Contenu du sommaire

On the death of the Duke of Burgundy Charles the Bold in 1477, King Louis XI of France undertook the conquest of certain possessions of his former adversary. It is in this context that the King occupied the city of Cambrai from 1477 to 1479. From the point of view of the Law, this occupation was problematic as the late Duke of Burgundy was not the sovereign of this city. Cambrai was an imperial and neutral city that Louis XI of France tried to transform into a royal city in order to control the border. The King set up a military garrison there and tried to break the neutrality of the city – at least in appearance – by forcing it to lend him money and by removing the imperial eagles from the city emblems. In spite of the destruction of the Cambrai communal archives, certain sources also make it possible to observe the royal policy on the population. This policy reveals the repression of the urban elite partisans in favor of the neutrality and the promotion of a true royal party. The occupation of Cambrai shocked contemporaries and the King quickly put an end to it. Neutrality was restored with the creation of a Franco-Burgundian garrison and then under the only control of Burgundians. The restoration of neutrality then responded to geostrategic considerations, the objective then being to “freeze” a highly conflictual frontier.

This paper analyses the emergence and the success of lotteries in the German-speaking areas during the 15th and 16th centuries. The “fortune pot” was a municipally controlled phenomenon, fundamentally related to crossbow or handgun shooting festivals. Thanks to a comparison within numerous municipal archives, this paper can thus reconstruct how the lottery was adopted in Germany during the 1460s, and became a trending phenomenon until the late 16th century. The article enables to analyse the economical logics, since the event had to bail out the prestigious expenses of the festival, and simultaneously to attract numerous bets. The lottery was not a merely local event, but rested on the participation of near and far bettors. Another stake was then how the city could defend its reputation and reactivate the bonds of solidary and good neighbourhood thanks to the collaboration and a transparent communication with its partners. From the announcement to the final results, the positive or mitigated reception of this urban spectacle is also a convenient way to apprehend the legitimate games and their use for the whole premodern urban society.

The reasons that led a worthy portion of French nobility to join the Protestant cause between the end of Henry II's reign and the beginning of Charles IX's reign remains an historical problem not yet satisfactorily proved. The task is not an easy one as the sources needed to shed light on the confessional choices of the French protestant nobility are scanty. However, there are exceptions and these ones are larger than usually reported. This is the case of Antoine de Croÿ, prince de Porcien, whose path, partially uncovered in the past, deserves a reexamination in light of the important role he played inside the French Huguenot movement. The aim of this paper is to study in depth the motivations that stand behind his engagement with the reformed cause and the stages that spanned it. An analysis of published and unpublished sources seems to imply that if the prince de Porcien hesitated for a while to publicly display his conversion to the Calvinist faith, afterwards he embraced without failing the fight for the Gospel as soon as he perceived that battle as the best way to find a balance between his faith and his standing in the society of his epoch. Because there is no doubt that, during his trajectory as a chief Huguenot, the prince de Porcien looked for and collected a sequence of benefits, starting from the marriage alliance he contracted with the daughter of a noble endowed with a much higher rank than his and whom, moreover, became later an heir. Nevertheless, far from only pursuing a social elevation to satisfy worldly passions, Porcien considered that the propitious situations that enriched his life, and which spurred his ambitions, came from God. Yet, these propitious situations arranged by God happened to him during his struggle for the Huguenot cause. A sign that God recognized him and his coreligionists as His chosen people. Hence, we can explain Porcien's lasting adherence to Calvinism and to the Huguenot party which only ended with his death occurred in 1567. It must be noted further that kinship relations, material and religious interests coalesced to shape Porcien's strong commitment to strengthen the Huguenot movement. This paper is particularly interested on how these patterns related to each other.

In January 1572, Anne du Moulin was found dead with her children and their nanny in Paris rue des Augustins. This “horrible massacre” led to a trial during which the advocate Barnabé Brisson, lacking any tangible proof, tried to produce in court the testimony of the ghost of Anne Du Moulin. She would have appeared to her husband and accused her cousin Blosset d'Arconville for being her murderer. This article offers to examine in the early modern justice what kind of actions ghosts were capable of doing. Perpetrated on the eve of St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, the du Moulin's case occurred also shortly after the Cross of Gastines Affair and was related to popular anxieties in Paris. Ghosts were thus endowed with a “social energy” which could be applied in a court case. In the long run, this case sheds also an original light on the “spectral grammar” in the French legislation which was then in its infancy. At its core lies the polysemic adage, le mort saisit le vif (“the dead seize the living”). This exemplary case illustrates the “spectral moment” at the dawn of modernity, during which ghosts were promoted by different kinds of knowledge (theology, law, medicine, natural philosophy, etc.) which made their existence possible and provide them with some agency.

Independence of the supreme command is generally considered as the cornerstone of the complex relationship between the military and politics in imperial Japan. Criticized by both Western and Japanese historiography as paving the way for the emergence of militarism, this independence is alleged to go back to the establishment of the army chief of staff as an organ detached from the Army ministry, having a direct access to the throne according to the Prussian model. But at the beginning, the Meiji government did not consider the 1878 reform as the expression of the independence of the supreme command, but rather as an instrument to isolate the military from the interference of political parties, to protect the Army and the Marine from internal struggles within the oligarchy and to enhance the direct imperial rule. In the wake of the implementation of the Meiji Constitution which endorsed the separation between the supreme command imperial prerogative from the organization of army forces, the Cabinet and the military competed about the determination of matters of state requiring the advice and assistance of the Cabinet and those which had to be carried out exclusively by the military, out of the Cabinet and Diet's jurisdiction through its direct connexion to the emperor. The ambiguity of the delimitation between the two imperial prerogatives, the weakness of the Prime minister office were strong incentives for the military to extend unilaterally the scope of the high command prerogative. The potentially disruptive effects of the growing autonomy of the supreme command were hidden and limited by the relative homogeneity of the political and military elites during the Meiji period. But, along with the acceleration of the differentiation process within the Japanese elites, the creation of military ordinances and the conditions of the adoption of the first Program of National Defence of the Empire of Japan in 1907 inaugurate a new step toward the independence of the supreme command prerogative which, in the long run, legitimated the military dominance over the parties Cabinet.