The St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre

Why this matters

Days separated a royal wedding meant to unite two warring faiths from the massacre that followed it, a timeline better built slowly than summarized in one sentence. Marguerite de Valois married Henry of Navarre in 1572, and the guest list from that wedding is largely who ended up in the killing.

Catherine de' Medici's role in urging Charles IX toward the order is the detail students argue about most, since a mother influencing a king reads differently than a king acting alone. I keep that question open rather than settled, because the sources on the page do not agree on how much choice Charles IX actually had.

From one teacher to another

This is a hard topic and I teach it the way I'd want a colleague to hand it to me, clinically, with the causes laid out step by step rather than any dwelling on the violence itself. Marguerite de Valois's memoir works well precisely because she was in the room that night, so students get a real eyewitness account instead of a secondhand summary, and I have them weigh what one person's memory can and cannot confirm. I keep the tone neutral toward both Catholics and Huguenots throughout, since this is a lesson about how religious division curdled into mass violence, not a verdict on either faith.