Editing St. Bartholomew's Day massacre (section)

===Paris===
The attempted assassination of Coligny triggered the crisis that led to the massacre. Admiral de Coligny was the most respected Huguenot leader and enjoyed a close relationship with the king, although he was distrusted by the king's mother. Aware of the danger of reprisals from the Protestants, the king and his court visited Coligny on his sickbed and promised him that the culprits would be punished. While the Queen Mother was eating dinner, Protestants burst in to demand justice, some talking in menacing terms.<ref>Garrisson, pp. 82–83, and Lincoln, p. 96, and Knecht (2001), p. 361</ref> Fears of Huguenot reprisals grew. Coligny's brother-in-law led a 4,000-strong army camped just outside Paris<ref name="Holt81"/> and, although there is no evidence it was planning to attack, Catholics in the city feared it might take revenge on the Guises or the city populace itself.

That evening, Catherine held a meeting at the [[Tuileries]] Palace with her Italian advisers, including [[Albert de Gondi]], Comte de Retz. On the evening of 23 August, Catherine went to see the king to discuss the crisis. Though no details of the meeting survive, Charles IX and his mother apparently made the decision to eliminate the Protestant leaders. Holt speculated this entailed "between two and three dozen noblemen" who were still in Paris.<ref>Holt (2005), p. 85.</ref> Other historians are reluctant to speculate on the composition or size of the group of leaders targeted at this point, beyond the few obvious heads. Like Coligny, most potential candidates for elimination were accompanied by groups of gentlemen who served as staff and bodyguards, so murdering them would also have involved killing their retainers as a necessity.

Shortly after this decision, the municipal authorities of Paris were summoned. They were ordered to shut the city gates and arm the citizenry to prevent any attempt at a Protestant uprising. The king's [[Swiss Guards|Swiss mercenaries]] were given the task of killing a list of leading Protestants. It is difficult today to determine the exact chronology of events, or to know the precise moment the killing began. It seems probable that a signal was given by ringing bells for [[matins]] (between midnight and dawn) at the church of [[Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois]], near the Louvre, which was the parish church of the kings of France. The Swiss mercenaries expelled the Protestant nobles from the Louvre Castle and then slaughtered them in the streets.
[[File:Debat-Ponsan-matin-Louvre.jpg|thumb|left|''One morning at the gates of the Louvre'', 19th-century painting by [[Édouard Debat-Ponsan]]. [[Catherine de' Medici]] is in black. The scene from Dubois (above) re-imagined.]]

In the [[Holy Innocents' Cemetery]], on 24 August at noon, a [[Crataegus|hawthorn bush]], that had withered for months, began to green again near an image of the Virgin. That was interpreted by the Parisians as a sign of divine blessing and approval to these multiple murders,<ref>{{Cite news |date=3 August 2007 |title=Le massacre de la Saint-Barthélemy : l'obsession de la souillure hérétique |language=fr |work=Le Monde.fr |url=https://www.lemonde.fr/ete-2007/article/2007/08/03/le-massacre-de-la-saint-barthelemy-l-obsession-de-la-souillure-heretique_941606_781732.html |access-date=22 December 2022}}</ref> and that night, a group led by Guise in person dragged Admiral Coligny from his bed, killed him, and threw his body out of a window. The terrified Huguenot nobles in the building initially put up a fight, hoping to save the life of their leader,<ref>Knecht (2001), p. 364. The site is now 144 [[Rue de Rivoli]], with a plaque commemorating the event, though both building and street layout postdate the 16th century. [https://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9A04E4DD1739E233A25752C2A9609C94669FD7CF New York Times on the plaque]</ref> but Coligny himself seemed unperturbed. According to the contemporary French historian [[Jacques Auguste de Thou]], one of Coligny's murderers was struck by how calmly he accepted his fate, and remarked that "he never saw anyone less afraid in so great a peril, nor die more steadfastly".<ref>{{cite book|last1=De Thou|first1=Jacques- Auguste|title=Histoire des choses arrivees de son temps|publisher=Boston: Ginn and Company}}</ref>{{page needed|date=August 2020}} 

The tension that had been building since the Peace of St. Germain now exploded in a wave of popular violence. The common people began to hunt Protestants throughout the city, including women and children. Chains were used to block streets so that Protestants could not escape from their houses. The bodies of the dead were collected in carts and thrown into the [[Seine]]. The massacre in Paris lasted three days despite the king's attempts to stop it. Holt concludes that "while the general massacre might have been prevented, there is no evidence that it was intended by any of the elites at court", listing a number of cases where Catholic courtiers intervened to save individual Protestants who were not in the leadership.<ref>Holt (2005 edn), pp. 88–91 (quotation from p. 91)</ref> Recent research by Jérémie Foa, investigating the [[prosopography]] suggests that the massacres were carried by a group of militants who had already made out lists of Protestants deserving extermination, and the mass of the population, whether approving or disapproving, were not directly involved.<ref>{{cite book |last=Foa |first=Jérémie |title=Tous ceux qui tombent. Visages du massacre de la Saint-Bethélemy |language=fr |trans-title=All Who Fall. Faces of the St. Bethlemy Massacre |date=2021 |publisher=La Découverte |isbn=978-2348057885}}</ref>

The two leading Huguenots, Henry of Navarre and his cousin the [[Henri I de Bourbon, prince de Condé|Prince of Condé]] (respectively aged 19 and 20), were spared as they pledged to convert to Catholicism; both would eventually renounce their conversions when they managed to escape Paris.<ref name="Dyer1861">{{cite book |last=Dyer |first=Thomas Henry |author-link=Thomas Henry Dyer |title=The history of modern Europe: from the fall of Constantinople in 1453 to the war in the Crimea in 1857 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ErgyAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA268 |access-date=28 March 2011 |year=1861 |publisher=John Murray |page=268}}</ref> According to some interpretations, the survival of these Huguenots was a key point in Catherine's overall scheme, to prevent the House of Guise from becoming too powerful.

On 26 August, the king and court established the official version of events by going to the [[Paris Parlement]]. "Holding a [[lit de justice]], Charles declared that he had ordered the massacre in order to thwart a Huguenot plot against the royal family."<ref name="Lincoln98">Lincoln, p. 98</ref> A jubilee celebration, including a procession, was then held, while the killings continued in parts of the city.<ref name="Lincoln98"/>