The massacre of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre is one of the most dramatic events of the French history. Summit of the civil war and nun which tore the kingdom, it inspired by many historians and writers, who tried to understand the causes of them and to discover the persons in charge of them.

However, the scarcity, even the absence of documents prohibit the categorical assertions, the only sources being posterior testimonies or memories documents in proof of the main actors of the drama.

On August 22nd in the morning, an attack was perpetrated against the admiral de Coligny, to which this one escaped. Historiography a long time recognized as a Catherine de Médicis the silent partner of the attack, but the responsibility for the Own way, and behind them of Spain (Philippe II, the pile cluster, the Zúñiga ambassador), is more probable. What is certain, it is that then nobody any more appears to have been able to control the situation, and the events precipitated. The attack poked the legitimate concern of the Protestants and the fear of the royal family, fed the noise of an Huguenot conspiracy - reinforced by the precedent of Meaux -, and made multiply criticisms against the king, shown to have financed the assassination of Coligny.

The decision of the massacre of the Protestant chiefs was made by the king (and Catherine de Médicis) in his Council, with this reserve which the responsibility for this decision falls, it seems, rather with the Own way. It is certain that, as of the decision taken of the violent removal of the Protestant chiefs - execution in the night from Friday to -, there was skid, cycle of violence panics and gestation of one second St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, much fuller, an event that the directors of the “political” massacre, whatever they are, had not envisaged.

The first part of the massacre proceeded in the Louvre and in the hotels of the Protestant princes. In Louvre, some, such Henri de Navarre and Henri de Condé, princes of royal blood, were constrained to abjure and were saved only in this condition, while other lords perished. As for Coligny, he was assassinated by men of the duke of Own way.

Thereafter, the men of the former provost of the merchants, Claude Marcel, a catholic guisard, continued the work of the killers elected by the king, and they multiplied the assassinations nonactive by some authority that it is. All the contemporaries insist on the unexpected character of a “incredible fury”, abruptly emerged of the people and impossible to control. Many testimonies brought back particular eagerness on the bodies of the victims - stripped, trailed in mud by children, decapitated, emasculated. The massacres did not cease before August 29th.

To understand the popular dimension of the massacre, it is advisable to point out the Parisian atmosphere in this end of the month of August 1572: the dearness reinforced by the surge of aristocrats come for the royal marriage; sermons violently antiprotestants in the churches, denouncing in particular “the execrable coupling” between Marguerite de Valois and Henri de Navarre; lampoons announcing the anger of God to punish the sinning men; noises and rumors whereby the king himself “wanted to be done Huguenot”; finally of strong heats and an over-populated city.

In short, Paris was virtually in a state of riot as of on on August 23rd. Also, as soon as the news spread massacre of the Protestant chiefs, part of the population passed to the action. Everywhere plundering accompanied the massacre, and no order nor no force seem to have been in measurement to be able to stop it. The assassins did not belong only to the working classes: the catholics, “dedicated” and killers, also recruited themselves in the mediums of the shop and the office, i.e. in the rows of the good Parisian middle-class.

The following day, the king made diffuse a declaration where he explained why the execution had taken place only on one royal order. Thus, the sovereign decided to take officially charges the responsibility for the massacre with it.

Can one establish an assessment? Certain contemporaries have advanced the figure of 100 ' 000 deaths. The contemporary historians speak about 5 ' 000 (minimal figure) with 100 ' 000 (maximum figure) victims for France, including undoubtedly 2 ' 000 in Paris, which accounts for approximately 1 % of the population of the capital. The event was followed of a wave of reconversions, and marked a quantitative backward flow of the Protestants, already perceptible since the years 1560.

A weakened monarchy

So for much of catholics the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre was only the achievement of a command of God to the sovereign, by this violence homicide decided at the summit of the State, and whatever were the initiators, the monarchical power had been removed the sacred character from. From now on, and for a long time, the base even of monarchy - i.e. design of a king of justice instituted by God for the whole of his subjects, protective shield of all its people against the enemies, untouchable because resolutely located above all the parties - was weakened. After the massacre, the many ones and violent ones Huguenot lampoons denounced, by the text and engraving, catholic and royal cruelty. At the same time, in spite of the royal declaration of August 26th, 1572, the catholic people became aware, at the time of the massacre, of his political clout and his possible autonomy.

Thus the event made it re-appear the theory of resistance to the State, a resistance which could go to the regicide if the sovereign exceeded some limiting - these limits which the set formula summarized since the beginning of the XVI E century: “The king must be able what he wants, but he should not want all that he can.” One of the principal theses emitted just after the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre to try to find there an explanation political claimed besides that the first massacre, that expressly made on order of the king, aimed at the great noble lines rather than the Protestants. It is in particular what Henri of Morello cherry-Damville in his Declaration of November 1574 justifying affirmed his catch of weapons against the king; it is also what supported a famous lampoon, Discours marvellous of the life, actions and swerves of Catherine de Médicis queen mother, published in 1574 after the death of Charles IX.

Since 1589, in his Delle ragion di Stato (“Of the reason of State”, translated into French in 1599), the Giovanni Botero Italian showed that the urgency of a danger involved the need for the holder of the power to reduce it without delaying. Thus, Charles IX, by calling upon the imminence of the danger to justify the massacre, into practice put a new concept, which will be hardly theorized fifteen years later, and whose history is still not closed: “reason of State”, by which to justify the abuse of power can be made with the name even exercise power. In that, the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre is one of the events founders of modernity in policy.