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From Hutton Webster's, Early European History (1917); edited for this on-line publication, by ELLOPOS
XXIV. THE REFORMATION AND THE RELIGIOUS WARS, 1517-1648 A.D.
» Contents of this Chapter
Page 43
CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE
During most of the second half of the sixteenth century fierce conflicts raged in France between the Roman Catholics and the Huguenots. Philip II aided the former and Queen Elizabeth gave some assistance to the latter. France suffered terribly in the struggle, not only from the constant fighting, which cost the lives, it is said, of more than a million people, but also from the pillage, burnings, and other barbarities in which both sides indulged. The wealth and prosperity of the country visibly declined, and all patriotic feeling disappeared in the hatreds engendered by a civil war.
MASSACRE OF ST. BARTHOLOMEW'S DAY, 1572 A.D.
The episode known as the massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day illustrates the extremes to which political ambition and religious bigotry could lead. The massacre was an attempt to extirpate the Huguenots, root and branch, at a time when peace prevailed between them and their opponents. The person primarily responsible for it was Catherine de' Medici, mother of Charles IX (1560-1574 A.D.), the youthful king of France. Charles had begun to cast off the sway of his mother and to come under the influence of Admiral de Coligny, the most eminent of the Huguenots. To regain her power Catherine first tried to have Coligny murdered. When the plot failed, she invented the story of a great Huguenot uprising and induced her weak- minded son to authorize a wholesale butchery of Huguenots. It began in Paris in the early morning of August 24, 1572 A.D. (St. Bartholomew's Day), and extended to the provinces, where it continued for several weeks. Probably ten thousand Huguenots were slain, including Coligny himself. But the deed was a blunder as well as a crime. The Huguenots took up arms to defend themselves, and France again experienced all the horrors of internecine strife.
THE MAKING OF EUROPE / EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY: Table of Contents
url: www.ellopos.net/politics/european-history/default.asp
Cf. The Ancient Greece * The Ancient Rome
Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium) * Western Medieval Europe * Renaissance in Italy
