By approaching the rhetoric of oubliance primarily as a strategy for reconciliation, I have sought to move the focus of my analysis away from the concept of forgetting and towards that of forgetting differences. Oubliance, in the texts studied here, does not entail censorship of the past so much as its reframing. The paratexts and programmatic statements I have highlighted afford insight into the ways in which elite writers forged the rhetorical tools with which they and their readers could reconcile themselves to their troubling recent past, and thus to one another.

Two central theses emerge from the material studied here. The first concerns the practice of history writing. Post-war historians attempting to serve the goal of reconciliation amplified the rhetoric of historical distance associated with critical historiography. Royally-sanctioned histories of the wars like those of Pierre Matthieu and Pierre-Victor Palma Cayet both repurposed and strengthened this aspect of Jean Bodin's method. For the royal historians, this was a tactic for managing an archive that was at once a gold mine and a minefield: firsthand documentary sources on the Wars of Religion were plentiful, but they were also incredibly volatile. The imperative of oubliance thus converged with new methodologies in historiography to consolidate the postulate of a sharp distinction between the present and the past.

The second thesis concerns the somewhat surprising role played by the rhetoric of emotion in the creation of this historical distance. Classical, medieval, and Renaissance Humanist writings across a number of genres enlist the term movere or esmouvoir with the explicit aim of inciting juridical, martial, or political action. Rhetorical techniques for “moving” listeners or readers to action in the world are designed to create an illusion of immediacy, thereby transforming historical events into vicarious experiences.

Pierre Matthieu was certainly not the first to characterize the French Wars of Religion in terms of tragedy. The intersection between history and tragedy was a commonplace in French writing about the wars from all sides, and in many different genres. An anonymous 1562 “Advertissement à la Royne mere du Roy” complains to Catherine de Médicis about the treatment of the Huguenots, using a theatrical metaphor to warn the queen mother that she risks becoming the main character in the tragedy represented by a France at civil war:

Despite its somewhat garbled syntax, the meaning of this warning is clear enough: if she does not take action, the queen mother risks becoming the protagonist in a most lamentable tragedy, one that will play out in the theater of France before her very eyes. The metaphor was clearly considered a durable one: this same passage, with a few very minor changes, also appears in 1587 in a diplomatic communication from Henri de Navarre to Henri III. In his Remonstrance faicte en la grande chambre … sur la reduction de la ville de Paris (1594) the jurist Antoine Loisel laments the fate of “le peuple, aux despens duquel ceste tragedie se jouoyt.” Matthieu notes that he finished writing his Histoire des derniers troubles de France in a year that saw “des sanglantes tragedies, des monstrueuses rebellions, des meurdres, des assassinats … la France doit estre le Theatre où l'on representera des spectacles effroyables” (111v).

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:

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.

In light of works like the Guisiade or the Mort de Coligny, as well as Robert Garnier's relentlessly grim depictions of tragic distress, we might be moved to ask Pierre Bayle's question, this time of tragedy: how could tragic theater, with its moving representations of explosive political intrigues and interfamilial violence, possibly have functioned as an instrument of reconciliation in the wake of the Wars of Religion?

In his comprehensive History of French Dramatic Literature in the Seventeenth Century, Henry C. Lancaster remarks that “Civil war doubtless retarded the growth of the French stage.” Yet he concludes his discussion of the period of the wars with the observation that there was in fact “considerable dramatic activity, both in the composition and in the performance of plays” during this time (32). Lancaster resolves this apparent contradiction by proclaiming that among these plays, he could find “no work of permanent importance,” but only “personal and political plays” (32). The latter he simply puts in a category apart from that of tragedy, even when their authors explicitly classified them as such. As a consequence, Lancaster argues too hastily that “the influence of such productions will be exerted on writings like the mazarinades rather than on the drama of later years” (156), for influence should not be thought of merely in terms of resemblance or imitation. Just as the civil wars of antiquity were to serve as negative examples for the sixteenth- century French, sixteenth-century tragedy proposed a proximity between spectator and stage that neoclassical dramatists, writing under the régime of oubliance, would seek to avoid. The context of the civil wars, so evident in the earlier plays, therefore also played a role in the transition from humanist to neoclassical tragedy.

In his exhaustive study of an “event without a history,” as he calls it, Denis Crouzet sets the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre in the context of French Renaissance dreams of community. According to Crouzet, at the time of the massacre, the French king, Charles IX, was at the center of several competing visions of French concord. The most dramatic of these visions imagined the king as the agent of divine justice in its Old Testament form: a series of writers advocated the use of violence to rid France of heresy and thus reunite the French. Others, most notably the chancelier Michel de l'Hôpital, advocated tolerance. Crouzet shows how l'Hôpital's dreams of reconciliation resonated with a broader neoplatonic and neopythagorist vision of the king (and queen) as the agents not of divine retribution, but of universal harmony.

Though I hesitate to reduce Crouzet's lengthy presentation any more than I already have, I nonetheless think we can usefully schematize the sixteenth-century responses to the Huguenot question he presents in terms of the old dichotomy of violence vs persuasion. Taken to its logical conclusion, the violent response to heresy would have involved the putting to death of every last heretic. However, the telos of the persuasive approach to religious discord – the dissolution of meaningful religious differences that Catherine de Medicis sought – is not all that different, since it does not grant Protestants the possibility to continue to exist as Protestants. (Theodore de Bèze recognized this immediately at the Colloque de Poissy in 1561.) Thus, both responses to the Huguenot question ultimately aim toward the elimination of the Huguenot community as such.

Rather than adopting Crouzet's alternatives of violence or persuasion, I shall here examine another privileged discourse of reconciliation in sixteenth-century France that sets a rhetoric of vengeance or pardon, on the one hand, against a rhetoric of oubliance, on the other.

In the article on the city Mâcon in his 1697 Dictionnaire historique et critique, Pierre Bayle devotes a long, convoluted remarque to the question of whether he should include material about the Wars of Religion in his work. He begins by paraphrasing the sixteenth-century edicts of pacification that urged the French to extinguish memories of the conflicts: “it would be desirable that the memory of all of those inhuman acts had been abolished in the first place, and that all the books that spoke about it had been thrown into the fire.” Those who hold that memories of the conflicts should have been erased and documents referring to them burned are certainly right when they warn that such reminders are “extremely liable to nurse an irreconcilable hate in people's minds.” Emphasizing his aversion to polemic, Bayle says that he would be perfectly happy if nobody ever remembered that kind of event, particularly if suppressing a painful past led to better conduct in the present; “but given that these things are amply recorded in a too-great number of works for the hope that affecting to say nothing about them in this one could do any good, I did not want to constrain myself.” In light of the extensive written record of this painful past, the efforts of any individual author to suppress it could only be a vain pretense; thus Bayle's dictionary includes extensive material about the wars.

Having acknowledged that the memory of the Wars of Religion was very much alive, thanks at least in part to the numerous books published on the subject, Bayle can only express surprise that: