Catherine’s regency coincided with the eruption of the French Wars of Religion, as Protestant Huguenots and Catholic factions plunged the country into chaos. Catherine’s overriding goal was preserving the throne for her sons and maintaining the fragile unity of France.

She initially pursued policies of tolerance, issuing the Edict of Saint-Germain in 1562, which granted limited freedoms to Protestants. But violence soon escalated. The Massacre of Vassy that same year, when Catholic forces slaughtered a Huguenot congregation, sparked the first of several brutal civil wars.

Catherine worked tirelessly to broker peace, convene conferences, and arrange politically useful marriages. Her marriage of her daughter Marguerite to Henry of Navarre, a leading Huguenot, was one such gambit. Tragically, it instead precipitated the most infamous event of her political life.

The St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre: Catherine’s Darkest Hour

In August 1572, thousands of Protestant nobles came to Paris for Marguerite’s wedding to Henry of Navarre. Tensions were already high, worsened by an attempted assassination of Admiral Coligny, a key Huguenot leader. Fearing Protestant retaliation and possibly manipulated by hardline Catholics, Catherine and her son Charles IX sanctioned a preemptive strike.

On August 24, St. Bartholomew’s Day, Catholic mobs swept through Paris, murdering Huguenot leaders and then turning on ordinary Protestants. The violence spread across France, killing thousands—some estimates range as high as 30,000.

To many Protestants in France and abroad, this atrocity confirmed Catherine as a monstrous orchestrator of genocide. Pamphleteers and later Protestant historians portrayed her as the ultimate embodiment of Medici poison, cruelty, and dark political calculation. shutdown123