Do you know what really happened that night?? And the nights afterwards? She showed much more mercy than your beloved Elizabeth Tudor...
What is more important: do you know what happened between July 1559 and August 1572? What was Catherine's attitude towards religion? By your assertions I assume you don't...
Umigon, Elizabeth I is not my "beloved", she surely behaved in a much more sane manner than Catherine.
Yes I do know what happened that between those years, and in looking at it , IMO Catherine is still an evil woman. I dislike revisionism in history. Catherine's motives were quite clear in what she was doing, and I believe in holding leaders responsible for their actions.
It's not a religious issue with me. I just don't like the portrayal of Catherine as this admirable person.
First regardless of "what happened" that night, or "what was planned", this is an event of the same calibre in my opinion as Kristallnacht in Germany in the 1930's, but as I stated what's the death of 70,000 "heretics" more or less....
Below from Wikipedia:
The St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre (Massacre de la Saint-Barthélemy in French) was a wave of Catholic mob violence against the Huguenots (French Protestants), under the authority of Catherine de Medici, starting on August 24, 1572, and lasting for several months. It marked a turning-point in the French Wars of Religion by stiffening Huguenot intransigence.
In 1572, a series of inter-related incidents occurred after the royal wedding of Marguerite of Valois to Henry of Navarre, an alliance that strengthened his claim to the throne of France. On 22 August, Catherine de' Medici's agent, a Catholic named Maurevel, attempted to assassinate Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, leader of the Huguenots, in Paris, but succeeded only in wounding him and infuriating the Huguenot party. Then in the early hours of the morning of 24 August, St. Bartholomew's Day, Admiral de Coligny and several dozen other Huguenot leaders were murdered in Paris, a series of coordinated assassinations that could only have been planned at the highest level. That was the signal for a widespread massacre. Beginning on 24 August, and lasting to 17 September, there was a wave of popular killings of Huguenots by the Paris mob, as if spontaneous.
From August to October, similar seemingly spontaneous massacres of Huguenots took place in other towns, such as Toulouse, Bordeaux, Lyon, Bourges, Rouen, and Orléans. Estimates of the number of those murdered range as high as 100,000. Historians generally agree on the figure of 70,000. Among the slain was composer Claude Goudimel.
"Catholics say only 30,000 were slain in the Inquisition of France. Protestants put the number at 70,000. We would prefer the latter figure. If there were 70,000 Huguenots in Paris on the night of the massacre, so much more the justification for the slaughter… We have heard ring out many times that the very bells that called the Catholics together on that fatal night. They always sounded sweetly in our ears." (Western Watchman, No. 21, 1912) Contemporary accounts report bodies in the rivers for months afterwards, so that no one would eat fish. Pope Gregory XIII's reaction was jubilant: all the bells of Rome pealed for a public day of thanksgiving, the guns of the castle of St. Angelo sounded a joyous salute, a special commemorative medal was struck, to honor the occasion, and Gregory commissioned Giorgio Vasari to paint a mural celebrating the Massacre, which is in the Vatican. In Paris, the poet Jean-Antoine de Baïf, founder of the Academie de musique et de poésie, wrote a sonnet extravagantly praising the killings. The Pope sent Cardinal Orsini to convey, in person, his happy blessings and goodwill to the Queen Mother for her butchery. It was not the first such pogrom of the Wars of Religion, nor would it be the last.
Background to the massacres
After the third war in 1570, there was a possibility of peace. The House of Guise had fallen from favor at the court and had been replaced by moderates who were more willing to find a peaceful solution to the crisis. The Huguenots were in a strong military position as a result of the Edict of Saint-Germain (August 1570). They controlled the fortified towns of La Rochelle, La Charité, Cognac, and Montauban. Catherine de Medici had hoped that the marriage alliances of her children would support her move for peace, including the proposed marriage of her son the Duke of Anjou (Henry III) and Elizabeth I of England.
By 1571, however, hopes of peace were collapsing. Relations between the Huguenots and the Catholics had deteriorated, and in Rouen on a Sunday in March, forty Huguenots were killed because they refused to kneel in front of the host (the eucharist) during a Catholic procession.
The Guise faction had fallen from favor at the French court, and the Huguenot leader, Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, was readmitted into the king's council in September 1571. The Guises hated de Coligny for two reasons: he was the leader of the Huguenots, and they thought he was implicated in the assassination of Francis, Duke of Guise, in February 1563.
The Catholic fleet assembled under Don John of Austria defeated the Turks at the Battle of Lepanto. This confirmed to the Huguenots that Catholicism could resurge across Western Europe, led by Philip II of Spain. In April 1572, 'Sea Beggars' took control of Brielle thus taking control of Holland. This meant that there was pressure within France to intervene on behalf of the rebels in the Netherlands to prevent a Spanish intervention in France. De Coligny was the main supporter of this intervention. There was then the possibility of either another civil war or a major war against Spain, which was at that time western Europe's greatest Catholic power.
Ostensibly to quell the rancour between the Protestants and the Catholics (the House of Bourbon and the House of Guise), the Queen-Mother, Catherine de Medici, arranged for Henry of Navarre, Duke of Bourbon (the patron of the Huguenots) to marry her daughter Marguerite. The wedding provided an extraordinary occasion to get all of the powerful Huguenots in one place.
Catherine therefore planned the massacre of many of the Huguenots while they were in town for the wedding, but she had a hard time convincing her son, King Charles IX of France, to go along, since he had developed a friendly relationship with de Coligny. Finally, after much argument, Charles became furious and lashed out at his mother, commanding the massacre to be done thoroughly if it were to be done at all (in other words, he didn't want to face any retaliation, so he ordered them all to be killed).
