If you’ve ever been to Paris, you’ve likely seen the church of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois; it’s directly across the street from the east end of the Louvre. Surprisingly, despite its central locations, it’s off the tourists’ beaten path; it’s too close to the much more famous Notre Dame Cathedral and the Sainte-Chapelle, and it’s literally overshadowed by the Louvre. Nonetheless, it’s among the most perfect buildings in Paris.
It’s tucked behind a beautifully vaulted gothic porch. The interior is white stone, with an aisle on either side of its gothic-vaulted nave and choir, which ends in a typically-French rounded apse and some beautiful stained glass that survived the Revolution. The exterior is the yellowed-white of all great Paris buildings, with a beautiful Gothic Rose on the West Facade, and flanks of flying buttresses. Directly to the church’s North is the town hall of Paris’s 1st Arrondissement, which was brilliantly designed, in the 19th century, as a neo-gothic tribute to St. Germain. Together they make an exceptionally beautiful set, joined in the middle by an octagonal, 19th century belfry.
But Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois is not notable just for its beauty. It’s the bloodiest church in Europe.
In 1562—forty-five years after Luther’s theses, fifteen years after the birth of the Church of England and three months after an official French edict granting tolerance to Protestants—the Duke of Guise was touring his estates, and stopped for Mass in Vassy, in North-Eastern France. In Vassy, he stumbled on a congregation of Protestant—Calvinist—Huguenots praying in a barn. Some of the Duke’s men tried to enter the barn, and were turned away. A fight broke out, and ended with the Duke ordering his men to set the barn on fire. Hundred of defenseless Huguenots were injured; 63 were killed. That was beginning of the French Wars of Religion, which would last until 1598, and kill three million people.
A league of Protestant aristocrats responded to the Vassy massacre by offering protection to Protestant churches, and seizing the city of Orleans. The capture of Orleans prompted Protestants elsewhere in France to seize the cities of Angers, Blois, Tours and Lyon. Huguenots in Toulouse seized the city hall, which triggered a Catholic riot in which between three and five-thousand people were killed, nearly all of them Protestant. The instigating Duke of Guise persuaded King Charles IX, who was 13, and his mother Catherine de Medici, who was regent, to revoke the edict of Protestant toleration. The Duke was then assassinated by a Huguenot nobleman.
With the Catholic-Protestant war spreading, Catherine arranged for a new edict of religious tolerance, which led to an uneasy peace that lasted from 1563 to 1567. In 1567, Charles IX began supporting Catholics in Flanders, and Protestants massacred 24 Catholic Monks and Priests in Nîmes. Fighting resumed, and before long, armies from all over Europe were marching into France. Protestants troops from the Low Countries and Germany came to the Huguenots’s aid, as did money from Queen Elizabeth of England. The Papal States, Tuscany, Anjou and Spain reinforced the Catholics. The fighting was bloody and very expensive, and in 1570, Charles IX sought peace, permitting the Huguenots new rights of public prayer and betrothing his sister Margaret to Navarre’s Protestant King Henry III. (Their engagement, incidentally, was the vague inspiration for Shakespeare’s Love’s Labors Lost.)
The marriage looked like it would set peace in stone, wedding Catholic and Protestant Royalty (over the objections of the Pope and Phillip II of Spain). It would take place in Catholic Paris, with all of France’s aristocratic, wealthy and important Huguenots in attendance.
After the wedding, France’s leading Huguenots remained in Paris to arrange for the oncoming era of good feelings. The leader of the leading Huguenots was Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, the first Protestant to be admitted to Charles’s court after hostilities ended. Four days after the wedding, an attempt was made on Coligny’s life: A Catholic sniper shot him from a window. Coligny was wounded, but lived.
It’s not clear on whose authority the assassination was attempted, but Catherine and the Catholic leadership feared Protestant retaliation. A list of the names of the entire intellectual leadership of French Protestantism was given to the King’s Swiss bodyguard. The ringing of the bells in Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois would be the signal for the Protestants’ murder.
The noble Protestant guests were staying across the street from St. Germain, in the Louvre palace. After midnight on St. Bartholomew’s Day, the bells rang; the Protestants were forced out of the palace into the street, where they were massacred.
This was taken as a signal to Paris’s angry Catholic commoners, who assembled themselves into death squads and, over the course of three days, systematically murdered every Huguenot in the city, man, woman and child. Essentially the only Protestant survivor was the newly-married King Henry of Navarre, who was spared when he agreed to convert to Catholicism (he renounced the conversation once he had escaped the city). Charles IX announced that the murdered Huguenots had been plotting to murder the royal family. The slaughter continued, and spread to the countryside, and all over France.
Estimates of the number of Huguenots killed in the St. Bartholomew’s massacre vary widely, from 2,000 to 70,000 nationwide. Contemporary estimates generally range from 10- to 30,000. Whatever the number, Protestantism in France was all but finished. Most of the Huguenots’s leaders were killed, and the survivors were terrorized and set on revenge. At the time, one in ten Frenchman was Protestant. Today, it’s about one in 50, and most of those are newly converted evangelicals. France has only slightly higher a protestant population than its combined total of Jews and Buddhists. The Protestant population is a quarter the size of the Muslim population.
One wonders how much of this could have been avoided if the French Calvinists had, like the English Calvinists—the Puritans—established a foothold in to the New World. In fact, that had been the idea of Admiral Coligny. In the War of Religion’s first peace, in 1564, a French Protestant colony was established in what is now Florida. It was named Fort Caroline (rather than Coligny Colony,) and was annihilated by the Spanish a year later. It might have survived if a fleet of reinforcements—sent by Coligny—had arrived in time, but the fleet was destroyed by a hurricane, off the Florida coast, near Cape Canaveral.
Some of the fleet’s supplies had already been offloaded, but what Fort Caroline really needed was men. Several hundred sailors survived the wrecks, but they made the mistake of surrendering to Spanish troops on shore, under the command of Pedro Menéndez de Avilés.
After the survivors had given Menéndez their weapons, and paid a ransom of 5,000 Ductas, they were asked, one by one, if they were Catholic. Everyone who answered no—about 350 men, nearly the entire company—was beheaded. The stretch of beach where this massacre happened is still known as Matanzas Inlet—in English, Slaughter Inlet.
Interestingly, after 450 years, the wreck of the French fleet’s flagship, La Trinite, was discovered recently. The director of the Florida-based Center for Historical Archeology is calling it “the most important shipwreck ever found in North America”—it’s in good condition, and filled with artifacts: The Trinity was one of the ships that foundered before unloading.
Anyway, Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois: a very pretty church. Visit it if you get the chance.
