Question 1
Evaluate the interpretations in both of the two passages and explain which you think is more
convincing as an explanation for the causes of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572.
Passage A
As the weeks of peace passed, the Queen Mother came to view with alarm Coligny’s growing influence at Court, the more so in the light of her obsessive fear of Spanish arms. She also resented the personal arrogance of the Huguenot leader, who was reported as advising the King to liberate himself from her tutelage.* Though Catherine had so often been compelled to work with the Guise, her attitude had [so far] deserved respect because she had sincerely aimed at the restoration of national unity and order under the crown. Yet in August 1572 she determined to take a short cut and plotted with Anjou and Henry of Guise to assassinate Coligny amid the festivities surrounding the marriage of her daughter Margaret with the young Henry of Navarre. In the event, Coligny was merely wounded, and the conspirators decided, probably on the spur of the moment, to cover their traces by organising a greater crime and committing the nation to a new war against the Protestants. Inventing the Huguenot plot, they prevailed upon the hysterical King to authorise a general attack upon the Huguenot leaders assembled for the wedding. On the fatal day, August 24th, Henry of Guise personally supervised the killing of Coligny while the Paris mob, completely out of hand, butchered a thousand or more victims.
*Tutelage = guidance/instruction
Adapted from A.G. Dickens, The Age of Humanism and Reformation, published in 1977.
Passage B
“The series of massacres that took place throughout France in August and September were not the produce of a pre-meditated Royal scheme to exterminate the Huguenots. Even when Charles IX succumbed to his mother’s brow beating on the night of August 23rd and ordered the murder of the leading Protestant noblemen gathered at court for the marriage, he neither expected nor desired the general massacre which subsequently ensued. The King’s orders for a selective strike were distorted into a call for a general massacre by ultra-Catholic elements at Court, and in Parisienne municipal government. What developed in Paris, and then spread to a dozen provincial cities, were mass religious riots essentially similar in motivation to the numerous disorders which had already punctured the country’s tranquillity, albeit of far greater proportions…
The city authorities managed to retain order within Rouen for almost four weeks following the massacre in Paris. What finally broke this calm and touched off the local massacre on 17th September?... All that is known for sure is that on that day Catholic zealots* gained control of the city, locked the gates to prevent Calvinists from escaping, broke into the jail where they were being detained, and systematically butchered them… The mob then gave itself over to its organised campaign of looting and violence which lasted for four days.”
*Zealots = extremists
Adapted from P. Benedict, Rouen During the Wars of Religion, published in 1981.
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Answer
