On August 22, 1572, Gaspard Comte de Coligny (1519–72), Admiral of France, bent to adjust his shoe or perhaps to open a letter. That unexpected movement saved his life. The bullet, fired by Charles de Louviers (d. 1583) from an upstairs window of a house owned by the Henri I, duc de Guise (1550–88), missed Coligny’s head and instead caught him in the arm and passed through to his opposite hand. Wounded and bloodied but alive, Coligny found refuge with other Huguenot (French Reformed) nobles. He even received the protection of the crown.¹ Two days later, however, Coligny learned the value of the crown’s protection when a team of assassins descended upon his lodging. That team of hit men was composed of King Charles IX’s Swiss and French guards, and others under the command of the duc de Guise.² Charles, convinced by Jean Le Charon (1529–86) and Catherine de Medici (1519–89), the Queen Mother, that Coligny and his Huguenot followers were plotting to overthrow him, ordered that the city gates be locked and the city militia be armed. The city artillery was called up. Meanwhile, the assassins, led by young Guise and perhaps Francis, duc de Anjou (1555–84),³ found Coligny. Their hired Czech assassin, Besme, murdered him in cold blood.⁴ The Admiral’s corpse was thrown out the window, beheaded, mocked, and finally thrown into the Seine.⁵ Coligny’s murder on August 24, 1572 triggered an orgy of anti-Reformed bloodshed that would continue for months and take the lives of approximately 6,000–10,000 people.⁶

That orgy of anti-Reformed bigotry would lead to awful things. After witnessing the brutal murder of her parents, young Anges Mercier was “immersed naked in her parents’ blood with horrible threats that if she ever became a Huguenot [converted to the Reformed faith] the same would happen to her.”⁷ A poor bookbinder with the surname Niquet, the father of seven children, was “burned in front of his house in a fire fed by books dragged from his shop. Then, half-dead, he was dragged to the river and dumped in.”⁸ The governor of Saumur was informed that “it was Anjou’s wish as well as the king’s that he should go to Saumur and Angers ‘to kill any Huguenots you find there.’”⁹ In our time we call this scale of attempted extermination of a people a genocide. The parlement of Toulouse imprisoned “some Huguenots” for their own safety, but a mob broke into the prison and murdered the prisoners, “including three Huguenot judges.”¹⁰ Many other Huguenots “converted” back to Romanism after the massacres. There were 16,000 Reformed in Rouen before St. Bartholomew’s Day and only 3,000 after.¹¹

One of the most celebrated cases was the murder and defenestration of Peter Ramus (1515–72), a Roman Catholic scholar and humanist who converted to the Reformed faith in 1561.¹² He was the “distinguished professor of rhetoric and one of France’s most prolific and influential, if also controversial, intellectuals.”¹³ After his conversion he fled France, but he was unable to find a home in any of the orthodox Reformed communities, in part because of his agitation for congregational polity and in part because of his rejection of the Christian appropriation of Aristotle.¹⁴ He was assassinated “in his rooms at the College de Presles, allegedly at the instigation of an academic rival, Jacques Charpentier” (1529–74).¹⁵ About this possibility, Robert Kingdon wrote, “No one well acquainted with academic communities would find this beyond the realm of possibility.”¹⁶ The first assassins who found Ramus were “turned away by bribes.”¹⁷ The second wave found him, shot and stabbed him to death, and then “pitched him out an upper story window.”¹⁸

Notes

1. The accounts offered here are drawn and synthesized from Barbara Diefendorf, Beneath The Cross: Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth-Century Paris (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Paris, 1991), 93–99; Janet Glenn Gray, The French Huguenots: Anatomy of Courage (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1981), 132–40; Geoffrey Treasure, The Huguenots (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2013), 169–71; Robert M. Kingdon, Myths About the St. Bartholomew’s Days Massacres 1572–1576 (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 1988), 28–31.
2. Diefendorf, Beneath the Cross, 96.
3. Gray, The French Huguenots, 139.
4. Kingdon, Myths, 34. Besme (sometimes Beme) was Charles Dianovitz, a Czech, who died in 1575. N. Weiss, “La Saint-Barthélemy a Bourges et Les Assassins de Coligny: D’Après Une Lettre Inédite du 9 Octobre 1572,” Bulletin Historique et Littéraire (Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Français) 45. 8/9 (1896): 444–59.
5. Joshua J. Mark, “The Death of Admiral Coligny,” World History Encyclopedia, 29 June 2022, presents an early account of Coligny’s death in which Besme was identified as German. Gray, The French Huguenots, 143, calls the Seine “a slaughterhouse.”
6. No one knows how many people died in the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacres. In a letter to Heinrich Bullinger, Theodore Beza claimed that 300,000 were murdered. See Paul F. Giesendorf, Théodore de Bèze (Geneva: Alexandre Jullien, 1967), 306–07. Most modern scholars agree that between 3,000 and 5,000 people were killed in Paris. Treasure, The Huguenots, 174, writes, “At the very least, two thousand Huguenots were killed in Paris; three to four thousand in the provinces.” There is some objective evidence substantiating calculations for what took place in Paris based upon what foreign ambassadors reported to their countries. See Gray, French Huguenots, 149. It is much harder to know how many were killed in the twelve towns and cities beyond Paris. According to Treasure, The Huguenots, 174, in Rouen alone, however, 400 Reformed were murdered on September 17, 1572. If something like this happened in the other twelve Catholic dominated cities with substantial Huguenot minorities, then the figure approaches the estimated 6,000–10,000. Scholars tend to focus on Paris to the exclusion of the other cities. Diefendorf, Beneath The Cross, tends to privilege Roman Catholic accounts over admittedly (and understandably) hyperbolic Reformed accounts, e.g., Simon Goulart, Mémoires de l’estate de France sous Charles neufiesme. Contenans les choses plus notables, faites et publiée tant par les Catholiques que par ceux de la Religion, depuis le troisiesme edit de pacification fait au mois d’Aoust 1570, iusques au regne de Henry troisisiesme. Reduits en trois volumes, chasque desquels a un indice de principales matieres y contenues…a Meidelbourg. Par Henrich Wolf (Geneva: Vignon, 1576).
   Diefendorf, Beneath The Cross, 104, observes that there are credible stories of Roman Catholics acting humanely in the midst of the Romanist inhumanity by sheltering their neighbors from roving mobs and bloodthirsty authorities.
7. Treasure, The Huguenots, 172.
8. Kingdon, Myths, 37.
9. Treasure, The Huguenots, 173.
10. Treasure, The Huguenots, 173–74.
11. Treasure, The Huguenots, 174.
12. Keith Sprunger, s.v., “Ramus, Peter,” in Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, ed. Daniel J. Treier and Walter A. Elwell (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2017), 718.
13. Kingdon, Myths, 37.
14. Ramus’ relation to Aristotle was not what he claimed it to be. On this see R. Scott Clark, Caspar Olevian and the Substance of the Covenant: The Double Benefit of Christ, Reformed Historical-Theological Studies (repr. Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2008), 58–63; Walter J. Ong, Ramus: Method and the Decay of Dialogue (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958).
15. Kingdon, Myths, 37. The “rooms” to which Kingdon alludes refer likely to two spaces, a bedroom in which an unmarried university professor would sleep, and an outer room for conducting tutorials and entertaining colleagues.
16. Robert M. Kingdon, Geneva and the Consolidation of the French Protestant Movement 1564–1572, Travaux D’Humanisme et Renaissance XCII (Geneva: Droz, 1967), 111.
17. Kingdon, Geneva, 111.
18. Kingdon, Geneva, 111.

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Post authored by:

• R. Scott Clark

  

  R.Scott Clark is the President of the Heidelberg Reformation Association, the author and editor of, and contributor to several books and the author of many articles. He has taught church history and historical theology since 1997 at Westminster Seminary California. He has also taught at Wheaton College, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Concordia University. He has hosted the Heidelblog since 2007.

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