Oubliance. n.f. C'est un mot vieilli, mais qui peut encore entrer dans le style marotique, comme synonyme d'oubli.
Focused on France in the period 1560–1630, this study examines the impact in France of the monarchical call to extinguish the memory of the Wars of Religion on post-war national historiography and on the elite sense of History more generally. This policy of oubliance is no doubt best known through the 1598 Edict of Nantes's call, in the first sentence of its opening article:
que la memoire de toutes choses passées d'une part et d'autre, depuis le commencement du mois de mars mil cinq cens quatre vingtz cinq jusques à nostre avenement à la couronne, et durant les autres troubles preceddens et à l'occasion d'iceulx, demourera estaincte et assoupie, comme de chose non advenue.
that the memory of everything that has taken place on both sides since the beginning of the month of March 1585 until our accession to the crown, and during the other preceding troubles and on account of them, shall remain extinct and dormant, as of a thing that never happened.
Whereas the first iteration of the policy, in article 9 of the 1563 Edict of Amboise, offered a more narrowly juridical formulation that annulled injures and offenses (“que toutes injures et offenses que l'iniquité du temps et les occasions qui en sont survenues ont peu faire naistre entre nosd. subjectz, et toutes autres choses passées et causées de ces presens tumultes, demoureront estainctes, comme mortes, ensevelies et non advenues”), the version put forth in the Edict of Nantes, reiterating language first used in the 1570 Edict of St-Germain, targets something much more diffuse: memory.
Coming after a protracted period of violent civil war that had dragged on for over thirty-five years, the Edict of Nantes met with a variety of reactions according to the political and religious interests of the factions in question; this complexity has been increasingly brought to the fore in scholarship on the period.