Transformation of the French Nobility's Historical Memory in the XVI-XVII Centuries: a Way to Overcome the Trauma of Religious Wars

Changes in the historical memory of social groups can be viewed as the consequences of a crisis caused by an unexpected, painful experience that undermines the identity system. The “golden age of memoiristics” in France came just a few decades after the official end of religious wars and the signing of the Edict of Nantes, when the French nobility first encountered the experience of civil wars and had to look for new ways to identify their identity. Models of writing memoirs, ranging from participants of the Religious Wars and ending with their descendants who did not cause these events, went through several stages of transformation - from the impossibility of accepting the end of the war to a certain unification of experience, which ultimately became the basis for updating the boundaries of the collective identity of gens d'épée in the Great Age of the first Bourbons, when the “polite society of the seventeenth century started to form.