tfanews2002@yahoo.comThe Terwilliger Family Association
If you don't know the history of the Huguenots, the following Reuters news release on 8/24/97 may be of interest to you.
MASSACRE OF PROTESTANTS STILL HAUNTS FRANCE
By Francois Raitberger
PARIS, Aug 24 (Reuter) - On a balmy summer night, 425 years ago, Roman Catholic militia wielding knives and swords fanned out through Paris, dragging Protestants from their homes and slitting their throats in an orgy of terror. When dawn broke on August 24, 1572, thousands of bodies lay in streams of blood on the streets of the French capital. The St Bartholomew's Day massacre, carried out in a struggle for control of the French court, remains one of the darkest episodes in the country's history. Pope John Paul sought to heal the painful memories after French Protestants, incensed that his four-day visit to Paris coincided with the anniversary of the massacre, demanded a gesture of remembrance. "On the eve of August 24, we cannot forget the sad massacre of St Bartholomew's Day, an event of very obscure causes in the political and religious history of France,'' he told crowds of young pilgrims from 160 countries at a Saturday night vigil. "Christians did things which the Gospel condemns,'' he said in a plea for forgiveness, dialogue and reconciliation. He made no further reference to the massacre during an outdoor mass coinciding with the anniversary on Sunday.
Jean Tartier, head of the French Protestant Federation, said the Pope had made "a very important statement that goes towards asking for forgiveness and looking back at history.'' Testimony that the massacre still haunts mainly Catholic France came in a recent film, "La Reine Margot'' (Queen Margot), starring Isabelle Adjani, which graphically described the killings and the obscure civil war plots that led to it. Most French people nowadays, in a country which has had two Protestant prime ministers in less than a decade, are at a loss to understand the complex causes of the massacre. Even the death toll is controversial. It has been variously put at between 1,000 and 10,000 in Paris, and 2,000 up to 100,000 for the whole country.
The massacre occurred against a background of rivalry between France and Spain for the control of Flanders, and a 10-year-old noblemen's war between Catholics and persecuted Huguenots, as French Protestants were called. On August 20, 1572, Catherine de Medicis, the pro-Spanish mother of France's Catholic King Charles IX, engineered an attempt on the life of his powerful Protestant aide, admiral Gaspard de Coligny, who was advocating war on Spain. A badly wounded Coligny warned the king about his mother. King Henry of Navarre, a Protestant who had just married Charles' sister Margot and came in line for succession to the French throne, demanded that Coligny's attackers be punished. Catherine de Medicis then ordered a massacre of Protestants during which Coligny would be finished off. Her powerful allies, including the duke of Guise, stormed Coligny's home, slit his throat and dumped his body in the house's yard. Church bells pealed, calling Catholic militia to arms. The killings went out of control.
The "wars of religion'' flared again. Twenty-two years later Henry of Navarre, after besieging the French capital, declared in a famous quip: "Paris is well worth a mass.'' He converted to Catholicism and was crowned king of France. His Edict of Nantes in 1598 granted the Huguenots toleration and civil rights. He was assassinated 12 years later in an anti-Protestant plot. King Louis XIV, attempting to forcibly convert Protestants, revoked the Edict of Nantes almost a century later.
Many Huguenots went to hide in remote mountain villages of southern France. An estimated 400,000 went into exile, taking their industrial skills mainly to Britain, the Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland. Persecution of Protestants ended in 1764, and the 1789 French Revolution made them fully-fledged citizens, granting citizenship to the descendants of exiled Huguenots who returned. About 100 protestants lay a wreath at the statue of Coligny on Sunday to mark the massacre. There are now one million Protestants in France, a country of 58 million. They gave the country its current Prime Minister Lionel Jospin and his fellow-Socialist former premier Michel Rocard, Nobel Prize winning writers Andre Gide and Jean-Paul Sartre, an atheist who was born to a Protestant family.
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