Focused on France in the period 1560–1630, this study examines the impact in France of the monarchical call to extinguish the memory of the Wars of Religion on post-war national historiography and on the elite sense of History more generally. This policy of oubliance is no doubt best known through the 1598 Edict of Nantes's call, in the first sentence of its opening article:

Whereas the first iteration of the policy, in article 9 of the 1563 Edict of Amboise, offered a more narrowly juridical formulation that annulled injures and offenses (“que toutes injures et offenses que l'iniquité du temps et les occasions qui en sont survenues ont peu faire naistre entre nosd. subjectz, et toutes autres choses passées et causées de ces presens tumultes, demoureront estainctes, comme mortes, ensevelies et non advenues”), the version put forth in the Edict of Nantes, reiterating language first used in the 1570 Edict of St-Germain, targets something much more diffuse: memory.

Coming after a protracted period of violent civil war that had dragged on for over thirty-five years, the Edict of Nantes met with a variety of reactions according to the political and religious interests of the factions in question; this complexity has been increasingly brought to the fore in scholarship on the period.