The Vassi Massacre

In the early years of the reign of Charles IX, Queen Catherine , who ruled France, pursued a policy of religious reconciliation. This involved the expansion of the rights of the Huguenots and the limitation of the influence of the de Guise family, which led the ultra-Catholic party. In January 1562, the edict of Saint-Germain was published, which for the first time allowed the Huguenots to send their cult, but only outside the city walls and not on Catholic holidays, and obliged them to leave the previously occupied Catholic churches.

But the edict had the opposite effect to what was expected. Catholics were outraged by the idea of ​​compromise as such; The Paris Parliament refused to ratify the edict ^[1] . The Huguenots considered the concessions made to them insufficient and continued the seizure of the temples and the conduct of their services in the cities. In this situation, any minor clash could be the reason for a large-scale civil war.

March 1, 1562 Francois de Guise drove through the town of Vassi on the territory of their possessions. He was returning from , where he visited his mother; He was accompanied by a strong armed detachment. In Vassi, the duke wanted to defend the mass , but it turned out that about a thousand local Huguenots had gathered in the riga near the church; This was an unconditional violation of the edict of Saint-Germain.

Since each side of the religious confrontation later used the events in Vassi in its propaganda to demonstrate intolerance and immunity to the rational arguments of the other side, there is no consensus about what happened. The Huguenots argued that the people of Giza, having learned about the meeting in riga, immediately attacked the unarmed and unprepared for the resistance of the “ heretics ”. According to the Catholics, the Huguenots deliberately provoked Giza and his retinue, organizing the singing of the psalms right in front of the church entrance, and in response to the Duke’s demand to observe the edict, began to insult him and throw stones. One of the stones hit Guise in the face; then his people attacked the trespassers. In the ensuing fight, more than fifty Huguenots were killed and at least a hundred more were wounded. ^[2]

After the massacre, Giza was met in Paris as a national hero. On the other hand, the Huguenot propaganda laid all the blame for the bloodshed on the duke; two leaders of the Protestant party, Condé and Coligny , had already united their troops south of Paris during March. The queen mother was forced to conclude an alliance with Gizami and cancel the Saint Germain edict. The First Huguenot war began .

Francois de Guise lived after the Vassi massacre for less than a year: on February 24, 1563, he was killed by the Huguenot bullet of Poltro de Meré .