Chapter 1

The Barriers of the League: May 1588

Barricade: the word makes its first appearance in the Commentaires of Blaise de Monluc, the warlord who commanded the royal troops against the Huguenots in Guyenne in the 1570s. He had a certain personal experience of it. In September 1569, he attacked Mont-de-Marsan: ‘The enemies fired straight at the bridge, along a main road, where they had put a barricade, which they were not all able to reach, as we caught a large force in the side roads. … Finally the enemies abandoned the barricade and hastened into the other town by the gateway.’ (Mont-de-Marsan had three concentric walls, and this attack was directed against the outermost of these.) When the town was taken, Monluc had the garrison executed. In July 1570 he laid siege to Rabastens, a fortified bastide on the banks of the Tarn, ‘the strongest castle that was in the power of the queen of Navarre’:

I had three or four ladders brought to the edge of the ditch, and as I turned back, I was struck by an harquebusade from the corner of a barricade touching the tower: I believe there were not as many as four harquebusiers there, as all the rest of the barricade had been destroyed by two cannon firing from the flank. Suddenly I was covered in blood, flowing from my mouth, nose and eyes. … But wiping the blood as best I could, I said to monsieur de Goas: ‘Make sure, I pray you, that no one collapses, and continue the combat.’

A surgeon, ‘by the name of Simon, opened me and removed the bones of both jaws with his fingers, so great were the holes, and cut the flesh of my face, which was all crumpled.’¹ After the bastide was taken, Monluc still had the strength to order ‘that not a single man escape without being killed’. It was during his convalescence that he wrote his Commentaires, while the leather mask was being made that he would wear until his death to hide his destroyed face.

But Guyenne was a remote place, and the war waged by Monluc against Henri de Navarre is not a major chapter of history. The official birth of the barricades dates from some twenty years later: on 12 May 1588, the regular troops that Henri III had brought into Paris were hemmed in by the tight mesh of barricades erected by the population, and narrowly escaped massacre. This famous Day of the Barricades marked both a turning point in the Wars of Religion that had ravaged France for more than twenty-five years, and the first large-scale and effective use of this tactic, fixing for a long time to come both the practical modalities of its use and its political significance.

Henri III, who had previously been king of Poland, came to the throne of France in 1574 on the death of his brother Charles IX (the king of the St Bartholomew massacre). He was not popular, particularly in Paris, which at that time was very Catholic and traditional. His entourage was lampooned, the famous ‘mignons’ who passed their time in duels and debauchery of various kinds. He was attacked for his fantasies, his cross-dressing, his taste for lapdogs and exotic animals. Pierre de L’Estoile, gentleman usher to the chancellery and quite royalist in his sympathies, related in his diary that on 14 July 1576:

The king and queen arrived in Paris on return from the land of Normandy, from where they brought a large quantity of monkeys, parrots, and small dogs purchased in Dieppe. Some of these parrots, the majority trained by the Huguenots, gave out all kinds of nonsense and railing against the mass, the pope, and the ceremonies of the Roman church; when some people who had been offended said this to the king, he replied that you don’t interfere with the conscience of parrots.²

But there were more serious matters. Henri III had granted concessions to the Protestants such as freedom of worship and the fortification of their towns, leading people to think that he was not far from supporting their cause. Worse still, as he had no direct heir and his brother, François d’Anjou, had died in 1584, the successor to the throne had to be his closest relative, Henri de Navarre. That the crown of France might fall to a Protestant was for the Catholics, and the Parisians in particular, a vision of horror, a quite unacceptable eventuality.

Paris, as the centre of intransigent Catholicism, lost no time in organizing under the impulsion of the League. This politico-military force had been built up around the Guise family in Nancy, capital of the duchy of Lorraine. With the backing of Spain and the pope, its aim was to ensure the maintenance of the Catholic religion in France, and to root out Protestantism. Its leader was Henri de Guise, le Balafré or ‘Scarface’. In Paris, the League carried out propaganda work and prepared for a confrontation that people felt to be close. The duke and his Paris emissaries had divided the city into five parts, each headed by a colonel and four captains, all experienced fighters. The priests preached openly against the king and his entourage, and weapons were stockpiled at the Hôtel de Guise.³

Informed by his spies, the king decided to bring things to a head. He forbade the duc de Guise to come to Paris, ‘and if he should come, matters being in the state that they were, a disturbance could be caused, in which case he would be permanently held to be the author and culprit of any evils that should arise’.⁴ On 9 May, the duke defied this order and made his entry, surrounded only by eight gentlemen. A vast crowd acclaimed him as he passed, crying: ‘Long live de Guise! Long live the pillar of the Church!’ ‘A young lady at a stall even lowered his mask and said aloud these words: “Good prince, since you are here we are all saved.” ’ He proceeded directly to the Louvre, where the king gave him a frosty reception. The duke denied any hostile intention, but he returned the next day, this time with an escort of 400 men, which was not intended to facilitate a reconciliation, despite the efforts of the queen mother, Catherine de Médicis.

Henri III had taken precautions, strengthening the guard around the Louvre and assembling a force of 2,000 French guards and 4,000 Swiss to the north of Paris, close to the Porte Saint-Denis but outside the walls. When any accommodation with the duke began to look impossible, he ordered a complete search of the city for weapons, and the arrest of infiltrators. The force needed was made up of the troops massed at the city gates, who made their entry during the night of 11–12 May 1588.

On Thursday, 12 May, the king stationed the guards companies at the Saint-Séverin crossroads and the Pont Saint-Michel, in the Marché Neuf on the Île de la Cité, on the place de Grève (now de la Concorde), in the Innocents cemetery and around the Louvre:

He sought by this means to carry out what he had already resolved with his council, that is, to seize a number of the bourgeois of Paris, of the League, the most evident, and some partisans of the duc de Guise … and have all these troublemakers and rebels killed at the hands of the executioners, to serve as an example to other adherents of the duc de Guise’s party.

It was this intrusion that triggered the Day of the Barricades:

When we rose, the people saw this new and unaccustomed spectacle; they were seized by fear, believing that this was a garrison designed to be placed in the city, a new occasion of servitude. Some who had more sense deemed that it was a preparation against monsieur de Guise, preventing the people from obstructing this.⁵

The city of Paris, ‘where one had never seen nor heard of a foreign garrison being installed’, had always enjoyed the privilege of not receiving soldiers within its walls, not having to lodge them or undergo the habitual brutalities that went with this. The entrance of the troops was an attack on this communal privilege which aroused the whole population, whether League supporters or not. So that this day was both a political insurrection by the League and a popular revolt against the introduction of soldiers into Paris. It is this double nature that explains why the city rose up en masse:

Upon this, each person hastened to take up arms, went out on guard by streets and quarters, and in no time put chains across and made barricades at the street corners. The artisan left his tools, the merchant his wares, the university scholars their books, the prosecutors their bags, the advocates their cornettes, the presidents and the very councillors took up halberds. All that was heard were terrifying cries, seditious murmurs and words to inflame and frighten the people.⁶

According to tradition, the first barricades were put up in the morning around the place Maubert, following the instructions of the comte de Brissac, one of the lieutenants of the duc de Guise. According to L’Estoile: ‘The bourgeois of the Saint-Séverin crossroads who were aroused and assisted by the comte de Brissac, who had already in the morning reached the side of the University, armed the students and had the first barricades made towards the rue Saint-Jacques and the quarter of the place Maubert.’ By the end of the morning the Latin Quarter was covered in barricades, and, by evening, so was the whole centre of the city.

It is quite possible that Brissot was the inventor of the barricade. What at all events is certain is that the construction that made its first appearance in Paris that day no longer had anything in common with the chains that it had long since been the custom to stretch between houses to block passage. These barricades were made of upturned carts, cobblestones, pieces of furniture, and above all barriques (barrels), filled with earth to give them solidity. The network of these was so dense that soldiers were caught as if in a net, under fire from the barricades and neighbouring houses. One detachment that tried to reach the place Maubert from the Île de la Cité was blocked by barricades in the rue Galande. ‘The Swiss guards were prevented in this way from passing and came to a halt. Following the example of this barricade, every quarter did the same to stop other soldiers in their tracks.’

Henri III, seeking to avoid bloodshed, sent marshals d’Aumont and de Biron to organize the retreat of the troops to the Louvre, which proved difficult:

As these poor Swiss could not do much, throwing down their weapons and shouting ‘Bonne France!’ and calling for mercy with their hands together, the furious people, from the Petit-Pont to the Pont Notre-Dame, almost killed them by striking with their harquebuses and other weapons, as well as the rocks and stones that women and children threw from the windows.

The following day, the king sent the maréchal de Biron to the duc de Guise to ask him to restore order in the city. The duke proceeded to the worst trouble spots and prevented a massacre of the Swiss guards. Without him, L’Estoile wrote, they would all have been dead. In Pasquier’s words: ‘The morning was for the king, until around ten o’clock; the rest of the day for monsieur de Guise, who, seeing himself in a strong position, mounted a horse, in his doublet [i.e. unarmoured], followed by a large company of men, promenading throughout the city, and indeed using his goodness with remarkable modesty.’ The duc de Guise managed to free the Swiss guards blockaded in the slaughterhouse of the Marché Neuf, and released Le Gast, captain of the French guards and one of the king’s ‘mignons’, who had taken refuge in a house on the rue Saint-Jacques.

Henri III’s situation, however, remained critical. The city authorities were worried:

Now, the provost of merchants and aldermen seeing that this armed and mutinous people who had remained in tumult the whole night, arms in hand and defiant in the streets, continued again this day and threatened to do worse, supported secretly by the duc de Guise and his partisans who grew stronger by the hour and were filing into the city, they went to the Louvre accompanied by some captains of the city to speak to the king and show him that if he did not give a prompt order to pacify this tumult, his city of Paris would be lost.

Catherine de Médicis then sought a reconciliation:

The queen mother, who throughout her dinner had not stopped weeping, set out for the Hôtel de Guise to try to calm this emotion, which was such that she could scarcely pass through the streets, being so densely strewn and retrenched with barricades, where those guarding them were reluctant to make a greater opening for her chair to pass. Finally, arriving there, she spoke to the duc de Guise, prayed him to extinguish the fires that had been lit, and to come and see the king from whom he would have as much satisfaction as he might expect, and make clear to him on such an urgent occasion that he had more desire to serve the crown than to weaken it. To which the duc de Guise, with cold mien, replied that he was very sorry, but it was not up to him, it was the people, and they were like maddened bulls and difficult to restrain. As for going to see the king, he said that to him the Louvre was strangely suspect, that it would show great feebleness of mind for him to go there, things being in a state that he deplored, and to cast himself helpless and unarmoured at the mercy of his enemies.

It is surprising that the duke did not show the same foresight at Blois, where he was murdered.

But the king, seeing the barricades dangerously close to the Louvre, decided to leave the city. ‘At five in the afternoon, having received notice from one of his servants, who slipped into the Louvre in disguise, that he would have to escape more or less alone, or he would be lost, he left the Louvre on foot, a stick in his hand, as if going to walk in the Tuileries as was his custom.’ He escaped on horseback by the Porte Neuve,⁷ followed the Seine as far as Chaillot and Auteuil, and with a handful of loyal followers took the road for Rambouillet.

Thanks to the barricades, the popular movement and the action of the League supporters had expelled the king from Paris. The duc de Guise was master of the city. But these insurrectionary days marked the high point of the League, which would soon experience a succession of defeats – the assassination of the duc de Guise at Blois, the battles lost to the royal forces by his brother, the duc de Mayenne, the four years of the terrible siege of Paris, and finally, the entry of Henri IV into the capital on 22 March 1594, putting an end to the Wars of Religion.

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1Blaise de Monluc, Commentaires (Paris: Picard, 1925), pp. 239, 344.

2Pierre de L’Estoile, Journal de L’Estoile sur le règne d’Henri III (Paris: Club des Libraires de France, 1963), p. 62.

3This stood on the site of the present Hôtel de Soubise, which houses the Archives Nationales. The two towers overhanging the rue des Archives are vestiges of it.

4L’Estoile, Journal, p. 282. The unreferenced quotations that follow are taken from this work, pp. 282–9.

5Étienne Pasquier, Lettres historiques pour les années 1556–1594 (Geneva: Droz, 1966), p. 290. Pasquier, like L’Estoile a direct witness, was advocate-general at the Chambre des Comptes, and a humanist who strongly condemned the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre.

6L’Estoile, Journal, p. 285. The following quotations are from pp. 286, 287.

7The Porte Neuve was at the western corner of the Tuileries on the Seine side.