Paris has decided to make more visible its commemoration of the St Bartholomew massacre of Protestants 450 years ago on 24 August 1572, by renaming a park in the city centre.
The St Bartholomew massacre is a black spot on French history, with few public commemorations.
While most French people have heard of the massacre, many may not know the details of a pivotal event in the wars of religion that traumatised Protestants and Catholics alike.
On 24 August 1572, on the festival of St Bartholomew, Parisian Catholics hunted down and killed nearly 3,000 Protestants, known as Huguenots.
The massacre then spread across France, leaving between 10,000 and 30,000 Huguenots dead.
Wars of religion
The event marked the end of an uneasy truce during the wars of religion. The Peace of Saint-Germain-en-Laye was signed between King Charles IX and Huguenot leader, Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, on 8 August 1570.
The truce displeased extreme Catholics, who believed that allowing for a religious divide would curse France in the eyes of God.
In August 1572 the queen mother, Catherine de' Medici, planned to marry her daughter, Margaret de Valois, to Protestant Henry III of Navarre – a wedding opposed by traditional Catholics as well as by the Pope.
A large number of important Protestants gathered for the wedding in Paris, a very anti-Protestant city, on 18 August 1572, and they stayed on after, many housed in the Louvre.
Four days later, as Coligny made his way home, he was shot from a window and seriously wounded. His supporters gathered outside the city, though there was no evidence they were planning an attack.
But Catholics in the city feared revenge, and the next day, on 23 August, Catherine de' Medici and Charles IX changed their minds about supporting the Huguenots, and decided to eliminate the Protestant leaders.
That evening, the King’s Swiss mercenaries killed the Protestant leaders, including Coligny, in the streets outside the Louvre, which sparked violence by city residents, who hunted down and killed Protestants for three days.
Il y a 450 ans, le 24 août 1572, le tocsin de l'église Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois sonnait pour annoncer le début du massacre de la Saint-Barthélemy. L'amiral de Coligny et près de 3000 protestants seront tués à #Paris. Un jardin-mémorial leur rendra bientôt hommage à #ParisCentre. pic.twitter.com/CoDj8a6mgF
— Yohann Roszéwitch (@YRoszewitch) August 24, 2022
The King ordered provincial governors to prevent violence outside Paris, but similar massacres of Huguenots took place in 12 other cities, including Bordeaux, Lyon and Toulouse.
Following the massacres, Protestants abandoned the cities or converted to Catholicism, and while the war of religion continued until the Edict of Nantes in 1598, the Huguenots political movement was crippled.
The park at the start of the massacre
The City of Paris decided to commemorate the start of the massacre by renaming a park in the centre of the city and dedicating it to the victims.
A small ornamental garden planted with chestnut trees, the park is in front of the Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois church, where the killings began.
“The bells of the Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois church rang an alert to Parisians in the night: after the Protestant leaders were executed, Isabelle Sabatier, president of the Society of French Protestant history, told La Croix.
A plaque in the park, which will be officially renamed at a ceremony on 16 September, will commemorate “the thousands of Protestants massacred in Paris on 24 August 1572 and the following days, victims of religious intolerance.”
Symbolically, the park is across from another memorial square that commemorates Jewish children deported to Auschwitz.
A commemorative plaque was installed in 2016 in the Vert-Galant square, under the Pont-Neuf bridge, but the city determined it was not visible enough.
With the garden, visitors can follow a memorial path, to the Seine, where many of the bodies were dumped, and then on to the Oratory temple of the Louvre, which houses a statue of Coligny.
