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This paper offers a reassessment of the history of the literary success enjoyed by the Grandes Chroniques de France during the 14th and 15th centuries. This history of the kings of France from their Trojan origins was written at the Benedictine abbey of Saint-Denis ca 1274, and then continued up to the time of King Philip VI. The last continuation, which is a chronicle of Kings John II and Charles V, was composed outside of Saint-Denis, probably at court, and finished ca 1381. In this state, the Grandes Chroniques went on to become one of the most widely disseminated French works of the Middle Ages, with more than 115 copies still extant today. Scholars have usually considered the Grandes Chroniques to be a propaganda tool commissioned and circulated by the kings in order to support the building and consolidation of a unified State apparatus around the crown, and more generally to strengthen the feeling of national belonging among owners and readers of Grandes Chroniques manuscripts. One generally assumed that King Saint Louis (1226-1270) commissioned the first part of the Grandes Chroniques, that King Charles V (1364-1380) deliberately fostered the circulation of the work, and that the public reacted enthusiastically, acquiring and reading the text credulously. The present paper intends to challenge this conception as a whole, so that a reconsidered view of the topic may emerge, which takes into account the results brought forward by studies conducted on the numerous manuscripts of the work. In an unfinished and posthumous book published in 2016, Bernard Guenée (1927-2010) argued the Grandes Chroniques had not been commissioned by Saint Louis, but rather by Mathieu de Vendôme, abbot of Saint-Denis. Guenée passed away before he could further investigate into the implications of such a hypothesis. By shifting the attention from the kings to Saint-Denis, Guenée's last work encourages scholars to consider the Grandes Chroniques as a product of a Benedictine abbey, conveying a conception of history that was very specific to this religious house. A close examination of significant passages of the text highlights how much Saint-Denis historiographers were concerned with supporting the material and spiritual claims of their abbey, one of the most powerful religious houses in high and late-medieval France. As the Grandes Chroniques do not necessarily spare the kings of France, one may question whether the 14th and 15th-century kings actually supported the copying and circulating of the text, as is generally assumed. Indeed, the classical hypothesis regarding the traditio textus of the Grandes Chroniques is that MS fr. 2813 of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Charles V's own copy of the text, served as a model for all subsequent witnesses. This misconception has lead generations of scholars into assuming Charles V had consciously supported the dissemination of the text, while on the contrary his personal manuscript proves to be unique upon closer examination. No other extant copy shares its particularities. The examination of a 1410 judicial case brought to the Parlement de Paris furthermore showcases what little support the crown actually gave to the Grandes Chroniques when their auctoritas was publicly challenged. The success of luxury copies of the Grandes Chroniques is most significant in princely houses and aristocratic families from the time of Charles VI to the end of the 15th century. In such contexts, manuscripts of the Grandes Chroniques passed from one generation to the next, preserved as precious symbols of belonging to an elite family and a house distinguished by its lavish library. Such houses, like that of Berry, Bourbon and Bourgogne, allowed for a large geographical circulation of copies, south of the Loire and north of the Somme. All the while, it seems the kings paid very little attention to the Grandes Chroniques, owning no witness of the text from the 1430s all the way to the dawn of the French Renaissance. Third and last part of the present paper, the study of the reception enjoyed by the Grandes Chroniques preserved in prestigious illuminated copies also challenges the traditional assumption according to which this history was universally accepted as the truth in the medieval kingdom of France. While some copies may never have been read at all, being considered prestigious artefacts rather than texts to peruse, others may have been read aloud, and only some display tangible signs of being carefully studied. Annotations scattered in several copies indicate critical readings of the text, some users of the Grandes Chroniques writing down expressions of their disbelief in the margins or arguing about the interpretation of historical events recounted differently in other sources. The Grandes Chroniques did not necessarily enjoy a greater authority than other historical works available at the time. This goes to show how versatile and contradictory the reception of Grandes Chroniques manuscript copies would be, much dependent on the predicament in which one used this historical work. As general assumptions on the role of the kings in the success of the Grandes Chroniques fail to explain what stems from studying manuscript copies of the work, this paper petitions for considering the exceptional fortune of the work as a complex phenomenon from the origins of the text all the way to the reception of its copies—a phenomenon one may not apprehend as a single enterprise of royal policy.

Renier Acorre, a native of Florence, is well-known for his political career at the court of the counts of Champagne and then at the royal court of France, since he occupied the position of Chamberlain for the counts (1270-1278), grand panetier of France (1277-1287) and receveur of the county of Champagne (1271-1292). His work as creditor, despite its important role and its variety, has been little studied up to now. Most of his financial operations were “concealed” within bills of sale or purchase or as donations. This paper will aim to answer three questions: quomodo? qui? cur? Indeed, the main goal is to study the workings of lending operations behind the rhetoric of public instruments and to show the many ways in which a debt can be “concealed” in the 13th century: rentcharge, donations serving as reimbursement, purchases without an original recorded price, sales with repurchase agreements/buyback options, or fictitious purchases. The social characteristics of the Florentine's partners in these “concealed” credit ventures is another point of interest: with whom or to whom does Renier Acorre grant “concealed credit”? This analysis will show that the Italian merchant managed to win the trust of a large group of people, since humble inhabitants of the village of Gouaix (where he sets up as lord) would employ his services just as much as local noblemen or the counts of Champagne. His clientele seems more wide-ranging than that of other money-lenders (Italian or otherwise) operating in the fairs (or outside of them) and involves a higher percentage of nobility. Finally, we will touch more rapidly on why a debt needs to be “concealed” in the 13th century. Is it truly concealed, or is it about the efficiency of the bill or even a purely technical point for the solicitor? Why does Renier Acorre resort to one given method rather than another to “conceal” his bank operations?

This article proposes, in line with the current anthropological turn in history, to re-read at new expense the main texts of eighteenth-century philosophy of nature on the sensitivity of plants to show that, far from having established the separation between nature and culture, the enlightenment has attempted to map a common world between humans and non-humans. The debates on the sensitivity of plants have made it possible to rethink the theory of the scale of beings and, above all, the place of man in ontological hierarchies. These discussions were not only the prerogative of naturalists and scientists, but also animated the public sphere throughout the century. We therefore propose to question the modalities of the circulation of these debates, in a context of enthusiasm for questions related to natural history and, more particularly, to botany. The first part of the article puts into context the philosophical and naturalistic debates around the sensitivity of plants and, more particularly, of the sensitivity. It recalls the opposing points of view around the notion of irritability, developed by Albrecht von Haller, and then develops the epistemological positions of certain philosophers and materialist naturalists such as Charles Bonnet and Jean-Baptiste Robinet. The re-reading of the theory of the scale of beings, where the living would decline in degrees of perfection, seems to know a new fortune in the eighteenth century, reflecting the desire to rethink the place of plants in the hierarchy of beings. The second part of this research looks at experiments carried out on sensitive plants and shows how the questions raised by these plants have circulated in the Europe of science, in particular between France and England. The scientists then try to subject these plants to the contact of etching, the spirit of wine and sulphur vapours. These experiments are part of the learned context of a search for a better understanding of the role of air on the vital movements of plants. Newspapers, gazettes and posters have greatly contributed to catalysing the dissemination of these debates on plant sensitivity. The third part of the article reveals the implications of controversies on plant susceptibility. Recognizing the irritability or sensitivity of plants was one thing. Admitting a specific form of intelligence to the plant world and attributing the movements of plants to the will was another. Starting from these rich debates, the fourth part considers the displacements of the anthropological view of the lights on nature. The sensitivity of plants was only one of many discussions about the links that guaranteed the continuity of nature and caused man to lose part of his supremacy. While alchemy was not systematically denounced as an epistemological obstacle, the question of plant spirits remained, for example, a good indicator of the blurred boundaries between the scientific and the occult, legitimate and illegitimate knowledge, as well as between the natural and the supernatural.

Mehmet-Ali holds a special place in the portrait gallery of Eastern sovereigns. Associated with the orientalist stereotype of the Eastern despot at the beginning of his government of Egypt, he was gradually represented as the model of the reformist statesman influenced by the European civilization. He was the object of a true admiration in France and even in a part of the English society. This new picture was not built ex nihilo but resulted from an influential policy led by the vice-king in France and England with his councillor and doctor Clot-Bey, and by the journeys of young members of the Egyptian elite. His aim was to become a credible alternative to the Ottoman sultan should the latter be overthrown by the Russians. This strategy paid off during the 1839-1840 crisis when, for the second time, Egypt's Pasha challenged Mahmoud II who tried to get Syria back. Most of the French public opinion defended Mehmet-Ali, while the English press became Francophobic despite showing mercy for the Pasha who was supported by France. Considered in France as the instrument for revenge against the coalition which drove to the Vienna Congress, Mehmet-Ali, from a British viewpoint, was to stay an ally to ensure the continuity of the route to India. The fascination for Mehemet-Ali is the consequence of a struggle for power in the East, of the building of pro-Egyptian networks and of the reception by a public moulded by orientalism. This fascination enables us to understand what lies behind the Franco-British competition in this region of the world, which was resolved thanks to the opening of the Suez canal.

In middle and upper-class families in nineteenth-century France, dolls were important objects materially, culturally, and psychically, as suggested by their ubiquity in women's memoirs as well as the proliferation of fictions devoted to them. The middle and later decades of the century saw important changes in the design and production of these highly class-differentiated objects. This article draws upon Robin Bernstein's methodological approach to the culture of childhood and race in the American context to argue that dolls played a significant part in the learning and transmission of class cultures for middle and upper-class children in nineteenth-century France. A first section traces the important psychic weight of dolls for nineteenth-century French girls via the autobiographies of women ranging from the obscure to the famous. The second part centers on the strikingly abundant corpus of fictions of the period centered on dolls to argue first for their taxonomic importance : differences between dolls gave girls both a map of social distinctions and scripts for playing upon them. Dolls were also disciplinary inasmuch as they invited and reinforced class-specific values and behaviors. Methodologically the article proposes, following Bernstein, a dynamic approach to material culture revolving around concepts of script and performance.

Studying thefts from churches in 19th Century France, from the French Revolution to the consequences of the Law of Separation, means taking an interest in a phenomenon that is both a moral scandal and a banal reality in a traditional and precarious society. A moral scandal, even a moral panic, because of the sacredness of the churches, especially after the French Revolution. A banal reality, because these thefts increased throughout the century, linked to transformations in crime and petty crime. Political and legal debates therefore question the transformations of repression, which must adapt to the logic of secularization and the transformations of the penal system. At the start of the 20th century, at the time of the Law of Separation, the rise of a new banditry specializing in sacred art sparked a second wave of indignation which provoked heated debates on republican secularism and on the protection and property of churches. Even if this new crime was not so spectacular as newspapers made believe, they caused a reorganization of churches surveillance.