A narrated YouTube lecture by Pocket Pastor about the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (beginning 24 August 1572 in Paris). The speaker describes the massacre’s immediate trigger (an assassination attempt and subsequent murder of Huguenot leader Admiral Gaspard de Coligny), the week-long slaughter in Paris that then spread to other French cities (Lyon, Rouen, Orléans), contemporary reactions in Rome (jubilation, a medal, Vasari frescoes) and an estimate that up to 70,000 people were killed in the following weeks and months. The video frames the massacre as a formative trauma for international Protestant identity and uses it to argue for separation of church and state and for religious freedom.
Questions this video answers
24 August 1572.
Up to 70,000 people.
Admiral Gaspard de Coligny.
Seven days.
Chapters
Foreign.
In 1572, here in Paris, an event took place that has been described in the book Great Controversy as blackest in the black catalog of crimes. On the 24th of August, St. Bartholomew's Massacre began. As the bells sounded at night, a slaughter began of the French Protestants who were in the city. There were more of them than usual because they had gathered for the wedding of one of their leaders, and in the night they were dragged from their houses and murdered in cold blood. The slaughter continued here in the city of Paris for seven days, and then it spread abroad to other cities like Lyon and Rouen and Orleans. And some people estimate that up to 70,000 people were killed over the next weeks and months.
Two days before St. Bartholomew's the King's Mother, Catherine, ordered the assassination of Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, a Huguenot leader. The assassination attempt failed, and they feared that the Huguenots would launch a counterattack. And so the second time round, they made sure and they killed the Admiral in his bed. And then the killing spree started. The butchery continued for seven months across the whole of France. Many of those who were killed were great and honorable people in society, as commoners and nobility alike suffered the same fate.
Two or three governors refused to obey the King's orders, and one of these, Paul Monmorin, wrote a letter that deserves to be repeated. Sire, I received an order under your majesty's seal to put to death all the Protestants in my province. I have too much respect for your majesty not to believe the letter is a forgery. But if which, God forbid, the order should be genuine, I have too much respect for your majesty to obey it.
When the news reached Rome, the response was jubilant and very undiplomatic. The joy amongst the clergy knew no bounds. The Cardinal of Lorraine rewarded the messenger with a thousand crowns. The cannon of St. Angelo thundered a joyous salute, and the bells on every steeple rang throughout the city. Gregory xiii, accompanied by cardinals, ecclesiastical dignitaries, led a procession to The Church of St. Louis, where the Cardinal of Lorraine led a chant of a Te Deum. A medal was struck to commemorate the massacre. And in the Vatican today can be seen the three frescoes of Vasari describing the attack on the Admiral, the King in council plotting the massacre, and the massacre itself.
Saint Bartholomew's was one of those events that helped to create a shared identity between Lutherans, Calvin's Reformed Church and the Anglicans. Catholicism was the other, and the violence directed towards Protestants created a shared sense of injustice and solidarity that spread throughout international Protestantism.
Saint Bartholomew's remains one of the many stains on the Catholic Church when the tragic consequences of the union of church and state were seen in full effect in the Bible, Jesus said that we should render to Caesar or the state that which is Caesar and to God that which is God's. Meaning that church and state should remain separate. May we defend the freedoms of those we agree with and those we disagree with for freedom. Religious freedom is something that God wants for everyone.
