ABSTRACT
The violence of the French Wars of Religion, particularly the massacre of St Bartholomew's day, has always excited the imagination, Alexandre Dumas' novel La Reine Margot, that was spectacularly adapted to the screen by Patrice Chereau, is only one of many fictional accounts that this event inspired. Based on the assumption that social origin was not a factor in the adherence to Protestantism, Natalie Davis argued that Protestants were representative of all sections of urban society; Garrisson defended the idea that Protestants represented the elite and that class differences would have been a particular motivation in the urban massacres. The portrayal of Protestants in Catholic polemic strengthens the cultural and social approaches to the problem of violence. Religious festivals provided both a powerful vehicle for cohesion and a means of identifying the enemies of the community. The use of medieval stereotypes to describe Protestants contributed to building a mental picture of Protestants as heretics and as such 'non human'.
