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Four hundred years ago, when Henry IV sought a peaceful end to forty years
of religious war in France, he prescribed oblivion--"oubliance"--as a means
of healing the wounds of war. He forbade public and private pursuit of
grievances arising from the wars and even went so far as to prohibit any
reference to past quarrels that might tend to stir up old animosities. But
outlawing memory does not suppress it. This paper will explore the ways in
which French Protestants and Catholics utilized memories of the
sixteenth-century Wars of Religion to forge distinctive religious
identities in the wake of the Edict of Nantes. I will argue that, if
Huguenots forged a unified identity based on separation and difference,
Catholic identity fractured under the pressure of the League and could only
be reunited when directed against a Protestant enemy. For Catholics too,
then, religious identity was defined in terms of separation and difference.
The perpetuation of France's religious quarrels beyond and in spite of the
Edict of Nantes gives one pause in celebrating the peace. And yet
understanding the complexities of religious identities in France, and also
the place of the Wars of Religion in shaping these identities, is essential
to understanding not only the eventual revocation of the Edict of Nantes
but also the Enlightenment's impassioned cry against organized religion,
the Revolution's attack on the church, and even the fierce secularism that
reemerged with the Third Republic and persists today in rigid prohibitions
against public display of religious affiliation.
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