Contenu du sommaire

In July 1470 Louis XI granted Jean VI Malet de Graville the permission to hold an annual fair at Châtres-sous-Montlhéry. From the institutional, legal and economic points of view nothing seemed to prevent the establishment of this commercial gathering in the south of Paris. Nevertheless, in April 1471, the Letter Patent establishing the fair had not yet been recorded by the royal administration, who ordered a commodo et incommodo survey to enquire about the legitimacy of the request and to define Lord Graville's rights and franchise. The applicant (prisoner of Edward IV in London) and his son, Louis, then began a struggle with the French king and his administration – a struggle which was to come to an end in 1475, when Louis XI imposed a partial endorsement of the Patent Letter.The archives of this affair, exceptionally well preserved, contain the survey ordered by the Provost of Paris and the letters exchanged between the protagonists of the endorsement request. It shows an administration, which was keen to preserve the royal domain and its own privileges, and it reveals the underlying conflicts of interest, and even the political and economic issues at stake when a privilege was granted by the King.

During the last centuries of the Middle Ages, an entirely new and rather spectacular type of documents appeared: the figured maps. Similar to views in perspective, maps or plans, they represented places or territories which were disputed during a trial, and were shown in order to determine each one's right better. The juridical bases of their usage were related to legal theory and practice, which both considered view as an excellent proof. But the nature of these pleadings remains complex, as they belong to expertise, testimony and evidence in the same time.

French historiography has long stressed the leading role assumed by the devouts in the 17th century Catholic Reformation, but lots of stereotypes remain about their unanimity and about the coherence of a “devout faction”, due to the celebrity of some Parisian figures close to the court. The truth is that the pious laity of the provinces has plural profiles and concerns, which evolve over time. Thus, in the diocese of Clermont, women and widows of aristocratic lineages loyal to the king support the expansion of the new religious orders after the French Wars of Religion. Then after 1640 they step aside in favour of the royal officers of the towns, who show increasing interest in the confinement of the poor as the mercantilist theories prevail. This shifting devout action not only impacts the course of Catholic Reformation, but more broadly reveals the coming of a new modernity.

The article aims to examine the charitable practices of the French medical elite, the docteurs régents of the Faculty of Medicine, as an attempt to preserve the professional interests of the group and confiscate a parish-based source of income between 1644 and 1791. Confronted to Théophraste Renaudot's project of charitable medical consultations in 1630, to whom they opposed their exclusive right to practice medicine before the Parliament of Paris, the docteurs régents set up their own consultations for the sick poor in 1644. The charitable consultations, a request of the Parliament against the enactment of the Faculty's privilege, were organized twice a week, as a collective duty under the care of the Dean and a minimum of six docteurs régents who also served as practical instruction for the young physicians. This free service, however, was hard to impose on docteurs régents, as, in addition to being time-consuming and unpaid, they restricted their private practice, until the establishment of a cash compensation in 1779.In addition to the Faculty charitable consultations, docteurs régents became involved in medical provision to the parish-based charities. Regulations helped establish their duties: visiting the poor, screening the sick and prescribe to the patient a tailored diet and remedies using low-cost common drugs, prepared and served by the Daughters of the Charité. Doctors regents could accordingly apply their theoretical knowledge, become known to the local notability and identify the needs of a new pool of customers. The small yearly fee, between 50 and 200 livres a year, was fixed, regular, making up for delayed and more uncertain payments from their private practice. After 1770, the sick poor parish relief developed into small structures of medical provision like the hospice Saint Merry. The development of the charitable activity had consequences on the configuring of medical care in eighteen-century Paris. New professional relationships were organized between the docteurs régents and the female sisters, to whom they confided more technical curing skills, involving remedies' preparations, bleeding and patient surveillance. It also generated a new category of customers, the sick parish poor, even more so as the hospital was gradually considered a “repulsive” curing place: docteurs régents used this new medical opportunity not only to identify the specific needs of these customers, such as short-term cures rather than long-term advices on regimen and diet to help them resume their economic activity, but also, as did Pierre Lalouette and Joseph Jacques Gardanne, as means to educate the potential paying sick customer in avoiding the services of unqualified healers.

Société générale, one of the leading French banks, has resisted general crises and crashes, wars, and competition, to reach its 150th anniversary. But it had to face its “own” four dire crises (1886, 1905, 1913, and recently, 2007/2009) which almost swept it from the Paris marketplace, gnawed into its creditworthiness, fostered the risk of a risk of illiquidity, and fuelled a crisis at the top of the leading team. Each crisis commenced because of specific developments, generally on internationalised fields of activity (trade finance, deployment of the bank in foreign countries, foreign loans, financial trading), but altogether they allow to question common issues. The analysis of these four events constitutes a case study about the management of the organisation of the banking firm, to gauge the commonplace management of risks, but moreover the relevance of the business model in front of the portfolio of strategic activities and in front of the geographic deployment of the bank on foreign markets. Archives are mobilised to scrutinize the causes of each crisis, and how far this one threatened the survival of the bank, which helps understand how the head managers failed to adapt their model of management to the evolution of the activities and of the risks of the institution. Thereafter, the article ponders how the managers called to rescue their bank succeeded in reinventing its business model and its mode of supervising the risks. Firms surviving to crisis generally came out with stronger methods of management, efficient systems of supervising business and risks, of controlling the procedures to be respected in each affiliate or branch – and that was the case at Societé générale indeed, about which we could thus suggest that its crisis reinforced its ability to cross the cyclical tensions. It also enriched its corporate culture, through the recurrent inflow of more accurate tools of risk assessment and management values, to be more oriented toward a fine-tuned perception of the necessary balance between dynamic strategies of organic growth and adapted structures of control, of risk management and the allocation of financial resources.