From the other side of silence: Huguenot life-writing, a dialogic art of narrating the self

The writing of memoirs in seventeenth-century France was an activity that took place on the margins. On the margins of society: those who wrote memoirs usually did so from exile, from prison, because they had fallen from grace into disgrace, or because they had come to a crisis point in their lives. On the margins of history: memoirs and their writers had a conflictual relationship with the official history of their time, which they set out to contradict, correct, or amend with their own story, their own outsider (yet also, insider) point of view. Memoir writing is a literature of testimony, which points to a tension between individual experience and culturally sanctioned narratives. Thus, to write memoirs in the early modem period is to perform an act of inscription that is always political. It is an act of resistance to the tendency of cultures to remember and forget in partisan fashion, which exposes that tendency by inscribing other experiences and voices into the collective memory of the past