As modern research has amply proved, the killings of Huguenots by the Parisian mob on St Barthélémy day in 1572 only amounted to around 3,000 souls. The King and his mother wanted to preempt an attempt on the lives of members of the royal family after somebody, probably an agent of the Guise party, shot Huguenot leader Admiral Gaspard de Coligny. When the King's Swiss Guard were sent out to kill the Huguenot leaders in the deeply Catholic city (the Protestants had gathered for a wedding of the King's sister to Henri de Navarre), the bells of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois rang and the common city folk began killing Huguenots. Some 3,000 or so perished, with a little over 1,000 being thrown in the Seine.
Over the course of the next few weeks, similar mob killings occurred in other prominent cities in France. The final death tally was, as both some of the fairest contemporary account and modern historians who specialise in the time and place agree, around 10,000. As has also been amply docuмented and argued, the Spanish Inquisition led to the deaths of some 3,000-5,000 heretics by the stake over the course of its 330 or so years in service.
Yet, Protestants throw around the number 70,000 regularly for Saint-Barthélémy, following the estimate of the prominent Huguenot the Duc de Sully. 300,000 is not uncommon to see, either. The more radical and unhinged Protestants give numbers closer to 1 million or even as high as 4 million, which must have been a fifth of the population of France ! The Spanish Inquisition is the same story -- tends of thousands or hundreds of thousands dead, if not millions. Yet, it is well known that less than 100,000 were even processed and tried by the inquisitorial tribunal; of those who passed through the tribunal's hands, only 2% or so were convicted of that pertinacious heresy that was a capital crime in the Spanish kingdoms.
Now, a lot of these lies were embraced by the Enlightenment philosophes, especially Voltaire. They seem to come from such books as Foxe's Book of Martyrs, which was protested for being factually inaccurate when it was first published in 1563 in England. Huguenots and conversos, mind you, were guilt of desecrating the incorrupt bodies of saints and destroying the Blessed Sacrament, in the case of the former, and assassinating Cardinals and meeting in secret to plot the death of Christians, in the latter. These are not slight crimes on their part. And yet, the Protestants, on top of this, invent lies and exaggerations about how they are persecuted by a bloodthirsty and dark religion, the Faith.
This calumnious caricature of the Church remains strong even today. I can't think of many propaganda campaigns that were more false and equally effective. People go to their graves believing deeply in these malicious lies.
The realisation I had, which made me think to write this post, is the utter shamelessness of the Protestants. What cynical pharisaism ! What hatred of God ! That they would be so bold as to break from the Church, αssαssιnαtҽ clergy and nobility, start cινιℓ ωαrs, start foreign wars, murder priests and monks and nuns, blaspheme sanctuaries and sacred vessels -- and then create a complex web of malicious lies about their being innocent persecuted sheep -- is truly staggering. It borders on being unbelievable. The true depth and nature of human depravity is something that is mysterious; the mind cannot grasp its reasons, nor understand its justifications. In this case, these people were shameless, their intent apparently often quite murderous and full of hatred.