There are conflicting accounts of what led to the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and who triggered the events of that fateful night, but all historical accounts agree on its brutality and trauma. Prior to the massacre Henry de Bourbon, the newly ascended King of Navarre married Margaret of Valois the sister of the King of France, Charles IX. The wedding was a last-ditch attempt to unite the feuding Catholic and Huguenot factions after ten years of bloody warfare. Unfortunately, Henry’s installation within the French Royal family did nothing to deter the King or his mother Catherine de Medici from advancing one of the worst incidences of genocide in history. 

At midnight on the 24th of August 1572, the bells of the church of St. Germaine l’Auxerrois began to toll. The church sits facing the Louvre making it easily accessible from the palace. The tolling of the bells of St. Germaine l’Auxerrois signaled the beginning of the massacre. Crowds of Catholics took to the streets, identifiable in the darkness by white armbands threaded over their clothing or white crosses painted onto their hats and caps. They went throughout the city knocking on doors, dragging Huguenots out of their beds, and systematically executing them.

The first to die was Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, the leader of the Huguenot resistance. The Admiral was staying not far from the Louvre where he was shot inside his lodgings. His body was then thrown onto the street below where it lay until his burial. Meanwhile inside the palace Huguenot nobility who were guests of the king were dragged out of their beds and murdered. Their dismembered bodies were piled outside the palace gates to bake in the summer sun. The newly married Henry of Navarre was reportedly saved from death by the hysterical pleading of his new wife, who begged her brother to spare her husband. By midday, the Seine was bloated with bodies and enveloped by the stench of blood. The massacre rippled across the kingdom gathering momentum and lasting weeks until finally it subsided. 

In the aftermath of the bloodshed, thousands of Huguenots fled France, congregating in Geneva and other parts of Europe. It was by no means the last instance of intense French Protestants face, but it was one of the bloodiest and most brutal.