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,
St. Bartholomew's Day massacre tensions, in explaining the French Wars of Religion, also re-emphasised the role of religion in the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre. He noted that the extra violence inflicted on many of the corpses "was not random at all, but patterned after the rites of the Catholic culture that had given birth to it." "Many Protestant houses were burned, invoking the traditional purification by fire of all heretics. Many victims were also thrown into the Seine, invoking the purification by water of Catholic baptism". Viewed as a threat to the social and political order, Holt argues that "Huguenots not only had to