Contenu du sommaire : Élites urbaines et constructions territoriales

Multiplicity and unity in Paris. Professional communities and civic careers, 17th- 18th centuries While forming a political space in itself, the Ancien Régime city is rarely studied as a whole or as an institutional network. This article aims to show how leading citizens, in 17th and 18th century Paris, joined their social trajectories into a single unit of action and recruitment. Bourgeoisie and territorial or professional communities were connected through several places of power such as merchant guilds, the commercial court, the municipality, or parishes. The same people were constantly moving from one institution to another. This way of structuring the city, which can be seen as a system, built its own hierarchy and sought to describe itself as part of public law within the monarchy.

« Les citoyens tant soit peu notables »: belonging to the elite in a mid-sized city, Poitiers, 17th century In the 17th century, Poitiers was a mid-sized provincial capital. It had been weakened by the increased requirements of the royal central authorities. The local elite was mainly made up of what were called « officiers moyens » from the Présidial (the Poitiers Law Court). These magistrates shared municipal government with the so-called « Trésoriers de France » (the French paymasters), university professors, and others lower officers. These various professional identities and affiliations generated an unstable configuration in the political, social, and symbolic spatial definition of the city. The elite had a common interest in defending urban freedom, together with maintaining its social supremacy. However, private and family strategies were sometimes in opposition to this common interest. The study of archives reveals the many solutions that were found to resolve those conflicts.

Cooperating in order to compensate. Municipal dynasties of Halle during the Brandeburg-Prussia integration, 1680-1740 As a result of the Treaty of Westphalia, the Hohenzollern dynasty received the archbishopric of Magdeburg and its residential city Halle as a hereditary fief in 1680. This territorial integration of Halle is analysed on both the social and political levels. However, not only the changes in the city constitution in favour of the ruler are important. The negotiations between the urban parties and the royal commission and the communication of the new power relations in the context of homage also reveal the decreasing influence and prestige of the Council lineages. But based on a prosopography of Halle Council lineages, we can detect collective compensation strategies: the Halle Council members cooperated in many ways with the rulers and increasingly became involved in the service of the city and the prince. Therefore, the contrast between city and progressive state in early modern Europe loses plausibility at the level of political actors.

From the bourgeois merchant to the commercial elite. Social status and economic function in the Rouen merchant class in the early 18th century At the end of the 17th and beginning of the 18th century, the emergence of a new commercial elite was part of a process of economic and social differentiation concerning both urban society as a whole and its regional and interregional environment. The article describes this evolution in the case of the merchants of Rouen, essentially referring to notarial and municipal documents, including the registers of the merchant community. In strengthening their active position on international markets and securing control over the regional one, these merchants were simultaneously able to strengthen their political position inside the urban society, alongside the local nobility.

Rising from economic elite to political elite thanks to diplomatic action. The case of “Portuguese” Jews in Hamburg from the late 17th century to the early 18th century While the careers of the “court Jews” and their importance for the building of an administration in the early modern German principalities have received extensive treatment in scholarly literature, the role played by Sephardic Jews in the diplomacy of the Holy Roman Empire has rarely attracted much historical interest. This paper deals with the group of “Portuguese Jews” that settled down in Hamburg at the beginning of the 17th century. Some of them became the diplomatic representatives of the kings of Sweden, Denmark, Poland, and even France. The career paths of two members of this community, Jacob Abensur and Diego Teixeira, allow us to see that the diplomatic service offered opportunities for social advancement. However, these opportunities also aroused strong opposition among the city's elite and “middle class”, which can be interpreted as the sign of an identity and of a social crisis of the Hanseatic town at the turn of the 18th century.

The aristocracy, a new urban elite? The case of the house of the Counts of Harrach in Vienna, 1550-1750 Court and City seem to be to very opposite worlds during the modern period. Nevertheless, the presence of the nobility was a reality in the monarchic residences. By studying the Viennese establishment of an aristocratic lineage, the Counts of Harrach, between 1550 and 1750, we can estimate how much a social group with several identities (local, provincial, or courtly) can integrate itself into the urban space. According to the importance of the urban noble property, their social leadership, their capacity to be visible in the urban landscape, and the development of unique relationships with the urban space, we may study how the Court nobility was actually integrated into the urban elites.

Political culture and identity in the towns of the Cantabrian coast, late Middle Ages The towns along the Cantabrian coast saw great changes in the late Middle Ages. Some of these towns were integrated into the seigneurial domains, and in many, power was shared among the lineages. Thanks to information gleaned from foral, municipal, judicial and seigneurial documents, we are able to analyse in depth the consequences of urban governments and political conflicts from the start of the Trastámara monarchs' rule until the early 1500s. Special attention is paid to the political culture and political discourses of the conflicts' protagonists, and we also examine the background of urban political identity in the region.