Theoretical Paper: Massacres during the Wars of Religion

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The Western notion of massacre first appeared in France during the Wars of Religion. At the time, the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre represented the ultimate model of an outburst of extreme violence against defenseless civilians. Just after the royal Princess Marguerite de Valois’ wedding to the Head of the Huguenot (Protestant) faction, Henri de Bourbon-Navarre, nearly 3,000 Protestants were slain in Paris in five days, from the night of of August 23-24 to August 29, 1572. The most recent historiographical studies consider the royal family responsible for the killing, as regards the decision to eliminate the “belligerent” or “warring Huguenots” (“Huguenots de guerre”), the leadership of the Protestant faction (Sutherland, 1973; Soman, 1974; Garrisson, 1987; Kingdon, 1988; Diefendorf, 1991; Crouzet, 1994; Bourgeon, 1995). The decision to mount the royal coup was motivated by fear of a Protestant plot following an attempt to assassinate their leader, Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, as well as by the desire to save the political “concord” (agreement) achieved with difficulty in 1570, or to prevent a Catholic uprising driven by Spain. Besides, as unusual signals appeared in the city, Parisian Catholics, who considered themselves invested with a holy mission, followed this lead and indulged in mob violence, leading to a much deadlier massacre. Eventually, Charles IX took responsibility for the massacre as a whole, but immediately demanded that the mass killings be stopped, since they represented intolerable disorder, which ran counter to the goals pursued by the monarchy over the previous decade. Nevertheless, massacres occurred locally in the kingdom until autumn, ending up in the murder of 7,000 additional victims (Benedict, 1981).

Compared to contemporary massacres, the historical distance that separates us from the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre makes it easier to apprehend it retrospectively as an event, that is, as an absolute and irreparable break in historical continuity. However, historical methods of research entail putting facts into perspective, and the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre must be evaluated in the light of existing practices of religious violence at the time. Thus, the contextualization approach is necessary in order to preclude anachronistic interpretations of massacres; yet we must also consider its limitations, so as to avoid trivializing this massacre and in effect, disregarding its unique character as an event.

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