If reason had played the smallest part in the elaboration of their belief, it could easily have proved to them that it must be quite indifferent to God whether He sees men adore Him in this fashion or in that.
Reason being powerless to affect the brain of the convinced, Protestants and Catholics continued their ferocious conflicts.
All the efforts of their sovereigns to reconcile them were in vain.Catherine de Medicis, seeing the party of the Reformed Church increasing day by day in spite of persecution, and attracting a considerable number of nobles and magistrates, thought to disarm them by convoking at Poissy, in 1561, an assembly of bishops and pastors with the object of fusing the two doctrines.Such an enterprise indicated that the queen, despite her subtlety, knew nothing of the laws of mystic logic.Not in all history can one cite an example of a belief destroyed or reduced by means of refutation.Catherine did not even know that although toleration is with difficulty possible between individuals, it is impossible between collectivities.Her attempt failed completely.The assembled theologians hurled texts and insults at one another's heads, but no one was moved.
Catherine thought to succeed better in 1562 by promulgating an edict according Protestants the right to unite in the public celebration of their cult.
This tolerance, very admirable from a philosophical point of view, but not at all wise from the political standpoint, had no other result beyond exasperating both parties.In the Midi, where the Protestants were strongest, they persecuted the Catholics, sought to convert them by violence, cut their throats if they did not succeed, and sacked their cathedrals.In the regions where the Catholics were more numerous the Reformers suffered like persecutions.
Such hostilities as these inevitably engendered civil war.Thus arose the so-called religious wars, which so long spilled the blood of France.The cities were ravaged, the inhabitants massacred, and the struggle rapidly assumed that special quality of ferocity peculiar to religious or political conflicts, which, at a later date, was to reappear in the wars of La Vendee.
Old men, women, and children, all were exterminated.A certain Baron d'Oppede, first president of the Parliament of Aix, had already set an example by killing 3,000 persons in the space of ten days, with refinements of cruelty, and destroying three cities and twenty-two villages.Montluc, a worthy forerunner of Carrier, had the Calvinists thrown living into the wells until these were full.The Protestants were no more humane.They did not spare even the Catholic churches, and treated the tombs and statues just as the delegates of the Convention were to treat the royal tombs of Saint Denis.
Under the influence of these conflicts France was progressively disintegrated, and at the end of the reign of Henri III.was parcelled out into veritable little confederated municipal republics, forming so many sovereign states.The royal power was vanishing.The States of Blois claimed to dictate their wishes to Henri III., who had fled from his capital.In 1577 the traveller Lippomano, who traversed France, saw important cities--Orleans, Tours, Blois, Poitiers--entirely devastated, the cathedrals and churches in ruins, and the tombs shattered.This was almost the state of France at the end of the Directory.
Among the events of this epoch, that which has left the darkest memory, although it was not perhaps the most murderous, was the massacre of St.Bartholomew in 1572, ordered, according to the historians, by Catherine de Medicis and Charles IX.
One does not require a very profound knowledge of psychology to realise that no sovereign could have ordered such an event.St.
Bartholomew's Day was not a royal but a popular crime.Catherine de Medicis, believing her existence and that of the king threatened by a plot directed by four or five Protestant leaders then in Paris, sent men to kill them in their houses, according to the summary fashion of the time.The massacre which followed is very well explained by M.Battifol in the following terms:--``At the report of what was afoot the rumour immediately ran through Paris that the Huguenots were being massacred; Catholic gentlemen, soldiers of the guard, archers, men of the people, in short all Paris, rushed into the streets, arms in hand, in order to participate in the execution, and the general massacre commenced, to the sound of ferocious cries of `The Huguenots! Kill, kill!' They were struck down, they were drowned, they were hanged.All that were known as heretics were so served.Two thousand persons were killed in Paris.''
By contagion, the people of the provinces imitated those of Paris, and six to eight thousand Protestants were slain.
When time had somewhat cooled religious passions, all the historians, even the Catholics, spoke of St.Bartholomew's Day with indignation.They thus showed how difficult it is for the mentality of one epoch to understand that of another.
Far from being criticised, St.Bartholomew's Day provoked an indescribable enthusiasm throughout the whole of Catholic Europe.
Philip II.was delirious with joy when he heard the news, and the King of France received more congratulations than if he had won a great battle.
