Long-range prospects for the Reformed churches in France appeared almost hopeful in the summer of 1572. The Peace of St. Germain (1570) that concluded the third civil war had granted significant political, military, and religious concessions to the Huguenots. The Catholic Duke of Guise had lost favor at court, and the charismatic Huguenot command Coligny seemed to have won the confidence of King Charles IX. The lavish wedding ceremony that united the king’s sister, Marguerite of Valois, to the Protestant prince, Henry of Navarre, on August 18, 1572, symbolized new hope for political and religious reconciliation in the kingdom, and an end to to a decade of civil war. Things turned out otherwise, however. In the early morning hours of St. Bartholomew’s Day, August 24, Catholic assassins attacked and killed Admiral Coligny in his bedroom in Paris, and then hunted down and killed several dozen Huguenot leaders who were visiting the capital for the royal wedding. These murders unleashed an orgy of popular violence in the city that lasted for three days as frenzied Catholic crowds murdered neighbors suspected of heresy, mutilating their bodies and ransacking their homes. In all, around two thousand Protestants died in the bloodbath in Paris. In the weeks that followed, the massacres spread to the provinces, where perhaps another three thousand people were slaughtered in cold blood. In less than a month, many of the chief political and religious leaders of the Huguenot party were dead.

—Scott Manetsch, “Beza and the Crisis of Reformed Protestantism” in Martin I. Klauber ed., The Theology of the French Reformed Churches: From Henri IV to The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Reformed Historical-Theological Studies (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2015), 43.