On August 23, 1572, the royal council ordered the assassination of the Huguenot leader Admiral Coligny, his companions in arms, and other Protestant leaders.1 Before dawn of the following day, the Duke of Guise’s guards had carried out the order. Coligny’s castrated body would be dragged through the streets in popular celebrations. Later that morning, Huguenot nobles whom the king had invited to stay in the Louvre were dragged outside and assassinated. As rumors flew about the city, men began to affix white crosses on their hats and on the doors of their houses, a well-known sign used by crusaders warring against heretics.2
It will not be necessary to recount the terrible collective massacres that occurred not only in Paris but also in many cities across the realm; but it is very important to establish who had given the orders for the massacre at its very beginning. By various royal declarations, Charles IX accepted the responsibility for giving the order to murder Coligny.3 As justifications he cited plotting against his royal person and the state. Indeed, the king believed that the Huguenots had secretly broken the most recent effort toward peace: the royal word given at Saint-Germain-en-Laye.
The more general massacres would be carried out by persons who believed that the king had ordered them to do this. Efforts to disabuse militia members and zealots, to get them to stop the killing, were not quickly successful. Zealots regretted that all the Protestants had not been killed. This created an undercurrent, an outlook: “Let’s finish the job.”
As early as August 28, a solemn procession was organized by the clergy in order to give thanks to God. There would be another procession on September 4, this time ordered by the king. In addition, the relics of Saint Genevieve, the patron saint of Paris, were brought from the church and became the focal point for veneration and gratitude. Medals were struck to celebrate a victory over heresy. When news of the massacre reached Rome, it was greeted with festivities and thanksgiving.
The idea that all of this was a Huguenot plot opened possibilities for excusing the monarch. Faced with so much violence, many Parisians found themselves ready to believe almost anything. One of the most learned and politically astute judges in royal service, Guy du Faur de Pibrac, undertook to write a justification and apology for the decision: killing Coligny, he argued, was a preemptive strike against the conspirators.4
Charles IX died in May 1574. His brother Henry, who had recently been elected king of Poland, took his time returning to France. He would never really comprehend what his French subjects had gone through on St. Bartholomew’s Day. At twenty-three, Henry relied on his mother, Catherine de Médicis, and her advisors to rule for him; but in only a few years his inexperience, his inconstancy, and his distorted priorities would cause him to be perceived as incompetent, evil, and a tyrant.
A king has a subject, a lofty duke (Guise), murdered without a trial: that is what tyrants do. A king who is a priest—an archbishop-cardinal (Guise) at that—murdered without a trial: he is not merely a tyrant, he is also a heretic.
As much by subtle deference as by actually holding offices, these high officials, the Guise brothers, were allowed to slip away from Henry III’s power. The king’s army was no longer the king’s. Indeed, thanks to the duke’s clients, thanks to the support of the people of Paris and the clergy, and thanks to the subsidies coming to the duke from Spain, Henry was king in name only. But the duke was king in almost every way save the title. Henry could think of no way to save his crown. In the end, he ordered the Guise brothers to be stabbed to death.
Some writers, among them Pierre de Belloy and Louis Dorléans, buckled down and defended efforts to repress heresy by force, often with assertions and questions about the sources of royal authority.5
The anointing of French kings with holy oil from the ampulla, the Eucharist at the coronation, involving not only the body-bread but also the blood-wine, consecrated the kings of France as priest-kings.6 Like moderate Catholic writers, and like their fellow Huguenot writers, new meanings were given to old words: l’État, “the state,” being a key example,7 something that was distinct from the royal body. The Roman law of necessity, and the tag “What pleases the prince has the force of law,” were elaborated upon to enrich argument. Somewhat later, medical terms such as “tolerance” acquired a new meaning.8
For the clergy, in its various collective corps, especially the Faculty of Theology, also known as the Sorbonne, there seemed no better choice of action than fasting more intensely and marching in processions, thereby imploring God to alter the impure life that had been provoked in France by the presence of heretics. Boucher, the learned preacher, curate, and vice-regent of the University, and also a member of both the militia and the Sixteen, called a general assembly and consecrated all his efforts to recover religious Catholic conformity in the realm. He would look to the House of Lorraine and its head, the Duke of Guise, as incarnate savior in the crisis, owing to Guise’s willingness, even eagerness, to go to war and to obliterate Huguenot arms and carry out executions and coercive conversions.
By the mid-1580s it seemed that God would not give a child to Henry III and his queen, despite their frequent visits to holy sanctuaries such as Chartres and Our Lady of Loreto. Not knowing the identity of Henry’s successor was troubling, even though the king was not all that old. Boucher (an energetic Sorbonne theologian) could accept the aging and celibate Cardinal of Bourbon, or perhaps one of the daughters of the king of Spain (despite the Salic Law), but the idea was anathema that the biological heir, Henry of Navarre, a heretic, might one day be permitted to mount the French throne.
As if memories of massacres and civil wars, pollution of Catholic holy sites, and royal impotence and luxury were not enough, the king turned to dissimulation in order to assassinate the Duke of Guise and his brother, the cardinal. Calls to depose or assassinate the king had scarcely been heard prior to his role as murderer. As paroxysm reigned, Boucher would shift from blaming evil counselors (such as Épernon), to pressing for deposing the king, and finally to having him assassinated. The king had been stripped of his royalty by papal decree as well as by a decree of the Sorbonne, a move that, in the minds of the Leaguers, changed his status from king to tyrant.
Protestant commentators would put forth their own idea of a perfected state within a reformed church. Which side would the God of war support? As it turned out, the leaders of the League would adopt some of the views put forth by their Huguenot enemies, not only about tyranny, but also about governance. How to recreate the spiritual and the political commonwealth of the early church?
In the late 1580s there was hope that the League was strong enough to create a pure Roman Catholic commonwealth and state; but the presence of heretics was the greatest impediment to creating this New Jerusalem. A corporate political governance led by the clergy adopted many of the features of a true state found in a legally grounded institution.