The Massacre of St. Bartholomew: Preceded by a History of the Religious Wars in the Reign of Charles IX

On August 24, 1572, the bells of Paris rang for a wedding. By morning, the streets ran with blood. Henry White's landmark 1868 account reconstructs the massacre that shocked Christendom and killed thousands of French Protestants in a single night of coordinated violence. But the massacre was not an aberration. It was the culmination of decades of religious civil war, political intrigue, and escalating intolerance. White traces the conflict from the early days of the French Reformation under Francis I, through the reigns of Henry II and Francis II, to the troubled reign of Charles IX, a king manipulated by his mother Catherine de' Medici. He examines how the Huguenots grew from scattered believers into a political force, how the Catholic establishment responded with increasing brutality, and how the famous St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre was years in the making. White drew on primary sources now lost to history, writing with 19th-century conviction that understanding the past might prevent such tragedies from recurring. His account remains a vital reconstruction of one of early modern Europe's darkest moments, when religion became a excuse for slaughter and the French crown sanctioned mass murder.