Madame la Serpente

ST. BARTHOLOMEW'S NIGHT (285 pp.) --Philippe Erlanger--Pantheon ($5).

It is so horrifying that a large basketful of babies should have been dumped in the Seine that perhaps it can be no more horrifying that this was done in the name of God. Yet religious massacres always trouble history's onlookers; the intensity of their revulsion is matched only by the enthusiasm of the participants.

St. Bartholomew's Night is an account of the August madness in 1572, when a confluence of chance, state policy and the religious hatreds of the Reformation caused the murder of at least 2,000, and perhaps as many as 100,000, Protestants. The book has its flaws. Author Erlanger, a French historian, has an extraordinary talent for making the complicated seem complicated, and too often the names he cites remain simply names. But his treatment is more thoughtful than is customary in day-it-happened books. The reader must be willing to work; if he is, he is well enough rewarded.

Machiavelli's Pupil. Erlanger makes it clear that 16th century behavior must not be cut to fit 20th century motives. In particular he observes that separation of church and state was not an unpopular idea in the 16th century; it was not an idea at all, and a ruler to whom it had been expressed would have found it incomprehensible.

The book's villainess-heroine is Catherine de' Medici. A stumpy Italian woman who had been married at 14 to the man who was to be Francis II of France, she had studied under Machiavelli and learned her lessons well. The women of the French court thought her middle class, but ambassadors to the Louvre knew where the power lay. After her husband's death in 1559, Catherine ruled France for 30 years while a succession of three weak sons occupied the throne.

Catholic Spain was the dominant power in Europe, and the fact that Spain's Philip II was Catherine's son-in-law did not prevent him from being an ominous potential enemy. Between Philip and England's Elizabeth, the most powerful Protestant ruler, Catherine ran an erratic but coolly steered course. Like a skilled chess player who knows that an immediate decision will ruin him, she sought complications, talked away several years seeking a ridiculous marriage between the middle-aged Elizabeth and her degenerate son.

Anatomy of Power. But in 1572 the balance of confusion at last tipped toward a resolution--or so it seemed. France's most influential Protestant was Admiral Gaspard Coligny, a military hero and a onetime condemned traitor (in Catherine's vacillating France, it was easy to be both). Coligny demanded an immediate war with the Catholic Philip, and at the moment had the ear of Catherine's moody, weakbrained son, King Charles IX.

To Catherine, it seemed easier to assassinate Coligny than to reason with him. But just as the official murderer discharged his arquebus at Coligny, the Protestant leader bent to adjust a shoe. Admiral Coligny was merely wounded. Later one autumn afternoon, Catherine gathered her closest counselors in the Tuileries Gardens. With the Protestants aroused and Coligny still dangerous, she abruptly decided that the solution was a slaughter of the most important Protestant leaders.

But the deed was too large for Machiavellian neatness. In a matter of hours, slaughter became general. The populace killed more than the soldiers; shop owners got rid of commercial rivals; children slaughtered children. For five days, as a popular song of the time was to put it, "Men's bodies, women's bodies, were hurled in the terrible fury down into the river, to carry the news as far as Rouen with never a boat.'' From a window in the Louvre, King Charles avidly took target practice at bodies floating past in the Seine.

The massacre was seen throughout the courts of Europe not as a bungled execution that got out of hand, but as an exemplary show of royal authority. Thus embellished in reputation. Catherine was able to get her son Henry elected King of Poland (he became King of France the next year). She lived on for years, successfully seeking complications, and perhaps taking pride in the nickname given her by the ambassadors she outwitted: "Madame la Serpente."

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