BARTHOLOMEW, NIGHT OF SAINT. - It is one of the episodes, perhaps the cruelest, that bloodied France during the wars of religion. Besides the ferocious fanaticism of Huguenot propaganda, what contributed to generating the massacre was above all the antagonism between the two parties into which the French high nobility was split in order to win predominance in the kingdom. One of them, that of the Guises, posed as the champion of Catholicism; the other, represented by the Condé and the Bourbons, favored the Huguenots, far more for political aims than out of religious conviction. King Charles IX and his mother Catherine de' Medici, while longing for the victory of Catholicism, aimed in particular at not being overpowered by either of the contending parties. Once the third war of religion was closed with the Peace of St-Germain-en-Laye in Aug. 1570, by which the Huguenots obtained full toleration throughout the kingdom and, as a pledge, four security fortresses, the blandishments of Gaspard de Coligny, leader of the Huguenots, to win over the mind of Charles IX and urge him against Spain with a view to the conquest of the Spanish Netherlands. Catherine then relied more on the Guises. The marriage of Henry of Bourbon, king of Navarre, to Margaret of Valois, the king's sister, celebrated on 18 Aug. 1572 in Paris, which was supposed to consolidate internal peace, drew to Paris many Huguenot nobles who arrived there armed; and it was then that Catherine, frightened by their arrogance, decided to get rid of Coligny; but the attempt against him (22 Aug.) did not succeed and only increased the hatreds between the factions.
Catherine then resorted to the desperate course of weakening the Huguenots by suppressing as many of them as possible in Paris and in the rest of the kingdom. Having come to an agreement with the provost of the merchants and overcome the king's hesitation, she decided that at a given signal, on the night of 24 Aug., the Huguenots were to be killed by surprise. The blow succeeded and the massacre spread in the following days to Meaux, Orléans, Troyes, Saumur, Blois, Tours, Angers, Rouen, La Charité, Lyons. Elsewhere the royal orders were not carried out, and the bishops themselves prevented or mitigated their execution. As for the victims, it proved impossible to establish their number, which rose to several thousand; among them there were also Catholics, victims of the confusion or of private vendettas; indeed, many of these were carried out in this turmoil. It is by now certain that the massacre was not prepared long in advance, but decided suddenly, and was due to political concerns caused above all by the attempt against Coligny which, having failed, had compromised the queen mother. The Pope had no part in it and was not informed of it until the massacre was over, and it was presented to him as a victory of the king over the conspiracy organized by the Huguenots against him.
In Rome the conviction arose that the blow had saved the dynasty and Catholicism in France, and public prayers of thanksgiving were therefore ordered, a medal was struck, and in the Sala Regia of the Vatican Palace a commemorative painting was executed in fresco, with the wish that France should henceforth be purged of the poison of heresy.