The Memory of the Wars of Religion

History is written by the winners, it is often said. The history of Protestant-Catholic conflict during the Wars of Religion is one of the cases where it was not. The first generation of Protestant historians in France, eager to preserve the words of their martyrs, to record each step in the revival of the true church, and to justify unsuccessful actions on its behalf, produced accounts with such abundant narrative detail and such extensive citation of original documents that they became inescapable sources for later generations of historians, even those who recognized their often tendentious character or wrote from a hostile perspective. As Henri Hauser observed in his still unsurpassed 1912 guide to the sources for the history of France, even ardently partisan Huguenot historians had a “concern for truth, a critical sense, and a degree of expository skills that one seeks in vain among their adversaries.” The enduring influence of these early Protestant histories stemmed from more than just their quantity and qualities, however. The most influential later historians also found their apportioning of responsibility for the conflicts more compatible with their own values and preconceptions than the rival Catholic vision of the same events. This was especially the case at two key moments in the shaping of the national memory of the civil wars. The first was during the reign of Henry IV, when Jacques-Auguste De Thou wrote his enduringly influential Historia sui temporis amid concern to bind up the wounds of the conflicts and establish that two confessions could co-exist in a single kingdom–a goal more attainable if the conflicts were understood as the product of disordered noble ambition, not (as Catholic ultras maintained) of Protestantism’s inherently seditious character. The second was under the Third Republic, when modern academic history as we know it was shaped in France and ultramontane Catholicism was seen by its shapers as the great threat to the Republic.

As is explained in Research and Publications Section: The French Wars of Religion, I worked on this subject during two phases of my career. My initial work that centered on Rouen relied heavily on archival material. Only after I returned to the subject around 2000 did I read deeply in the early narrative accounts and realize just how rich and detailed the early Protestant histories are–and how much even recent accounts of this period owe to their framing of the key issues and events. To write a more accurate history of this period that exploited what is reliable in these histories while determining their limits and distortions required thinking and writing about the historiography of the period as well.

This meant first of all seeing how the Protestant histories were produced and how close their authors were to the events about which they wrote. Diagnosing their silences and distortions also required exploring the works of Catholic historians and chroniclers from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries who might offer information complementing or challenging their version of events. Some Catholic histories turned out to be of surprising richness and apparent reliability. Others uncritically incorporated legends about the period. All revealed a great deal about how different segments of the Catholic population understood these events over the subsequent centuries. From the examination of these Catholic histories it was a natural step to start investigating how the memory of the civil wars was perpetuated and presented in media other than learned histories–in commemorative processions, via the cult of the saints, and in popular print forms such as almanacs and calendars. This line of investigation meshed well with my previous work on seventeenth-century French Protestantism and its concern to determine the nature, depth and endurance of the confessional division arising from the Wars of Religion. The wider growth of interest among historians in the topic of collective memory also stimulated my interest in this topic.

Related Publications

Graphic History: The “Wars, Massacres and Troubles” of Tortorel and Perrissin Travaux d’Humanisme et Renaissance no. 431 (Geneva: Droz, 2007). Revised and abridged French translation, Le regard saisit l’histoire. Les Guerres, massacres et troubles de Tortorel et Perrissin Titre courant no. 47 (Geneva: Droz, 2012).

“Deux regards catholiques sur les premières guerres de religion à Rouen” in Jean-Pierre Poussou and Isabelle Robin-Roméro eds., Histoire des familles, de la démographie et des comportements en hommage à Jean-Pierre Bardet (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2007), p. 729-740.

“Divided Memories? Historical Calendars, Commemorative Processions, and the Recollection of the Wars of Religion during the Ancien Régime,” French History 22 (2008), 381-405.

(Co-authored with Barbara Diefendorf) “The Saint Bartholomew’s Massacre: A European Site of Memory,” original English version of an essay published in German translation in Europäische Erinnerungsorte, vol. 2, Das Haus Europa eds. Pim de Boer, Heinz Duchhardt, Georg Kreis and Wolfgang Schmale (Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 2012).

“Shaping the Memory of the French Wars of Religion: The First Centuries” in Erika Kuijpers, Judith Pollmann, Johannes Müller and Jasper van der Steen eds., Memory before Modernity. Practices of Memory in Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2013), p. 111-128.

(Co-authored with Hugues Daussy and Pierre-Olivier Léchot), “Introduction” in Benedict, Daussy and Léchot eds., L’identité huguenote. Faire mémoire et écrire l’histoire (XVIe-XXIe siècles) (Geneva: Droz, 2014), p. 13-33.

“La conviction plus forte que la critique. La Réforme et les guerres de religion vues par les historiens protestants à l’époque de la Révocation” in Benedict, Daussy and Léchot eds., L’identité huguenote. Faire mémoire et écrire l’histoire (XVIe-XXIe siècles) (Geneva: Droz, 2014), p. 223-239.