ABSTRACT
Les Tragiques, Agrippa d’Aubigné’s epic, seven-book poem about the French Wars of Religion, offers testimony to an eternal religious (Calvinist) truth as well as about a set of earthly historical circumstances, the latter a secular, juridico-historical form of vérité. First published nearly two decades after the Edict of Nantes, which encouraged peaceful coexistence in part by urging the French to abstain from renewing memories of the wars, Aubigné’s fiery polemic was brazenly out of step with monarchical policies, and one senses that it could not be otherwise: for how could Aubigné subordinate the transcendent truths of protestant theology to mundane political concerns? Thus Frank Lestringant, one of the Tragiques’s recent editors and one of its most sensitive readers, has written that the work was simply inopportune and anachronistic by the time of its publication in 1616 (7). 1
