An exhibition entitled Les Cathares: une idée reçue? that suggested that the Cathars were invented travelled around France in 2018–19 and reignited the controversy over the existence of a unified Cathar Church. The academic debate can be provocatively reduced to the title of Monique Zerner's edited collection, Inventer l’hérésie, which suggested that twelfth-century heresycould not have given rise to a unified Cathar Church. The exhibition compressed scholarly arguments into bite-size chunks that could be better absorbed by the general public and simplified the message without the context and nuance. The reduction of a complex controversy to two standpoints that can be boiled down to a chicken-and-egg problem (was it heresy that caused persecution or the other way around?) is indicative of the way public history operates. Nevertheless, such simple binaries are redolent of the dualism that the Cathars were accused of and the ‘all or nothing’ aspect of the medieval controversies. For the early modernist it also echoes the cosmic war between good and evil that characterised so much of the printed polemic and propaganda of the French Wars of the Religion.

The formation of a Protestant identity as a response to the enforcement of Catholic orthodoxy evokes the medieval past constantly in a way that not only invites a comparison but suggests striking continuities with the Cathars. Catharism was never so historically significant than when it was revived by the Protestants and their enemies in a way that was crucial to the formation of confessional identities. Catholics seized upon the medieval concept of a Cathar Church in order to draw a parallel with Protestants who then turned it to their advantage, arguing that the Cathars had been True Christians like themselves. I should like to argue that the ‘Cathars as Protestant’ myth is at the origin of the Cathar identity that is a source of regional pride amongst the people of the Midi to the present day. The events of the French Wars of Religion that led to the invention of this identity will be considered here as well as other Protestant identities that emerged in parallel and contributed to this myth. Attempts to debunk the myth, such as Bishop Bossuet's Histoire des Variations des Églises Protestantes, written in the wake of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, only served to strengthen it as they were interpreted as Catholic propaganda.