St. Bartholomew's Day massacre published his "Discours contre Machievel" in 1576, which was printed in ten editions in three languages over the next four years. Gentillet held, quite wrongly according to Sydney Anglo, that Machiavelli's "books [were] held most dear and precious by our Italian and Italionized courtiers" (in the words of his first English translation), and so (in Anglo's paraphrase) "at the root of France's present degradation, which has culminated not only in the St Bartholemew massacre but the glee of its perverted admirers". In fact there is little trace of Machiavelli in French writings before the massacre, and not very much after,
Paris in the 16th century Paris is estimated by modern historians to have been about 250,000 at the beginning of the 16th century, growing to 350,000 by 1550, then dropping down to 300,000 by the end of the century, due to the plague epidemic of 1580, and the long siege of the city during the Wars of Religion. The area of the city covered about 439 hectares within the city walls. Several new neighborhoods, formally rural, were populated over the course of the century, notably the Faubourgs Saint-Honoré, Saint-Martin, and Montmartre. Despite efforts of the government to keep the area outside of the walls clear