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Until recently Jacques de Molay, the last Grand Master of the Templar Order, suffered from a negative prejudice in the historiography. At best, he was seen as a man of action, who happened to be often confused, but never as a diplomat. The Templars, however, then played a significant role between the Latin sovereign powers. Elected in spring 1292, in a very difficult international context, Jacques de Molay immediately launched large-scale undertakings, where, more than his predecessors, he was influential and above all acted independently. To reassure his order after the loss of Acre and spark a new crusade, he conducted resolute diplomatic action. He was not a priori prepared, but, thanks to two journeys to the West – a first one, ignored by scholarship, in winter 1292-1293, and a second one, from spring 1293 to autumn 1296, for three and a half years –, he rubbed shoulders with the powerful, first, King Charles II of Naples and Pope Boniface VIII, but also Edward I of England, James II of Aragon and, possibly, Philip IV the Fair, who allegedly made him the godfather of his last son. So, going back to the sources, can we highlight the making of a diplomat, who, in a period of acute crisis in the Latin world, worked, in his own words, “for the common utility of Christendom and the convenience of our house.” This study thus sheds a very different light on the figure of the last Grand Master of the Temple and, through one of its important actors at the end of the thirteenth century, Western diplomacy is enlightened both at the margins of the great state frameworks and in relation to them.

The agrarian crisis that affected Western Europe economy between 1314-1322 reflects as a symbol the downturn that struck medieval economy since the end of the 13th century. Two harvest failures design the pattern of this crisis. The three back-to-back harvest failures of 1315-1317 induced all across North-Western Europe the worse famine of its history, the so-called Great Famine. Then, though not having induced such a disaster, in 1321-1322 prices abruptly rocketed to a record level. Recent climate reconstructions show that this crisis happened in a period of rapid climate transition, between the Medieval Climate Anomaly and the Little Ice Age. Hence, in the context of worries about global change, historians renewed the analysis of the agrarian crisis through the lens of environmental history. To date, available econometric reconstructions of the crisis have been achieved only with english archive materials, i. e. by the study of the great deal of manorial accounts produced by estates administrations since the beginning of the 13th century. This paper aims to enlight this period from a geographically different point of view. The collection of roll accounts produced by the administration of the ancient county of Savoy makes it possible to reconstruct continuous prices and yield series from 1280 onwards, and for a detailed analysis of coping strategies adopted by rural communities. In this paper we focus on the region of the Bresse, in Eastern France. It is shown that the conjuncture follows the same patterns in the Bresse as in south England, with climate having the same over-arching impact, though less disastrous. We discuss also the process of increasing vulnerability induced by continuous climate stress on this communities, whose own coping strategies worsened their situations. In this perspective, we propose that exogeneous and indogeneous factors are closely intertwined to trigger the social crisis. Two examples make it particularly relevant. First, in order to cope with the culmination of prices in 1315-1317, a large part of the peasantry had to sell lands, goods or cattle in order to preserve their access to food market. Subsequently, an increasing impoverishment of the peasantry occured, reaching its climax in the 1320's. During this decade, accounting documentation provide numerous evidences that a non negligible part of the peasantry was not able anymore to cultivate their plots. Like in a vicious circle, this decline of the labor capacity that initially resulted from a coping strategy adopted to cope against climate stress, added its own effect in 1321 with climate stress on production to trigger an even more dramatic social crisis than after 1315. Secondly, the documentation suggests that the contraction of the grain market caused by the decrease of the production after 1315 appears to be non linear with the production decline. It means that stewards retrieved from the market bigger quantities of their stocks during period of low production (after 1315) than in period of benevolent harvests (before 1315). In other words, the more production declined, the more cautious the stewards were in selling their stocks. Comparable to a process of self-fulfilling prophecy, this strategy, by restricting the supply had a booster effect on the increase of prices in 1322 alongside the production decline induced by climate. Finally, if the commnities have been more or less able to cope with the catastrophic climate stress of 1315-1317, their ability to absorb a nevertheless weaker exogeneous shock on the harvest in 1321 was lower, due to coping strategies adopted few years earlier. The social consequences were then more dramatic after 1321 and during the entire 1320's.

The paper analyses some 250 texts concerning the “cri public”, the publication of royal and local ordinances in Paris between the XIVth and the XVIth centuries by the crier of the king (crieur juré du roi). The publications are written down in the Livres de Couleur (Archives nationales et Archives de la Préfecture de Police). Besides a short description of the publication process and the conditions of the production of the texts, the study focuses on the spatial aspects of the ritual. In fact, due to the nature of the documentation, texts concerning the criers' activities generally limit themselves to declare that the publication was done “sufficiently”, at “accustomed places” or “lieux accoutumés a faire cris” and specify very rarely where exactly this happened. For some French communities, we know the list of these “accustomed places”, but not for Paris, and generally, researchers suppose that the encompassing denomination covers a fixed set of places. However, other studies point to a probable spatial flexibility of the ritual.If most of the texts concerning publication in the Livres de Couleur mention only the generic denomination of “accustomed places”, 46 texts contain more specific elements too. These elements appear on the one hand in the part ordering where to publish, or, on the other hand, in accounts on publications made and signed by the criers probably not long after the deeds.These detailed descriptions of publications highlight different types of itineraries with a variable number of stops, identified by street, square or crossroad names, mention of churches, cemeteries or royal buildings. The main part of the paper examines these detailed descriptions, comparing the spatial arrangements of the individual publications with their respective topics. Some publications were thus made on very special places, as the ones concerning the cleaning of the place de Grève were uttered on spots in and near the square itself. Publications regulating the working of specialised craftsmen or tradesmen show a double spatiality: the itineraries seem to focus on the places of production and trade, and, besides, cover more general locations without direct links with the craft. And finally, several publications, concerning the security of the city or regulating economic activities occurring in many urban sites, like selling bread or keeping tavern, are executed in crossroads and squares disseminated in urban space. These general itineraries include different number of stops and are almost never identical but seem to contain a set of 6-7 frequently occurring places among other, rarely mentioned ones. These places can constitute the basis of a list of accustomed places with some common characteristics: they are important marketplaces, squares and crossroads (Halles, Petit Pont, Maubert square, Porte de Paris, Porte Baudoyer, crossroad Saint-Séverin, crossroad Croix du Tirouer), they are situated within the old urban walls built around 1200. But they only constitute the frequent but non obligatory elements of a big variety of itineraries, constructed apparently by the crier. Thus, the most common allusion to the spatial aspects of the ritual, “accustomed places” seems to ensure the validity of the publication and masks a plurality of journeys. However, even if not unchanging, the activity of the crier constituted a familiar event in urban life and contributed to an everyday presence of the royal power in the city.

In 1591, Aragon and the capital Saragossa are the scene of a revolt opposing the kingdom to its king in an attempt to uphold the constitutional laws after several decades of Aragonese law's being undermined. Under Philip II, repression resulted in a wave of trials fueled by a hunt, led by zealous agents, for compromising papers within rebel institutions and among dissidents. This judicialization of the conflict aimed at purging the kingdom of the most disruptive members and at normalizing the relations between the king and his kingdom. Sensitive writings could factually prove–enmity and treachery set aside–the involvement of someone and lead to his or her execution, seizure of property or damnatio memoriae. This sparked conflicts of archives with at stake the political, social and economic fate of individuals and whole families, thus deprived of their titles and their memory. How can the social fabric be restored when finally ceases the confrontation, when dissensus and cleavages that have appeared during the unrest cannot be brushed aside? How can everybody find his or her place again in a society that must be inclusive again? Here, by following individuals and groups who manipulate, preserve, exchange, hide or diffuse these sensitive writings to different ends, through a variety of means, of logics and of temporalities, I intend to grasp the reality of this episode through the history of these papers of disorder, their circulation and their uses and the tensions they epitomize. In doing so, it is a socio-political history of the revolt that I propose, starting from a contextualized history of written culture, centered on the short period of the exit from the armed conflict towards seeming, political normality.

The theme of the Counter-Reformation was among the most debated by European historiography in the second half of the 20th century. Historians have argued how the Roman Church managed to overcome the deep crisis of the early sixteenth century by proposing a new model of Christian, who must be orthodox, educated, purified and more attentive to the evangelical mission. The article aims to partially deconstruct this classical thesis, by discussing largely unpublished documentation from the Congregation of the Holy Office. The proposed case is that of the Inquisition of Malta, where there was one of the most important tribunals of this ecclesiastic institution. The analysis of the documents shows how the inquisitors, in agreement with the Inquisitorial Congregation, spent most of their time protecting their collaborators, who were very often criminals, not orthodox, offenders of the orthopraxy and contrary to morality. The Holy Office used its large staff to challenge the authority of civil and religious institutions, by guaranteeing to the employees extraordinary fiscal, judicial, military, political and spiritual privileges. Paradoxically, as the Maltese example testifies, the inquisitors often became an obstacle for the discipline proposed at the Council of Trent, by protecting their collaborators and their privileges.

This article deals with the elaboration of the Franco-Italian Labour Treaty, signed in Rome on 30 September 1919, namely the first agreement aimed at regulating both recruitment and placement issues and social rights issues. This essay is not aimed at focusing on the drafting and negotiation phase. On the contrary, its purpose is to analyse the birth of Labour Treaty idea, focusing on the public debate. Thus the article would like to think about the construction, during the First World War, of the French and Italian migration policy for the post-war period, taking into account both published and unpublished sources and underlining the Great War importance. The definition of a real migration policy, indeed, depended on the war time centrality gained by the States, regarding migration flows control and labour market management. As far as the two national contexts' goals are concerned, different priorities were at play. On the one hand, in Italy the need of valorizing the emigration was stressed. Thus the Labour Treaty had to guarantee Italian migrants' social rights (social insurance, assistance, wages, working conditions), in order to improve their status and avoid their naturalization. On the other hand, in France the manpower shortages and the demographic needs were stressed. Thus the Labour Treaty had to guarantee durable and official recruitment channels, in order to pursue reconstruction operations and increase productivity.

Still widely present in contemporary memories, the Mitterrand-Rocard conflict continues today to serve as a point of reference in the political debate and in the media commentary. Begun in the 1960s, this duel between these two personalities of socialism is based much more than on ideological distinctions, on political power struggles for the conquest of power, inside the PS, but also for the presidency. Receiving a massive echo in the media, in phase with a new treatment of politics and corresponding to a collective imagination, it ends up surpassing the actors themselves. Which earned him to survive his two actors.