On 18 August 1572 Margaret of Valois married Henry of Navarre in Paris, a Catholic princess and a Protestant king, and the match was meant to be a piece of peace-making after a decade of civil war. Many of the most prominent Huguenot families travelled to a largely Catholic city for the wedding. Six days later, on the feast of Saint Bartholomew, the killing began before dawn.
Gaspard de Coligny, admiral of France, was killed in his lodgings; his son-in-law Charles de Teligny died in the same hours; the philosopher Petrus Ramus, who taught in Paris, was killed a few days after. Most of the dead have no names that reached us. The violence spread over the following weeks to Orleans, Lyon, Rouen, Bordeaux and other towns, and left thousands dead. Historians still argue over who ordered what, and how much was command and how much was crowd; the tradition that blames Catherine de' Medici is old, and the record is thinner than the tradition.
The painting below shows an open square with armed men and the unarmed, bodies on the ground and by the wall, soldiers coming through the gate. What it does not show is how ordinary the streets were the week before, when the same neighbours passed each other going to different services. That is the part I hold onto: the difference was in how they prayed, and it was enough.
Coligny was among the very first killed, and only two days earlier he had survived a shot fired at him in the street. Six days between a wedding arranged to hold the peace and the death of the man who had staked most on it.
The painter, Francois Dubois, was a Huguenot from Amiens who left France and settled in Switzerland. He was not in Paris that morning, so far as anyone can establish; he painted it from what reached him, which is perhaps why the square is so bare and the figures so small.