St. Bartholomew's Day massacre
The St. Bartholomew's Day massacre in 1572 was a targeted group of assassinations and a wave of Catholic mob violence directed against the Huguenots during the French Wars of Religion. Traditionally believed to have been instigated by Queen Catherine de' Medici, the mother of King Charles IX, the massacre started a few days after the marriage on 18 August of the king's sister Margaret to the Protestant King Henry III of Navarre. Many of the wealthiest and most prominent Huguenots had gathered in largely Catholic Paris to attend the wedding.
Painting by François Dubois, a Huguenot painter who fled France after the massacre. Although it is not known whether Dubois witnessed the event, he depicts Admiral Coligny's body hanging out of a window at the rear to the right. To the left rear, Catherine de' Medici is shown emerging from the Louvre Palace to inspect a heap of bodies.
Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, the leader of the Huguenots
Charles IX of France, who was 22 years old in August 1572, by François Clouet.
This popular print by Frans Hogenberg shows the attempted assassination of Coligny at left, his subsequent murder at right, and scenes of the general massacre in the streets.
The Huguenots were a religious group of French Protestants who held to the Reformed (Calvinist) tradition of Protestantism. The term, which may be derived from the name of a Swiss political leader, the Genevan burgomaster Besançon Hugues (1491–1532), was in common use by the mid-16th century. Huguenot was frequently used in reference to those of the Reformed Church of France from the time of the Protestant Reformation. By contrast, the Protestant populations of eastern France, in Alsace, Moselle, and Montbéliard, were mainly Lutherans.
Persecution of the Waldensians in the massacre of Mérindol in 1545
Huguenots massacring Catholics in the Michelade in Nîmes
Millais' painting, A Huguenot on St. Bartholomew's Day
The St. Bartholomew's Day massacre of French Protestants (1572). It was the climax of the French Wars of Religion, which were brought to an end by the Edict of Nantes (1598). In 1620, persecution was renewed and continued until the French Revolution in 1789.