The Edicts of Pacification (1560-1598) - Formation of French Model of Religious Peace and "Politics of Oblivion"

In the thesis, I study the formation of a model of religious peace that was characteristic of France in the second half of the 16th century, based on the so-called edicts of pacification. This is the common name for a group of royal decrees of 1562–1598, the main purpose of which was to end the civil war and create prerequisites for peaceful coexistence of Catholics and Protestants. These documents did not deal with doctrinal issues. Their provisions were aimed at regulating the legal and social status of the Huguenot minority, who lived side by side with the Catholic majority. The idea of ​​oblivion occupies a special place in the texts of the edicts of pacification: subjects were instructed to forget past disagreements and mutual grievances accumulated during the period of religious wars and the king, in turn, guaranteed amnesty to participants in wars and canceled court sentences that had been brought against them. An important role in the affirmation of the religious peace belonged to the implementation of the provisions of already accepted edicts of pacification. First, they had to be registered by the parliaments of the kingdom, then the royal commissioners appointed to each province considered the citizens’ complaints and determined whether the plaintiffs had the right to compensation in accordance with the current edict. Thus, the requirement to eradicate the memory of religious wars combined paradoxically with the need to preserve and to document it. As a result, a unique situation emerged that predetermined the final crisis of the coexistence of confessions in the 17th century. The conclusions made in the thesis can be used to further study the period of religious wars in Europe, as well as to develop the concept of the policy of oblivion. When working on the thesis, I used my course paper “Edict of Nantes, 1598: History of Creation, Text Structure, Political Terminology” submitted at HSE in 2018 and my translation of the Edict of Nantes into Russian.