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The Seven Ages of the Written Word. The Attitudes and Pratices towards Literacy in the Douaisis (1st c. BC – 12th c. AD).In the 12th and the 13th centuries, like other parts of Western Europe, the town of Douai, which is situated in the French-speaking area of the county of Flanders, went through a “documentary revolution”. Local society developed new attitudes to the written word which could be described as a “system of attitudes and pratices towards literacy” (régime de scripturalité). Through a case study on the local scale of the Douaisis (the little country around Douai), this paper identifies and characterizes seven successive systems of attitudes and pratices towards literacy between the Iron Age and the last decades of the 12th century. (1) The first is perceptible in the use of pseudo-literacy on Gallic coinage in the 1st century BC. (2) The Latin literacy system of the Roman High Empire (1st-3rd centuries AD) appears to have been more complex and socially more extended (including the tile maker Titica), though local literacy seems to have been less dynamic in that area than in other parts of the Roman world. (3) Late Antiquity (4th-6th centuries) proved a time of crisis : local society was affected by the settlement of Frankish groups and evidence of literacy practices rarifies, though administrative literacy could have survived. (4) During the 7th-8th centuries, a kind of Christian restricted literacy can be observed, clerks and monks were apparently the last users of the Latin written word while pseudo-literacy coinage seems to reappear. (5) However, the Scarpe river valley scriptoria from the 9th to the mid-10th centuries were very active in the Carolingian Renaissance with masters like Hucbald of Saint-Amand and lay people were sometimes involved in pragmatic literacy. The first attempts of vernacular literacy can be noticed as the split between Latin and Romance language became effective. (6) Between c. 950 and c. 1050, with the withdrawal of the cultural and administrative networks of post-Carolingian times, a new type of clerical restricted literacy appeared. The Church apparently exercised a monopoly on the written word. (7) At least, from the 1060s to the 1170s, the rise in the production of charters and other pragmatic documents, the local presence of heresy (and thus of “textual communities”) and the reputation of the grammar school of Douai signal the first stages of the local “documentary revolution”. The thousand-year-old history of literacy in the Douaisis was neither cyclic, nor linear. Despite the disappearance or the transformation of some elements, and without adopting a teleological view, a cumulative logic does prove at work, allowing us to identify these successive systems of attitudes and pratices towards literacy. Ancient literacy ended between the 4th and the 6th century. It was followed by First Medieval Literacy, itself replaced by Second Medieval literacy in the 12th century.

The dynasty of the counts of La Marche and Angouleme, from the family of Lusignan, passed away at the beginning of the 14th century, leaving its estates to the king of France. The internal conflicts between its members led to successive successoral crisis, allowing Philip the Fair to interfere into the sharing of the inherintance. He seized the whole Lusignan land just before the death of the last count, Guy de Lusignan, who tried to ally himself with the king of England in order to offset the Capetian authority. The French royal officers began with all the deceased's beneficiaries a series of negociations using the legal idea of “crime de lèse-majesté” to justify the seizure and the royal refusal to give back the lands in order to force them to withdraw from their claims. Thanks to this, Philip IV has annexed to the royal desmene all the Lusignan's estates in Poitou and Brittany and their counties of La Marche and Angoulême. It were one of his reign's main territorial acquisition and the most successful but, as he immediately took advantage of it to assign an appanage to his third son, it had remain little known. Moreover, taking place just after the great political trials against Bernard Saisset, Boniface VIII and the knight templars, this seizing, using the concept of lese-majesty, ends its shift in meaning and represents an unknown milestone in the formation of the idea of high treason and the constitution of juridical political machinery.

This article studies an unknown manuscript of the French National Library, the Histoire métallique du Czar Pierre I (circa 1730). First it situates it in the context of the medallic propaganda promoted by the Russian government analyzing the later example of Voltaire, author at the request of this government between 1757 and 1759 of the Histoire de l'empire de Russie sous Pierre le Grand, the writer being submitted to this medallic propaganda at this occasion. Then it shows how the form of the manuscript was inspired by the display volume published in 1702 and 1723 by the Académie des inscriptions, the Médailles sur les principaux événements du règne de Louis le Grand avec des explications historiques, and how the medals of Peter the Great, partly produced in Germany, were also inspired by those of the French monarch. Finally, the manuscript is compared to the two medallic histories of Russia of the eighteenth century : Éléazar de Mauvillon's Histoire de Pierre I (1742) ; Pierre Ricaud de Tiregale's Médailles sur les principaux événemens de l'empire de Russie depuis le règne de Pierre le Grand jusqu'à celui de Catherine II avec des explications historiques (1772). This document illustrates the international influence of the medallic history of Louis XIV and how the Russian State took inspiration from it for its own propaganda.

This article aims to study the itinerary of a volunteer from the 19th century, Ronald Mac
Iver (1841-1907), starting from the biographies which were dedicated to him at the end of the century. His exceptionnal path included fifteen different commitments during the 1860s and the 1870s, including European (France, Spain, Greece, Serbia, etc.), American (USA, Cuba, Mexico, Brazil etc.) and some non-occidental countries (Egypt, India, New Guinea). The aim of the article, though, is not to trace the steps of this itinerary nor to analyze them. The transatlantic peregrination of MacIver serves as a point of observation of the mutations of the atlantic world during this period. One of the goals of the paper is indeed to defend the relevance of such a scale of analysis by showing how European and American theaters of war connect together through these transnational circulations. The reflexion stresses first on the personal dimensions of the itinerary of MacIver. First of all, we face the construction of a transnational military career, as MacIver appears as a professional officer who moves from a theater of fighting to another. Nevertheless, his path is also clearly motivated by political reasons. MacIver is an international volunteer who fights to defend his ideas, which in his case are conservative : he refuses the abolitions of slavery, defends christiandom and monarchy, and even his vision of nationalism, one of the key processes of that time on an atlantic scale, is a conservative one. In a second moment, the paper deals with the global conditions in which this transnational commitment takes place. The demonstration brings to light a double contradictory process which influences MacIver's experience : from one hand, his volunteering is permitted by the multiplication of the intercontinental links in the atlantic world, as a result of the transport revolution and the first globalization, which allow an increased mobility between Europa and America ; from the other hand, the volunteering has to deal with the emergence of the nation-states who strengthen their control on their borders, especially the terrestrial ones, and fight against transnational political circulations. Such a paradoxical situation leads to insist on the agency of MacIver and the actors of political internationalism in the atlantic world : how did they manage to get through these new and fluctuating conditions, in order to carry out their projects ? The last moment of the paper connects together these personal and global scales by focusing on the part of these transnational volunteers in the making of an atlantic world as a space of military commitment and political action. To do so, it takes into account the own perception of the actors and tries to show that they were themselves aware to be part of this atlantic world. The demonstration stresses particularly on the part of the volunteering networks established by the Garibaldians and the Confederates which made possible itineraries like MacIver's through battlefield solidarities and re-commitments. Taking place during the genesis of modern war on both shores of the Atlantic, we argue that this international volunteering was decisive in this genesis, because the circulations of the volunteers made them go-betweens who spread up the new knowledges and techniques of modern war. Finally, this international volunteering needs to be replaced within a broader movement of political transnational solidarities which also concerned civilians and other fields of public action and determined the practical conditions of the volunteering.

From L'Humanité to L'Ordre national. On a Deviation of “Pro-War Socialism”The recent discovery of a batch of unpublished archives sheds new light on pro-war socialism and its actors. Among them is Pierre Georget La Chesnais (1865-1948) who was both the addressee and the author of these precious documents. Through these archives, we were able to reconstruct the path of a man involved in various literary and political circles. Introduced almost simultaneously to the Mercure de France and to L'Humanité by his old friends, the symbolist poet André-Ferdinand Hérold and Louis Révelin, a Jaurès associate, this early LDH and SFIO militant got closer to a group of normaliens gathered around Albert Thomas during the Great War. Among the advisers of the Minister of Armaments were the Durkheimians Maurice Halbwachs, François Simiand and most notably Hubert Bourgin, with whom La Chesnais was to build a strong political friendship. After their failed attempt to found a new and more patriotic socialist party in the 1920's, their association led them to become contributors to L'Ordre national, a prominent anti-Semitic periodical. This shared path highlights the deviations of a “purely intellectual socialism,” which Hubert Bourgin retrospectively described with bitterness and resentment in most of his books. La Chesnais' elitist militancy of the early years was built on literature, symbolist poetry and the plays of Ibsen, which inspired libertarian ideas. But in the wake of Bourgin, he then rubbed shoulders with far-right propagandists ahead of the upcoming conflict.

This article aims to explore the reasons for the poor connectivity of religious historiography and global history in the researches covering periods from the late eighteenth century to the present (gathered under the name of “contemporary era” in France). On the one hand, global history, which has been structured from works in economics and politics, seems not interested in religious matters, which are considered irrelevant for the explanation of the most recent phases of globalization. On the other hand, religious historiography, which has sought to secularize its approaches, seems suspicious of a global history that is sometimes theologically grounded, assuming for instance that humanity is converging. The rare works of global history specifically focused on religion seem to justify, by their disturbing proximity to world theology, these apprehensions. In their vast majority, when historians of contemporary religion cross the national borders in their study works, they mobilize the paradigm of “transnational history” and not that of global history. While acknowledging the merits of this “humble” positioning, the author pleas for a globalized history of religion in the contemporary era, that would test the sociological theories of the globalized religion, discuss the hypotheses of the historians of globalization, and analyze in new ways the dynamics of the religion in the recent history of humanity.