St. Bartholomew's Day massacre

“ The "Popish Plot" (1678) .—A rumor was started that the Catholics had planned for England a St. Bartholomew massacre. The king, the members of Parliament, and all Protestants were to be massacred, the Catholic Church was to be reëstablished, and the king's brother James, the Duke of York, a zealous Catholic, was to be placed on the throne. Each day the reports of the conspiracy grew more exaggerated and wild. Informers sprang up on every hand, each with a more terrifying story than the preceding. ”

“ Such was the awful massacre of St. Bartholomew. When contemplated in all its aspects of perfidy, cruelty, and cowardice, it must be pronounced the greatest crime recorded in history. The victims were invited under the guise of friendship to Paris. They were received with solemn oaths of peace and protection. The leading men in the nation placed the dagger in the hands of an ignorant and degraded people. The priests, professed ministers of Jesus Christ, stimulated the benighted multitude by all the appeals of fanaticism to exterminate those whom they denounced as the enemies of God and man. ”

“ Your citizens of Paris formerly had lent themselves as the ready
instruments to slaughter the followers of Calvin, at the infamous massacre
of St. Bartholomew. What should we say to those who could think of
retaliating on the Parisians of this day the abominations and horrors of
that time? They are indeed brought to abhor that massacre. Ferocious as
they are, it is not difficult to make them dislike it, because the
politicians and fashionable teachers have no interest in giving their
passions exactly the same direction. ”

“ Catholics conceived the notion that the Huguenots had flown to arms, and intended a universal massacre. The tocsin was sounded on every side; the villages rose en masse, and the (Roman) Catholic peasantry stuck a white cross in their hats, in imitation of the assassins of Saint Bartholomew. The night of the 14th was spent in casting bullets, preparing cartouches, and many a curate joined in and hastened the arming. The next day, the whole population was on the alert, ready for the direst excesses, and it was with the utmost difficulty the magistrates could restrain them. ”

“ Bartholomew's day, 1572, by orders emanating from the court.
Isolated from the religious wars in which it is but one of the darkest episodes, this affair has been set forward as an independent act—a deliberate scheme of the Catholic party in France—king, nobles, and clergy—to extinguish Protestantism at a single blow. The numbers of the victims have been exaggerated to an extent incompatible with all contemporary statistics of population; and the massacre of St. ”

“ True friends of mankind and haters of intolerance have their rheumatism or colic on August 24th, the day of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. Voltaire always timed his boils so and got a rash or the itch on May 14th for good measure. ”

“ There will be no tranquillity in the kingdom while one of them is left alive; and I hope his Majesty will take advantage of the present ferment to order a general massacre of them, like that of the poor Protestants on Saint Bartholomew's day in Paris. ”

“ The barrel is richly chased in high relief, with a stag-hunt amid foliage. The stock is inlaid with ivory, sculptured into a series of hunting scenes, knights on horseback.
The dreadful massacre of Saint Bartholomew commenced at Paris on the night of the festival of that saint, August 24th, 1572. Above 500 persons of rank, and 10,000 of inferior condition, perished in Paris alone, besides those slaughtered in the provinces. ”

“ It is scarcely less remarkable as being one of those historic crimes which defeat their own purpose by reacting against the perpetrators and advancing the cause of those who suffer outrage.
The tragedy of St. Bartholomew's Day marked the culmination of the great struggle which devastated France in the latter half of the sixteenth century. ”

“ We may have crusades without a Holy Land to recover—as we have had a Bartholomew massacre; we have had, and may have again, in civilised Europe, the political massacres which, in reading history in our closets in our own peaceful homes, we had fondly deemed passed away for ever. ”

“ It was an age that in Italy could breed a Cenci, and in France could tolerate the massacre of St. Bartholomew as a legitimate stroke of statecraft. But when we consider whether crime be a fit subject for tragedy, we must distinguish. Merely as crime, it is vulgar, as are the waxen images of murderers with the very rope round their necks with which they were hanged. ”

“ In the year 1554, two men of the reformed religion, with the son and daughter of one of them, were apprehended and committed to the castle of Niverne. On examination, they confessed their faith, and were ordered for execution; being smeared with grease, brimstone, and gunpowder, they cried, "Salt on, salt on this sinful and rotten flesh!" Their tongues were then cut out, and they were afterward committed to the flames, which soon consumed them, by means of the combustible matter with which they were besmeared. [57]
The Bartholomew Massacre at Paris, &c. ”

“ To betray and to kill were deeds so common that they caused scarcely any astonishment, and that people were almost resigned to them beforehand. We have cited fifteen or twenty cases of the massacres which in the reign of Charles IX., from 1562 to 1572, grievously troubled and steeped in blood such and such a part of France, without leaving any lasting traces in history. Previously to the massacre called the St. Bartholomew, the massacre of Vassy is almost the only one which received and kept its true name. ”

“ But Paris knows not Argonne, and terror is in her streets, with defiance and frenzy. From a Sunday night to Thursday are a hundred hours, to be reckoned with the Bartholomew butchery; prisoners dragged out by sudden courts of wild justice to be massacred. These are the September massacres, the victims one thousand and eighty-nine; in the historical fantasy "between two and three thousand"--nay, six, even twelve. They have been put to death because "we go to fight the enemy; but we will not leave robbers behind us to butcher our wives and children." ”

“ He inherits and maintains the tyrannous and oppressive feudal system, that prevents the common people from acquiring ownership of land. His career has been described, "as an hideous abortion and mistake of nature, the use and meaning of which is not yet known." The persecution of Bible readers, or Protestants, is begun with a general massacre at Paris, on the anniversary of Saint Bartholomew in 1572. Those who escape the bloody horrors of that occasion, are commanded to emigrate from France, on pain of [Pg 420] death. ”

“ These were the real authors of the Saint Bartholomew massacre, and this is the manner in which they prepared and accomplished it.
The court saw with displeasure that the chiefs of the Reformed, Jeanne d’Albret, Henry of Bourbon, Henry of Condé, Coligny, Larochefoucauld, Lanoue, Briquemant, and Cavagnes, had retired to La Rochelle, or to their provinces. It was necessary to draw them out, in order to get them into their power. Men of the third party were sent to them, who, without raising their distrust, might induce them to approach nearer to Paris. ”

“ Is our treacherous assault upon a weak people distressing a nation which contributed Bartholomew’s Day to human history? Is our ruthless spirit offending the sensibilities of the nation which gave us the Reign of Terror to read about? ”

“ Bartholomew?"
"Not I, lady! not I!" exclaimed the perfumer, with a look of disgust and horror at the very name of that fearful massacre. "Not I, indeed! not for the world would I have borne a part, either in that shameful affair, or in the late brutal murder of the great Duke and the Cardinal de Guise."
"Why, how now!" cried Beatrice. "Would you, who hold life so lightly, and take it so carelessly from others; would you affect scruples at slaying those you consider heretics, or at putting away ambitious tyrants?" ”

“ Bartholomew, preceded by a History of the Religious Wars in the Reign of Charles IX,’ London, 8vo, a work of genuine research. White's was the first English treatise to show that the massacre was the result of a sudden resolution, and not of a long-prepared conspiracy. ”

“ Bartholomew. I am the Inquisition of Spain. I do not say that we have never gone mad, but I say that we are fit to act as keepers to our enemies. Massacre is wicked even with a provocation, as in the Bartholomew. ”

“ Such might have been supposed by a moralist to be the punishment, inflicted, even upon this earth, on him, who, if he did not instigate, ordained and prosecuted the horrible massacre of St Bartholomew.
The state of the miserable Charles grew hourly worse, and he rapidly approached his last moments. None knew better than his heartless mother, as she had herself admitted, that he must die ”

“ The nobles leagued against them, the royal forces were set in motion; the White Hoods were defeated and butchered without compunction, and the society founded for a good purpose came to an end, and its disappearance gave free scope for the great Companies to reorganise and resume their depredations.
When the massacre of S. Bartholomew was determined on in 1572, sealed orders were sent to the Count-Bishop of Le Puy as to all other governors to order a butchery of the Huguenots. Antoine de S. Nectaire was bishop at the time. ”

“ If they are in arms against the king, I must be in arms for him; but I hope none the less that, when arms are laid down, there will be a cessation of persecution--at any rate, a cessation of massacre. It is bringing disgrace on us in the eyes of all Europe, and I trust that there may be a league made among us to withstand the Guises; and to insist that there shall be, in France, no repetition of the atrocities by which Philip of Spain, and the Duke of Alva, are trying to stamp out the reformed religion in the Netherlands. ”

“ We may here interrupt the narrative of events subsequent to the restoration of peace in the territory, with the story of the most horrible massacre of white people by religious fanatics of their own race that has been recorded since that famous St. Bartholemew's night in Paris—the story of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Committed on Friday, September 11, 1857,—four days before the date of Young's proclamation forbidding the United States troops to enter the territory—it was a considerable time before more than vague rumors of the crime reached the Eastern states. ”