La Ligue comme objet historiographique

The article analyzes the Catholic League as a historiographical object shaped from the end of the French Wars of Religion, still influencing the collective imagination today. Historians progressively simplified the League’s political dimension by amalgamating all exclusivist Catholics within it. This created a historiographical synecdoche encompassing all Catholics who refused to separate loyalty to the monarchy from the Catholic character of the Crown, thereby promoting a dichotomous view opposing seditious Leaguers and moderate royalists. This historiographical object underlies erroneous interpretations regarding the positions of certain prominent figures of French Catholicism during the Wars of Religion.