« Ceux de la Relligion pretendue se trouverent sy cours de memoire… »

This study, by examining the mechanisms of qualification of the French Protestants’ relationship with the past by the royal power in the 1620s, would like to explore a hypothesis: one of the means of expression by the royal power of its domination over the French Reformed, and consequently one of the tools of the widely documented annihilation of their faculty of partisan political action, would reside in the shameful qualification of the Reformed’s understanding, and, in particular, by an attack on their political recourse to the faculty of memory. In the first place, the study emphasizes the expression in the sources of these defects of understanding and memory among the Huguenots. Present from the beginning of the reign of Louis XIII, the accusation of a defective memory was used by the agents of the royal power to criticize the reception by the Huguenots of the measures taken on questions of religion, but also by the Reformed themselves, in a perspective of transformation of their political action. In the second part of the paper, we shall study the way in which royalist libels, particularly those grouped in the Mercure François, were part of a shared desire to equate the Huguenot relationship with the past with both error and disordered reasoning, which was more a matter of weaknesses in their understanding than of political tricks, thereby denying them any capacity for political action. In this way, the royal authorities made political use of the shame, which served to requalify the place of the Reformed in the kingdom.