Adjudicating the troubles: violence, memory, and criminal justice at the end of the Wars of Religion

Abstract

Abstract This article provides a new perspective on the themes of violence, memory and criminal justice at the end of the Wars of Religion by focusing on a particularly well-documented criminal case tried by the Parlement de Paris. Previous studies of the end of the troubles have often focused on the politics and personality of Henri IV or studied the memory culture of elites. This article instead examines how the witnesses who confronted the royalist military captain Mathurin de La Cange made use of a broad social memory of the civil wars and shows how their use of the courts formed part of a larger pattern of post-war conflict resolution. This was a time when people in France endured decades of warfare and confessional division, but nevertheless emerged determined to put an end to the violence by committing to resolve their disputes through the law.