Individual will, rather than the seemingly hard facts of race or language or natural borders, makes a nation – this was the message Ernest Renan offered in 1882 in his famous address to the Sorbonne, “Qu'est-ce que'une nation?” A nation is a daily plebiscite, he memorably told his audience. He also reminded them that for a nation to be a nation, it must have a common past of “endeavors, sacrifice, and devotion.” Suffering more than joy unites a people; collective grief is more valuable than a string of triumphs. Yet just as this common past must be remembered, it must also be forgotten. Thanks to a greater scholarly sensitivity to the problems of memory, Renan has recently achieved renewed importance. Yet the kind of memory and forgetting to which Renan referred was very specific; it involved traumatic religious violence: the St. Bartholomew's Massacre of 1581 and the thirteenth-century massacres of the Albigensians in the Midi.