There has been some discussion lately as to the massacre of the Huguenots about a century before this period. It has been held that the St. Bartholomew Massacre was only a political squabble, begun by the Huguenots, in which they got the worst of it. The number of persons killed on the occasion has been reduced to a very small number. It has been doubted whether the Pope had anything to do with the medal struck at Rome, bearing the motto _Ugonottorum Strages_ ("Massacre of the Huguenots"), with the Pope's head on one side, and an angel on the other pursuing and slaying a band of flying heretics. Whatever may be said of the massacre of St. Bartholomew, there can be no mistake about the persecutions which preceded and followed the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. They were continued for more than half a century, and had the effect of driving from France about a million of the best, most vigorous, and industrious of Frenchmen. In the single province of Languedoc, not less than a hundred thousand persons (according to Boulainvilliers) were destroyed by premature death, one-tenth of whom perished by fire, strangulation, or the wheel. It could not be said that Louis XIV. and the priests were destroying France and tearing its flesh, and that Frenchmen did not know it. The proclamations, edicts and laws published against the Huguenots were known to all Frenchmen. Bénoît[17] gives a list of three hundred and thirty-three issued by Louis XIV. during the ten years subsequent to the Revocation, and they were continued, as we shall find, during the succeeding reign. [Footnote 17: "Histoire de l'Édit de Nantes," par Elie Bénoît.] "We have," says M. Charles Coquerel, "a horror of St. Bartholomew! Will foreigners believe it, that France observed a code of laws framed in the same infernal spirit, which maintained _a perpetual St. Bartholomew's day in this country for about sixty years_! If they cannot call us the most barbarous of people, their judgment will be well founded in pronouncing us the most inconsistent."[18] [Footnote 18: "Histoire des Églises du Désert," par Charles Coquerel, i. 498.]