Contenu du sommaire

The author proposes to reconsider the relationship between Epicureanism and politics at the end of the Roman Republic. Since half-century, the debate revolves around the “republicanism” or the “monarchism” of the Epicureans. However, the author proposes to leave this determinism, and study these relationships around the opposition between the Populares and Optimates through two Roman Epicureans: Atticus and Lucretius. Atticus is described as Optimas by Cornelius Nepos and Cicero, while Lucretius, in his De Natura Rerum's introductions, uses a popularis vocabulary. The Epicureans are not or outside the city or in advance: they are embedded in the heart of contemporary political debates.

The Livre au Roi is a juridical text compiled in the very first years of the twelfth century, probably to support the ambitions of king Amalric II of Lusignan. He ruled over the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem between 1197 and 1205, thanks to his marriage with the queen Isabella, and tried to re-establish a strong monarchy. Reproducing assizes and customs of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the author devotes several chapters to justice and punishments. As it has been demonstrated by Michel Foucault, there is a consubstantial link between justice, power, and the image that a society gives of itself: through the Livre au Roi, we try to understand how this link is re-forged in the feudal society of the Latin East. First of all, the question of justice reveals a lot about medieval minds and practices: the absence of the inquisitional procedure, the role of witnesses, the place of the justicial ordeal... We also aim to understand how the Livre au Roi, in itself, strengthens the social order: indeed, the text reaffirms constantly the superiority of the knights upon the burgesses. In particular, the knights were less harshly punished than the burgesses when they commited violent aggressions: the Livre au Roi imposed the bellatores as the only agents of legitimate violence. Finally, we try to show how the text reflected Amalric's will to re-impose the monarchy above the barons: by deliberately using anachronistic assizes and vocabulary, by claiming the right to judge, the king wanted to show himself as the direct successor of the powerful kings of the past. The Livre au Roi is at the very heart of Amalric's political program, but a fair number of chapters shows that this is only an ideal: the monarchy was forced to compose with a very powerful seigniorial class. The Livre au Roi must then be read anthropologically: it partook of the feudal conception of power and politic. It reveals a society which always prefer the circulation of power, if only symbolic, rather than the concentration of power.

On April the 3rd of 1445 the consuls of Perpignan sent to the consellers of Barcelona copies of various letters they had just received from France, which contained remarkably precise information about the situation in the neighbouring country. They also joined a Catalan copy of an ordonnance of Charles VII of France on “the men-at-arms that the king wants to keep and whom he wants to provide accommodation in his kingdom” (published in appendix). The reasons behind and the complex modalities of the transmission of this exceptional documentary evidence are the subject of the first part of this article. Subsequently, the “copy of the ordonnance” is examined under a formal point of view and then compared with other contemporary legal provisions concerning the men-at-arms in Valois France, as well as with the key testimonies of the chroniclers. At the end of this identification process, the copy of Barcelona turns out to be a Catalan version of the famous “lost ordonnance” of Charles VII concerning the men-at-arms, the issuing of which was a decisive step in the process of creation of the compagnies d'ordonnance. This discovery allows in particular to reassess the lists of the captains and of the geographical entities that were chosen for the accommodation of the men-at-arms. Finally, this article puts in a new light the foundational nature traditionally attributed to this lost ordonnance. It was indeed a project of general reform and of control of the men-at-arms that concerned the whole territory under royal domination, with the notable exception of Languedoc. Still, despite this document, many practical problems remained unresolved, and space was left for future adaptations and negotiations in the field, a situation that would result in the necessity of issuing other ordonnances in the following time.

The aim of this article is to revisit the question of the financiers in Old Regime France. It starts with an analysis of the discourses about the financiers under the Absolute monarchy that underlines the complexity of their relationship with the government and the public. It then reviews the secondary literature and highlights the existence of competing historical interpretations (functional, political, utilitarian), which raise the question of their overall capacity to account for the role and impact of the financiers at different times. On this ground, the article focuses on a specific group of financiers, the so-called traitants d'affaires extraordinaires, during the Nine Years War. Further to a description of the specific role and scope of the activities of the various financiers responsible for helping the monarchy to raise the funds it needed to pay for its peace and wartime expenditure, the article examines the conditions and profits granted by the king in his contracts with the traitants whose services were hired for the purpose of selling royal offices in the public and advancing the revenue to the Treasury. It also explores the contractual arrangements of the companies established by the financiers to manage their operations as well as the rights and the responsibilities of their various stakeholders. These bases being laid, the article relies on the administrative correspondence relating to the traités during the Nine Years War to address a range of issues, in particular the extent to which these contracts, and other control procedures, were robust enough to deter fraud. The accounts of two traitants' companies offer an opportunity to analyse and compare the structure of their income and expenditure (including the volume and cost of the promissory notes sold in the public to finance their payments to the Treasury), to explore the strategies of the contractors, to calculate their net profits and further discuss the problem of embezzlement. The article ends with the study of the context and debates which led to the introduction by finance minister Michel Chamillart, in 1700, of a shortfall tax on the financial profits of the gens d'affaires or traitants, the method used to determine its rate (50 % of the net benefits), its distribution among the various stakeholders (including the bailleurs de fonds or backers), and the related procedures. In total, the article argues that the relationship between the monarchy, society and the financiers under the Ancien Regime was not static and, therefore, suggests that the broad question of control and fraud must be examined against changing circumstances. With regard specifically to the Nine Years War, the article concludes that within the constraints of the Absolute monarchy, contractors offered valuable services by raising capital for the benefit of a king who ruled over a country which, at the time, was by far the wealthiest in Europe, and where ministers failed to foresee long wars of attrition and whose financial strategy was limited by the very existence of privilege. Overall, the traités were too costly to be a viable system of war financing. In these conditions, the substantial fortunes made by a handful of very successful traitants suffice to explain that the government easily gave in to public criticism against the wealth of the financiers and felt compelled, when peace resumed, to cancel the advantageous conditions offered in the treaties by taxing financial profits.

The following article traces the history of the policy of « ideological training » (weltanschauliche Schulung or weltanschauliche Erziehung) developed between 1933 and 1945 by the SS (Schutzstaffel), the organization that considered itself the elite of Nazism. Its radicalism and its scope make the SS's efforts in the field of political indoctrination a paradigmatic example of the Nazi regime's attempts at transmitting its new system of values to its rank and file. An empirical case study of such a policy can thus allow the historian to shed new light on the problem of nazi normativity and help bring a new perspective to the understanding of the mentalities of the men who committed to the cause of the « Third Reich » and fought and murdered in its name – two issues that are central to the recent historiography of National-Socialism. This article combines four complementary methodological approaches: an institutional history of the network of organizations tasked with elaborating and implementing the SS's training program, at the centre of which stood the SS-Schulungsamt (educational office), that oversaw the work an « educational organization » (Schulungsapparat) of more than a thousand instructors present at all levels; a prosopographical profile of the specific group of Nazi perpetrators who operated at various levels of the « educational organization »; an analysis of the ideological discourses and teaching methods elaborated by these institutions; and an evaluation of the way the SS's own brand of education impacted the hundreds of thousands of men who served in its civil, military or police branches. The first two parts of the article analyse the two main chronological phases of the history of the « educational organization » and its changing priorities, as the program of ideological training, that initially aimed at forging the civil elite of the nazi regime through a process of long-term reeducation (1933-1939), increasingly transformed into an instrument of morale-boosting for the SS's fighting troops (1939-1945). The third and last part of the article tries to assess the results of ideological training and the extend to which Nazi norms penetrated the SS's various units. It reaches the conclusion that, although ideological penetration should not be underestimated, it varied greatly and remained generally far below the utopian expectations of SS ideologists.

This paper focuses on the study of the internal purges against communists in the West German Civil Service during the 1950s and 1960s. Based on the exploration of several disciplinary procedures, it analyses the way in which the institution understands the “duty of loyalty” of its civil servants since the establishment of the democratic order. The article considers first the long duration of the “professional civil service” since the 19th century and the way in which this “duty of loyalty” has been elaborated and formulated in different regimes, including the Prussian Monarchy, the Weimar Republic and the Nazi Regime, in order to understand the changes at work after the Second World War. The thesis defended here is that the normative change observed in the Constitution of 1949 and the federal Law of the civil service of July 1953 has been used to purge a population different from former Nazis: namely the communists. Our hypothesis is that this internal purge of the civil service in the 1950s and the 1960s took place not only because of the Cold War, but also because the former Nazi civil servants had been reintegrated in the public administrations thanks to the generous policy of amnesty and rehabilitation implemented in West Germany, so that they wanted to defend their positions and their professional interests against the antifascists who had joined the civil service after the 8 May 1945. The disciplinary sanction against communist activism and KPD or SED membership in the civil service offers an interesting mirror of the now well known penal lawsuits against communists in West Germany. It allows us to reflect on the social background of anticommunist practices at the individual level.