Conclusion

Summary

When Henri IV issued the Edict of Nantes in 1598, he required that his subjects extinguish the memory of the recent wars, having already ordered the libelous and radical texts of those years to be publicly burnt.¹ But this command of oubliance, an existing tradition in the edicts of pacification issued from 1562 onwards, was not so easily obeyed.² The deliberate conservation of the documents and imagery of these troubled years, often at great personal risk, served to remind contemporaries of the entrenched nature of the confessional division. The desire of individuals like Pierre de L’Estoile, Pierre Pithou and Simon Goulart to preserve these records testifies to a profound commitment to particular memories of the wars of religion, and a notable sense of duty to expose the ‘abuses, impostures, vanities and furies of this great monster of the League’.³ Others wrote of the ‘chimeras’ of League political thought, and depicted the League as a monster, often a hydra, that would be the death of France.⁴