, but I don't see you calling for her to back down when she refers to Protestants as heretics.
.
You never really want to understand that she speaks in the context of the 16th century. She doesn't speak from her
own point of view but from Catherine de Medicis' and the French Catholics' to present
their, not her own, point of view. She puts the whole thing in perspective, so it's perfectly alright that from that perspective she should call Protestants "heretics". Protestants then considered Catholics as "papists", also a perfectly legitimate expression in the historical context because it illustrates people's views then.
And now a quote from David Starkey's
Rivals in Power:
"The 'Wars of Religion' of the later sixteenth century were notorious for atrocities, the inevitable consequence of conflicts in which neither side regard its opponents as worthy of mercy. But no other had the impact of the massacre of the French Protestant leadership in Paris on St. Bartholomew's Day (24 August) 1572. This arose from the belief, widespread throughout the Protestant world, that it had been planned long in advance and that Protestants had been deliberately lured to their fate. [...].
It is now known that the 'plot' was a myth. The Queen mother of France, Catherine de Medici, had been panicked into allowing the massacre because she feared that France was about to be sucked into war with Spain, which she desperately wished to avoid. But the plot appeared to confirm the growing belief in the existence of a 'Catholic League' intended to extirpate Protestantism from Europe" (p.162).
St. Bartholomew's Day can thus not at all be compared to the pogrom night of 1938 in Nazi Germany, but more to the September massacres during the French Revolution. In both cases terrible atrocities were committed by the mob and tolerated by the Government. Both events resulted from panic in a climate of fear and mistrust.
