Throughout the 16th century, France was tattered with religious wars; wars to squash religious pluralism in the country. The Protestant Huguenots were growing in numbers. By 1560, 10 percent of the nation was Protestant. The monarchy tried to mitigate this growth by launching repressive measures against the Huguenots, but those decrees were ignored.
Nobles sided with the Huguenots during this feud. However, that was not purely on religious grounds. This was a political calculation for many nobles who benefited from a weakened monarchy. Regardless, this gave the Huguenots the political support they needed to defend themselves against Catholic attacks when the war came to physical blows under King Francis’ oppression.
In 1560, the Estates General convened to address this issue. It decided on religious toleration, an opinion adopted by a third faction during the French Wars of Religion known as the Politiques. However, neither side practiced religious toleration, and the wars continued.
By the 1570s, the Duke of Guise coordinated an assassination attempt on the leader of the Huguenot forces, Admiral Coligny. The Duke and Catherine, King Charles’ mother, believed if they killed the Huguenot leadership, the entire movement would crumble. However, the assassination attempt failed. Admiral Coligny was shot but not killed. King Charles regarded this as an atrocity and swore to launch an investigation to prosecute the perpetrator, but the Duke was never officially exposed. However, Charles’ promises could not mitigate the rising tension, and soon, his mother Catherine believed the Huguenot forces were planning to kidnap her and Charles. She and the Duke pressured him to call for the execution of all the Huguenot leadership. After a heated argument with his mother, Charles had an emotional breakdown and yelled, “Fine! But kill them all!” The immediate aftermath was a huge slaughter across the country. Catholic mobs interpreted this as a justification to execute all the Huguenots, from the military leadership to young children. King Charles tried to stop the mobs and correct his mistake, but it was too late. The city gates were locked, trapping all the Huguenots inside, and between 5,000 to 30,000 Huguenots were killed on that day during the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1572).
Contrary to their expectation, the massacre did not “squash” Protestantism in France. Charles’ successor, Henry of Navarre, was a Protestant himself, and he passed the Edict of Naples (1598), granting all people religious freedom. Thus, in the end, after all the bloodshed during the French Wars of Religion, the nation embraced religious tolerance after all.
Asher Sisneros 