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  • The Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre: The Mysteries of a Crime of State (24 August 1572) by Arlette Jouanna
  • Frederic J. Baumgartner
The Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre: The Mysteries of a Crime of State (24 August 1572). By Arlette Jouanna. Translated from the French by Joseph Bergin. (New York: Manchester University Press. Distrib. Palgrave, an imprint of Macmillan. 2013. Pp. xiv, 271. $100.00. ISBN 978-0-7190-8831-5.)

This is the first book of the prolific French historian Arlette Jouanna to be translated into English. That it and none of her other books on sixteenth-century France is now in English demonstrates the continuing fascination with its topic—the August 1572 massacre of Protestants in Paris. The topic seemingly had been exhausted in myriad works, including several major studies in the past two decades, but Jouanna was convinced that a comprehensive review of the primary sources would provide a better explanation for the massacre and demonstrate its significance for French history.

The key issue for Jouanna is explaining how the court of Charles IX moved from celebrating the marriage on August 18 between Prince Henry of Navarre, titular [End Page 353] head of the Protestant party in France, and Catholic Princess Marguerite, the king’s sister, to sanctioning the brutal murders of six days later: “No greater contrast could be imagined between these rejoicings and the bloody fury unleashed a few days later” (p. 4). Any answer to that question also requires accounting for the attempt on Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, the actual leader of the Huguenots, on August 22 and how it led to the general massacre two days later.

The author begins her study with the Edict of St-Germain of 1570, which provided limited toleration for the Huguenots and royal offices for several of their leaders. Although Charles and Catherine de Medici, his mother, were convinced that the treaty would secure peace in the kingdom and worked to ensure its efficacy, most Catholics, including many nobles led by the Guises, seethed with rage against those who “wounded them in their most intimate religious selves” (p. 22). That was especially true in Paris, where radical preachers denounced the treaty and urged action against the heretics. Jouanna also shows the Huguenots’ deep discontent with the edict’s limitations and their anxiety that the king might be persuaded to break it.

Thus the situation was highly volatile when many Huguenot nobles arrived at Paris in early August 1572 for the royal wedding. For the militant Catholics, the marriage demonstrated that the king was willing to go further in placating the heretics, perhaps even going to war with Spain in support of the Protestant rebels in the Netherlands. Jouanna’s detailed account of the attack on Coligny mines the sources for every nuance on those responsible and their motivation. She concludes that it is impossible now to determine who arranged the attack, but the would-be assassin (a Guise client) had to have received the go-ahead from someone well placed at court, not necessarily the duke of Guise. She is far surer about the motive: It would break the fragile peace, which certainly turned out to be true, likely beyond the conspirators’ wildest dreams. Jouanna uses the term Surgical Strike as the title for her chapter on the royal executions of Coligny and other Huguenot leaders in Paris. Convinced that a massive Huguenot military reprisal would quickly follow the attack on Coligny, Charles ordered the deaths of those who would lead it. Given the heightened state of fear among Catholic Parisians toward the polluters in their midst, it was all but inevitable that the surgical strike would become “a murderous orgy of pacification” (p. 123).

The author then examines the vast outpouring of writings in response to the event. She reaches two major conclusions: The massacre ensured that the Protestants would not become the religious majority of France; it shattered their confidence that God had determined that they would. Second, the need for royal apologists to justify the extrajudicial executions of Coligny and his captains led to a “super-sacralisation” of the king, who was above human law and answered only to God, contributing to...

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