Refédérer les Français par la mémoire des guerres, 1593–1594

From the seventeenth century onwards, the memory of the Wars of Religion was constructed from a polarized narrative according to which the victory of Henri IV would have erased everything that the League had represented. In this sense, its defeat would have been mainly ideological, political reason having finally prevailed over religious fanaticism. However, in the months following the king’s conversion in July 1593, opposition was not the main driving force, neither in the attempts to achieve peace nor in the operations to reread the past undertaken by the pacification effort. This paper thus focuses above all on two texts from the period between 1593 and 1594, written by two protagonists of the reconciliation of Leaguers and Royalists: Pomponne de Bellièvre’s Advis aux François and Villeroy’s Apologie. Their attempt to bring people together was also made through a conciliatory judgment on the causes of and those responsible for the conflicts and therefore, implicitly, through the recognition of the legitimacy of the League’s past commitment.