Forgetting Differences

Abstract

This study argues that the political and legislative process of forgetting internal differences undertaken in France after the civil wars of the sixteenth century leads to subtle yet fundamental shifts in the broader conception of the relationship between readers or spectators on the one hand, and history, on the other. These shifts, occasioned by the desire for communal reconciliation, will ultimately serve the ideologies of cultural and political absolutism. By juxtaposing representations of the French civil war past as they appear (and frequently overlap) in historiography and tragedy from 1550-1630, Forgetting Differences tracks changes in the ways in which history and tragedy sought to “move” readers throughout the period of the wars and in their wake. The shift from a politically (and martially) active reading of the past to a primarily affective one follows the imperative, so clear and urgent at the turn of the seventeenth century, to put an end to violent conflict. Subsequently, however, this orientation to both history and tragedy would be appropriated for other ends, utlimately helping to further absolutist ideologies of culture and politics that privileged affective over active readings of the past.

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