In late April 1568, four years before the notorious St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in Paris, there was a massacre of Protestants in Amiens by elements of the Catholic populace, arguably with the complicity of the Catholic town council. The fact of the massacre is indisputable -- municipal officers were paid for clearing the bodies of the dead from the streets and waterways of the Somme river. The estimates regarding the numbers of men, women and children killed vary according to the source -- from 100 to 120 or 140.

Frustratingly, despite turning over many stones, I was unable to identify more than a handful of the victims. I did, however, make an important discovery while examining the Catholic parish baptism registers following the massacre. In the baptismal register of the parish of St. Remy primarily between late April and early May the priest or his clerk inserted special notations in the margins of the register -- "h" or "hu", "huc" ot “hucq” -- next to certain entries. I realized that these special notations stood for “hucquenot” (i.e. "huguenot") and that these were not normal "baptisms" but rather what were called "reconciliations," Catholic ceremonies performed on children who had previously been baptized Protestant. Their parents, fearful or coerced in the wake of the massacre, were trying to get their children and themselves "right" with the established church. Additional research turned up other instances of this phenomenon after other episodes of popular anti-Protestant violence, for instance in June 1562 (parish register of St. Leu) or threats of violence in October 1572 (parish register of St. Germain). I wrote about this phenomenon in my first published article (in French) : “Catholic parish registers and the aftermath of St. Bartholomew in Amiens, ” Revue du Nord, vol. 70, July-September 1988, pp. 501-510. I also wrote an article summarazing what we know about the massacre of 1568 in “The roofer Jean Martin and the massacre of Protestants at Amiens in 1568,” Bulletin de la Societe des Antiquaires de Picardie, 1er semestere 2014, pp. 347-360.

Note: The digitization of the page of the parish register of St. Remy for late April 1568 taken from Departmental Archives of the Somme website obscures several of the priest’s marginal notations identifying “hucquenot” children and indicating the street of residence of their parents. e.g. rue de la nar[ynne] (narine) and rue des louvetz. In 1974, before this register was digitized, I had made a photocopy of this page which makes clearer these marginal notes of the priest. I have therefore added a scan of this photocopy to the display below.

This page from the register of St. Leu also shows reconciliations on June 15, 1562 in that parish. There are no special "h" signs, but the long intervals between the child's date of birth and the date of "baptism" indicates that these too were reconciliations rather than normal baptisms. (Etat civil online A.D. Somme)