This paper examines questions of identity among French Huguenots, a religious minority for whom the signing of the Édit de Nantes (1598) represented the promise of religious freedom. However its Révocation in 1685 confirmed a period of intense turmoil and civil war, culminating for the Huguenots in renewed persection, death and eventual diaspora. The Musée du Désert in Mas-Soubeyran (France) serves as a memory-site of French Protestantism (Philippe Joutard in Pierre Nora, Les Lieux de Mémoire). The collective memory of this repressed group, as represented in personal narratives, provides insights into questions of identity, social equality, religious freedom and human rights. This paper focuses on a journal kept by Huguenot pastor Daniel Chamier (1565-1621) during his 1595-96 journey to Paris, where he worked to promote, then draft, the Édit de Nantes. Reflected in Chamier’s journal are contemporary socio-cultural practices as well as the process by which an individual writer becomes a vehicle for collective memory. Weaving together historical event, cultural memory, life-writing and imagination, the journal demands contextualization and interpretation. Like the Musée du Désert, the journal serves as a “memory-site” that participates in the historical process of recovery of French Protestantism -- its key figures, objects, physical places, cultural practices, texts and collective discourses. In this reading, Chamier’s journal carries a significance that is wider in scope than the content of its narrative or the social practices it describes: travel from the provinces to Paris, conversation with King Henri IV regarding the Édit de Nantes, endless waiting to see the King, mundane problems of a culinary nature. Recovered texts necessitate special interpretive efforts, hence “cannot have a full cultural life, cannot do the cultural work the might otherwise do,” as Cary Nelson observes, “unless people are taught such new ways to read them.” Conferences on cultural memory also take part in the process of reception that permits the recovery and re-evaluation of repressed and neglected texts.