A royal wedding in Paris turned into a massacre of thousands of Protestants

In August 1572, Catholic mobs in Paris, with the crown's tacit approval, slaughtered thousands of Huguenot Protestants who had gathered for the wedding of Henry of Navarre. The killing spread to other French cities over the following weeks, leaving an estimated 5,000 to 30,000 dead. It hardened decades of religious civil war between French Catholics and Protestants.

— Barbara B. Diefendorf, Beneath the Cross: Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth-Century Paris — Oxford University Press, 1991
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