouen, Orleans, Lyons, Toulouse and other large cities to surprise the catholic Christians and put them all to the sword. The king was apprised of this near the end of the year 1572, whereupon, considering well such a damnable enterprise, he sent orders to all the cities to inquire as to the truth of this endeavour…. When its truth was discovered, he ordered, so that the cost of the executions for which he otherwise would have had to pay might be avoided, that…[the huguenots] be put to death in all of the cities of France where they could be caught. [Explanation of the Saint Bartholomew's massacre provided by an anonymous catholic chronicler, 1581.]

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Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 21 , Issue 2 , June 1978 , pp. 205 - 225
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1978

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References

1 ‘Relation des troubles excités par les calvinistes dans la ville de Rouen, depuis l'an 1537 jusqu'en l'an 1582’, publication of La Revue de Rouen et de la Normandie (Rouen, 1837), pp. 35–6.Google Scholar

2 This entire paragraph is based on the German student's detailed eyewitness account of the massacre: Read, C. (ed.), ‘La Saint-Barthélémy à Orléans racontée par Joh.-Wilh. de Botzheim, étudiant allemand témoin oculaire’, Bulletin de la Société de l'Histoire du Protestantisme Français (henceforward B.S.H.P.F.), XXI (1872), 345–92.Google Scholar

3 Smaller incidents of violence also occurred in Albi, Gaches, Rabastens, Romans, Valence, Orange, and perhaps Aurillac and Bar-le-Duc as well. The best overviews of the provincial massacres are the contemporary Memoires de l'estat de France sous Charles IX (3 vols., Middleburg, 1578), 1, 327–418, 529–38Google Scholar; and the recent work by Estèbe, Janine, Tocsin pour un massacre, la saison des Saint-Barthélémy (Paris, 1968)Google Scholar, ch. ix. These can be supplemented by a number of excellent studies of one city or one province, notably: Puyroche, A., ‘La Saint-Barthélémy à Lyon et le gouverneur Mandelot’, B.S.H.P.F. XVIII (1869), 305–23, 353–67, 401–20Google Scholar; D'Estaintot, C. R. H. L., La Saint Barthélémy à Rouen, 17–2; septembre 1572 (Rouen, 1877)Google Scholar; Carrière, Victor, ‘Les lendemains de la Saint-Barthélémy en Languedoc’, Revue d'Histoire de l'Eglise de France, XXVII (1941), 221–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Estèbe, , ‘Les Saint-Barthélémy des villes du Midi’, Actes du colloque l'Amiral de Colignyet son temps (Paris, 1974), pp. 717–29Google Scholar. The suggestion that violence occurred in Aurillac is found in the ‘Journal de François de Syrueilh, chanoine de Saint-André de Bordeaux, archidiacre de Blay’, Clément-Simon, (ed.), Archives historiques du département de la Gironde, XIII (1871–1872), 287Google Scholar. That Bar-le-Duc was also affected is stated by Nicolas Pithou in his account of the massacre in Troyes, Bibliothèque Nationale (henceforward B.N.) MS Dupuy 698, fo. 372 v.

4 Davis, Natalie Zemon, ‘The rites of violence: Religious riot in sixteenth-century France’, Post and Present, LIX (1973), 51–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Estimates of casualty figures for the event are notoriously unreliable, often varying from each other by several hundred victims in any given town. The figure of 3,000 casualties provided here represents only a rough approximation arrived at by adding together the contemporary estimate of the number of victims in each provincial massacre which seemed closest in time to the event and least likely to be distorted by partisanship.

6 See, for example, François Hotman's remark in a letter to Sulzer, pastor in Basel: ‘Several governors in the cities in the provinces declared openly to the king that they were not executioners, that he could look elsewhere if he wanted one, and that they would not obey his edicts in these killings. Thus by far the larger part of the cities in France abstained from this butchery’ (Weiss, N. (ed.), ‘La Saint Barthélémy: nouveaux textes et notes bibliographiques’, B.S.H.P.F. XLIII (1894), 432).Google Scholar

7 Lambert, Gustave, Histoire des guerres de religion en Provence 1530–1598 (Nyons, 1972), p. 269Google Scholar. This is a reprinted edition of a late nineteenth-century work of popular history. With the spread of tolerationist and republican sentiments in the eighteeenth and nineteenth centuries, Carcès was by no means the only figure credited with having refused to do the king's bloody business who was raised to the status of a minor local hero. The bishop of Lisieux, Jean la Hennuyer, who was credited with having prevented violence in that town, was made the subject of a laudatory play written in 1772 and attributed by some – erroneously but tellingly – to Voltaire. Sixty years later the municipal officials under the July Monarchy saw fit to hang a painting of the bishop interceding to stay the anger of the catholic mob in the chambers where the city council met for its deliberations. Similarly, in Dijon, a plaque was erected in 1864 amid much civic fanfare in honour of the governor of Burgundy, Charny, considered responsible for having preserved that town from bloodshed. de Courtsigny, C. Osmont, ‘Jean le Hennuyer et les Huguenots de Lisieux en 1572’, B.S.H.P.F. XXVI (1877), 146Google Scholar; ‘La Saint-Barthélémy à Dijon’, B.S.H.P.F XIV (1865), 347–8.Google Scholar

8 The best recent examinations of the extent of Charles IX's responsibility for the massacre are Estèbe, , Tocsin, pp. 179–90Google Scholar; Mieck, Ilja, ‘Die Bartolomäusnacht als forschungsproblem: kritische bestandaufnahme und neue aspekte’, Historische Zeitschrift, CCXVI (1973), 73–110Google Scholar; and Sutherland, N. M., The massacre of St Bartholomew and the European conflict 1559–1572 (London, 1973), p. 340.Google Scholar

9 The long debate over the question of responsibility for the Paris massacre is reviewed by Butterfield, Herbert, Man on his past (Cambridge, 1955), ch. viGoogle Scholar; and Mieck, , ‘Die Bartholomäusnacht’, passim. Only Estèbe, Tocsin, pp. 143–5Google Scholar, and a single, characteristically accurate and insightful, paragraph by Mariéjol, Jean H. in his Laréforme et la ligue (1559–1598), vol. vi, pt. 1 of Lavisse, Ernest (ed.), Histoire de la France depuis les origines jusqu'à la Révolution (9 vols., Paris, 1910–1911), p. 131Google Scholar, deal in any satisfactory way with the spread of the massacre to the provinces. Their accounts are far less detailed than the analysis I shall attempt here.

10 The most easily accessible printed copies of letters sent on this date are to be found in Memoires de l'estat, 1, 296–9. reprinted in Cimber, L. and Danjou, F., Archives curieuses de l'histoire de France (27 vols., Paris, 1834–1840), ist ser., VII, 157–8Google Scholar. The authenticity of these letters may be confirmed by checking them against such surviving manuscript copies of royal letters to the provinces as Archives Communales de Rouen, Chartrier, tiroir 400 (2), Charles IX to Carrouges, 24 Aug. 1572.

11 B.N., MS français 15555, fo. 41, Charles IX to Vicomte d'Orthe (governor of Bayonne), 27 Aug. 1572; ‘Journal de François de Syrueilh’, pp. 283–4 (copy of a letter from Charles IX to the governor of Bordeaux, 28 Aug. 1572); Monod, H. (ed.), ‘La version du Duc d'Anjou sur la Saint-Barthélémy’, Revue Historique, CI (1909), 325–6Google Scholar (copy of a letter from Charles IX to the governor of Lectoure, 28 Aug. 1572); Paris, P. (ed.), Correspondance du roi Charles IX et du Sieur de Mandelot, gouverneur de Lyon, pendant l'année 1572, époque du massacre de la Saint Barthélémy (Paris, 1830), pp. 52–3.Google Scholar

12 Memoires de l'estat, 1, 319, 322–3.

13 Ibid. 1, 319.

14 Archives Communales de Rouen, B 3, Journal des Echevins for 26, 27 and 28 Aug., 1 Sept. 1572.

15 de Courtsigny, Osmont, ‘Jean le Hennuyer at les huguenots de Lisieux’, pp. 151–3.Google Scholar

16 Archives Communales de Rouen, A 19, Registre de Délibérations for 25 Sept. 1572.

17 ‘Journal de François de Syrueilh’, p. 284; Paris, (ed.), Correspondance de Charles IX et Mandelot, p. 53Google Scholar. The editors of the letters of Catherine de Medici refer to several other letters dispatched by Charles IX on 30 August containing similar clauses revoking verbal instructions. See Lettres de Catherine de Médicis, ed. de la Ferriere, Hector and de Puchesse, Baguenault (11 vols., Paris, 1880–1943), IV, xciii.Google Scholar

18 Paris, (ed.), Correspondance de Charles IX et Mandelot, p. 45.Google Scholar

19 B.N., MS nouvelles acquisitions françaises 1086, fos. 104–5. This has been printed as part of de Teil, J. (ed.), ‘Livre de raison de noble Honoré du Teil (1571–1586)’, Bulletin de la Société Scientifique et Litteraire des Basses-Alpes, VI (1893–1894), 30–3.Google Scholar

20 Rigaud(?), Jean, ‘Discours du massacre de ceux de la religion réformée fait a Lyon…’ in Gonon, P. M. (ed.), Histoire lamentable contenant au vrai…les plus notables des cruautés, massacres, assassinats et devastations, exercés par ceux de la religion romaine contre ceux de la religion réformée…(Lyons, 1848), p. 191Google Scholar; Puyroche, , ‘La Saint-Barthélémy à Lyon’, pp. 311–21, 355–7, 361–2Google Scholar; Gascon, Richard, Grand commerce et vie urbaine au XVIe siècle: Lyon et ses marchands (environs de 1520 – environs de 1580) (2 vols., Paris-The Hague, 1971), II, 527–8.Google Scholar

21 The events leading up to the massacre in Bordeaux are narrated below. On the arrival of the royal instructions from Paris and the measures taken in the immediate aftermath of the violence in the capital, see ‘Journal de François de Syrueilh’, pp. 281–7.Google Scholar

22 The best account of the massacre in Bordeaux is a long letter written just four days after the event: B.N., MS français 15555, fos. 124–7, Jacques de Largebaston to Charles IX, 7 Oct. 1572. See also ‘Journal de François de Syrueilh’, p. 296, and the valuable study of Hauser, H., ‘Le père Emond Auger et la massacre de Bordeaux 1572’, B.S.H.P.F. LX (1911), 289–306.Google Scholar

23 On the catholic policy of elimination, see above all Sutherland, The massacre of St Bartholomew, passim, although the value of this work is unfortunately partially vitiated by the author's tendency always to believe the worst about catholics. Evidence of at least first steps taken toward putting the elimination policy into effect is provided by the arrest in 1561 of a Guisard agent in Rouen caught with a list in his possession of all the city's leading huguenots and the extent of their fortunes. The man was subsequently executed and the city's protestants were convinced that the catholics had been plotting to massacre them. The Histoire ecclésiastique des églises réformées au Royaume de France, eds. Baum, G., Cunitz, E., and Reuss, R. (3 vols., Paris, 1883–1889), 1, 857–61Google Scholar, provides elaborate detail about this plot. The details are at least partially corroborated by Heron, A. (ed.), Deux chroniques de Rouen (Rouen, 1900), p. 192.Google Scholar

24 B.N., MSS Dupuy 33, fos. 72–3, and Dupuy 698, f0.371. On Ruffec's anti-protestantism, see the Histoire ecclésiastique, II, 974.

25 Lettres de Catherine de Médicis, IV, xcviii n.

26 This letter has been published by Laronze, Charles, Essai sur le régime municipal en Bretagne pendant les guerres de religion (Paris, 1890)Google Scholar, pièce justificative, no. 5, P. 269.

27 Puyroche, , ‘La Saint-Barthélémy à Lyon’, p. 313Google Scholar; Mémoires de l'estat, 1, 383–4; Mourin, Ernest, La réforme et la ligue en Anjou (Paris–Angers, 1856), pp. 106–11.Google Scholar

28 B.N., MS Dupuy 33, fo. 73; Galpern, A. N., The religions of the people in sixteenth-century Champagne (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), p. 177.Google Scholar

29 Mémoires de l'estat, 1, 353–4.

30 Ibid. 1, 383–4.

31 Ibid. 1, 356; Read (ed.), ‘La Saint-Barthélémy à Orleans’, pp. 347 ff.; Puyroche, ‘La Saint-Barthélémy à Lyon’, pp. 313 ff. Information is unfortunately lacking which would enable one to determine the spark to the massacres in Rouen and Meaux.

32 The sequence of events in Bordeaux is narrated above, p. 213. Toulouse remained calm until 3 October, when two envoys sent off to Paris returned to the city claiming that the king wished the huguenots massacred. The parlement of Toulouse then sent orders to this effect to the other cities of its ressort, provoking the violence in Gaillac and smaller incidents in Gaches and Albi. See Carrière, , ‘Les lendemains’, pp. 224–8Google Scholar; Estèbe, , Tocsin, pp. 152–5.Google Scholar

33 This aspect of the massacres in the Midi emerges clearly from the conflicting reports on the massacre: B.N., MS français 15555, fos. 124–7, Jacques de Largebaston to Charles IX, 7 Oct. 1572; fo. 131, Frommelet (procureur du roi in Bordeaux) to Charles IX, 8 Oct. 1572; fo. 161, Largebaston to Charles IX, 29 Oct. 1572; and fo. 163, Frommelet to Charles IX, 25 Oct. 1572. Estèbe, , ‘Les Saint-Barthélémy des villes du Midi’, p. 278Google Scholar, stresses the importance of these longstanding political rivalries.

34 Laronze, , Essai sur le régime municipal en Bretagne, p. 213.Google Scholar

35 Estèbe, , Tocsin, ch. xiiGoogle Scholar; Davis, , ‘The rites of violence’, passim.Google Scholar

36 See, for example, Crespin, Jean, Histoire des martyrs persecutez et mis à mort pour la verité de l'evangile, depuis le temps des apostres jusques à present (1619) (2 vols., Toulouse, 1885–1889), 1, 559Google Scholar, where the martyrdom is recounted of Thomas de Sainct-Pol, who ‘en rendant quelque marchandise…ne peut souffrir les blasphèmes d'un quidam, ains…l'admonnestra doucement d'une humanité et douceur naturelle qu'il avoit; mais l'autre estant irrité, incontinent le soupconna Lutherien (comme ils appellent) à raison d'icelle remonstrance non accoustumée entre Papistes’.

37 For examples of this, see below, p. 220, de Sainetes, Claude, Discours sur le saccagement des eglises catholiques par les heretiques anciens et nouveaux calvinistes en l'an 1562 (Verdun, 1562), pp. 62–3.Google Scholar The broader tendency to explain natural disasters as the result of human transgressions was so deeply ingrained in the mentality of the times that it would be impossible to cite all the evidence that exists to demonstrate it. The question is discussed by Thomas, Keith, Religion and the decline of magic (London, 1971), pp. 89 ff.Google Scholar; Davis, , ‘The rites of violence’, pp. 57–60.Google Scholar

38 The major cities seized by the huguenots at the outbreak of the First Civil War included Rouen, Dieppe, Caen, Le Mans, Meaux, Orleans, Blois, Angers, La Charité, Bourges, Poitiers, Angoulême, Lyons, Valence, Grenoble, Montpellier, Nimes, Montauban, Agen, and Castres. By the Second Civil War the authorities were far warier, and the huguenots secured only Orleans, La Rochelle, Nimes, and a number of smaller cities in the Midi.

39 Galpern, , Religions of the people, p. 172.Google Scholar

40 ‘Rélation des troubles’, p. 3.

41 Ibid. p. 11.

42 Ibid. p. 41.

43 Ibid. p. 15.

44 Ibid. p. 41.

45 The best single guide to the size of the protestant community throughout France is still Geisendorf, P.-F. (ed.), Livre des habitants de Genève, vol. 1: 1549–1560 (Geneva, 1957)Google Scholar Its list of refugees from France reflects, albeit in a slightly skewed fashion, the relative size of the different protestant communities (and the degree of persecution they faced). Seven cities in which massacres occurred (Angers, Bourges, Lyons, Meaux, Orleans, Rouen and Troyes) are to be found among the ten provincial cities sending the most refugees to Geneva, while the figures for Toulouse and Bordeaux also suggest sizeable concentrations of protestants. Of course, this document provides no indication of the total size of any calvinist community at its height and thus cannot tell us whether the huguenots represented a majority or a minority of the population locally, but research I have done on huguenot population figures clearly suggests that in none of these cities did the protestants represent more than a minority of the population. Rouen, for instance, sent more refugees to Geneva than any other city in France, yet the protestants represented only 21% of the city's population at their height (Benedict, Philip, ‘Catholics and huguenots in sixteenth-century Rouen: The demographic effects of the religious wars’, French Historical Studies, IX (1975), 224).Google Scholar In contrast to the sizeable huguenot minorities in most towns in which massacres occurred, the livre des habitants indicates only small protestant communities in Saumur and La Charité. Significantly, these were also among the cities in which the massacres were most clearly the handiwork of just a few zealous catholics in positions of authority, not of the catholic populace at large.

46 Histoire ecclésiastique, II, 439–49, 575–98, 637–68; de Lacomb, Bernard, Les débuts des guerres de religion (Orléans, 1559–1564): Catherine de Médicis entre Guise et Condé (Paris, 1899)Google Scholar, passim; Gascon, , Grand commerce et vie urbaine, II, 459–535.Google Scholar

47 Blouyn, Mathieu, Histoire des troubles advenus à Gaillac et aux environs depuis 1559 au 13 décembre 1593, ed. de Rivières, (Montpellier, 1877), pp. 5–25Google Scholar; Estèbe, , Tocsin, p. 154.Google Scholar

48 Estèbe, , ‘Les Saint-Barthélémy des villes du Midi’, p. 725.Google Scholar

49 In Bordeaux the massacre was carried out primarily by six companies of soldiers under de Montferrand. There was some looting, but the sources contain no references to any ritualistic brutality. On the conduct of the massacre there, see B.N., MS français 15555, Jacques de Largebaston to Charles IX, 7 Oct. 1572, fo. 125; ‘Journal de François de Syrueilh’, p. 296. The sources are simply mute about Rouen; we have almost no details whatsoever about how the massacre was carried out and what went on during it, although it is known that the violence lasted for several days – a fact which suggests that the massacre was more than simply the summary execution of those huguenots imprisoned in the city's jails for safe keeping. The evidence concerning the massacre in Rouen is surveyed in Benedict, Philip, ‘Rouen during the wars of religion: popular disorder, public order, and the confessional struggle’, unpub. Ph.D. diss. (Princeton, 1975), pp. 152–3.Google Scholar Toulouse was something of an intermediate case. Here a mob was crucial in sparking the violence, which was accompanied by a good deal of pillage, but the sources do not refer to any excesses of brutality. For the best accounts here, see Estèbe, , Tocsin, pp. 153–4Google Scholar; and her ‘Les Saint-Barthélémy des villes du Midi’, p. 724.

50 Estèbe maintains that there is a fundamental distinction between the massacres which took place in the Midi and those which took place in the rest of France, the massacres in the South being less strongly motivated by blind confessional hatreds, more strictly political in nature, and accompanied by none of the excesses of brutality which marked the massacres in the North. ‘Quand il y a des violences [in the Midi]…on pourrait presque dire qu'elles sont rassurantes…’ (Estèbe, Tocsin, p. 204). The distinction may not be as neat as she makes it appear. The massacre at Gaillac included victims ‘mis à mort, destronchés et coupés en plusieurs endroits de leur personne’ (Blouyn, , Histoire des troubles à Gailhac, p. 24).Google Scholar Conversely, gory details of mutilated corpses, disembowelled mothers, or victims hurled into rivers running red with blood appear in the narratives of only some of the northern massacres. Although the silence regarding brutal excesses in certain northern towns such as Troyes, Meaux or Angers may simply be a result of the paucity of our sources, I would argue that the chief distinction in terms of the level of brutality involved needs to be drawn between those massacres in which there was a high degree of mob participation and those in which the killing was largely the work of city officials or soldiers.

51 Memoires de l'estat, 1, 384. See also Mourin, , Réforme et ligue en Anjou, pp. 109–11.Google Scholar La Charité and Troyes also witnessed massacres with a minimum of popular involvement. In La Charité, the Italian troops of the arch-catholic Duke of Nevers were the agents of the violence, while in Troyes, the sergeant of the conciergerie, acting on the orders of Belin and de Vaudry, accounted for the great majority of the victims, executing those held in the city's prison one by one ‘à tour de roole’. This latter city also saw a few huguenots attacked by a mob, but the toll of such violence was slight by contrast with the excesses occurring elsewhere in France (Mémoires de l'estat, 1, 356; B.N. MS Dupuy 33, fo. 73).

52 For good accounts of the measures taken in the wake of Saint Bartholomew's day in towns untroubled by violence, see Philippi, Jean, Mémoires, in Petitot, C. B. (ed.), Collection complète des mémoires relatifs à l'histoire de France (130 vols., Paris, 1818–1829), 1st ser., XXXIV, 379Google Scholar; Carrière, , ‘Les lendemains’, pp. 223 ff.Google Scholar; de Courtsigny, Osmont, ‘Jean Le Hennuyer’, pp. 151–3Google Scholar; Guibert, Louis, La ligue à Limoges (Limoges, 1884), p. 4Google Scholar; and ‘Le protestantisme à Limoges 1572’, B.S.H.P.F. XIX–XX (1870–1871), 430.Google Scholar This last work, a contemporary account of the aftermath of the massacre in the Limousin capital, is particularly suggestive as regards the concerns of the authorities lest any disorder rebound against them. The news of the violence taking place in other cities ‘servoient d'argument au peuple de ceste ville pour en faire la semblable’. The authorities deployed the militia throughout the city and were able to maintain order: ‘La raison [for their actions] estoit fondée en deux principalles considerations: l'une que les officiers du roy et les consulz n'avoient receu aulcun commandement d'ainsi proceder [to carry out a massacre] comme les aultres villes esquelles les gouverneurs avoient executé telles charges; l'autre que, si le peuple commancoit librement prendre des armes, il estoit à craindre qu'ils les emploierait indiscretement à son apetit, non seullement contre ceulx de la religion mais contre les principaux habitans.’ The massive wave of reconversions to Catholicism on the part of the protestant population of those areas where they were in the minority has not often been remarked upon by historians, but for the dimensions of this movement in one city, see Benedict, , ‘Catholics and huguenots in sixteenth-century Rouen’, pp. 228–9.Google Scholar Comparative information on this phenomenon throughout France may be found in Benedict, , ‘Rouen during the wars of religion’, pp. 181–5.Google Scholar

53 For the actions taken in huguenot-controlled towns such as these, see Carrière, , ‘Les lendemains’, pp. 223–5Google Scholar; Ménard, Léon, Histoire civile, ecclésiastique et littéraire de la ville de Nismes (7 vols., Paris, 1750–1758), v, 71–2Google Scholar; Barbot, Amos, Histoire de la Rochelle (3 vols., Paris–Saintes, 1886–1890), III, 19 ff.Google Scholar

54 Meyer, Jean et al. , Histoire de Rennes (Toulouse, 1972), p. 200.Google Scholar

55 Henry, E., La réforme et la ligue en Champagne et à Reims (St Nicholas, 1867), passim.Google Scholar

56 Guiraud, Louise, Etudes sur la réforme à Montpellier (2 vols., Montpellier, 1918)Google Scholar, passim; Guillaume, and Daval, Jean, Histoire de la réformation à Dieppe (Rouen, 1878), passim.Google Scholar