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This article presents a detailed analysis of two legal and political imbroglios created by the dynastic crisis of 1383-1385 in Portugal and touching on the relations between the latter and the Republic of Genoa. Both cases raised the problem of determining the extent to which a king could be constrained by the obligations that bound their predecessors : specifically, whether or not the privileges and properties granted by the previous kings of Portugal to the first admiral of the kingdom, the Genoese Manuel Pessanha, and his successors, by reason of the office of admiral, were binding on the newly installed King John I (r. 1385-1433) ; and whether or not the latter was legally obligated to pay damages to two Genoese merchants, Lucianus and Obertus Spinola, for the seizure of one of their ships, by order of John I's predecessor, Ferdinand I (r. 1367-1383). These questions prompted the writing of three legal consultations, two of which by the famous Perugian jurist Baldus de Ubaldis (m. 1400) – and relatively familiar to historians of late medieval political thought – and a third one, unpublished and largely unknown, by the college of civil law professors of the University of Bologna. This article proposes a novel reading of these three consultations, based on a thorough reconstruction of the events to which they refer, pieced together from documentary materials and contemporary chronicles. This exercise allows one to capture precisely the intimate connexion between the ideas developed in the three consultations – which explore, on the whole, the theoretical foundations and the practical and juristic implications of the public action of the king, that is to say, those acts of the king that were carried out in the name of his royal dignitas, as a public person – and the socio-political circumstances of late fourteenth-century Portugal. Contrary to previous scholarship, which has reduced the ideas that Baldus develops in his two consultations to a purely theoretical, and arguably universal, essence, this article contends that they were, like the arguments laid out by the Bolognese civilians, not only deeply and directly informed by their Portuguese context – and largely unintelligible if disconnected from it – but also a likely influence on the conduct of King John I with respect to Genoa and, more broadly, to the stabilisation of the political society of the kingdom, after the upheaval caused by more than a decade of intermittent warfare culminating in a dynastic break. Put another way, rather than being perceived exclusively as juristic writings articulating a learned political analysis, the three consultations under examination here should be interpreted as so many constituent parts of a political reality that they helped to shape and to understand. This article also ventures the hypothesis that the two consultations by Baldus are evidence of a subtle evolution of his thinking on the problem of accommodating the juristic recognition of constraints on the exercice of monarchical power – namely, the obligation to honour a contract or to accede to a demand for financial compensation – and the political reality of a pure power unfettered by those constraints. In his consultations, Baldus outlines a framework for the exercise of monarchical power that places the locus of those constraints not on the person of the king but on the apparatus of government, which becomes tangible in Baldus's reasoning by the description of the fisc as a function of government and the institutional expression of the res publica and by the formulation of the interrelationship between the latter and the public essence of royal authority.

The Papier Rouge register contains more than 400 criminal sentences pronounced in the 14th and 15th centuries by the urban power of Dijon, which has high justice rights over the urban territory and its close suburbs under the franchise charter granted to the inhabitants by Duke Hugues III in 1183. Well-known to historians for its information on the criminality repressed in the city and the diversity of the social qualities of the convicts, it must also be placed in the context of the production of the writing in the city in the late Middle Ages, and especially the political context of Dijon. If the creation of the Papier Rouge was part of the administrative boom that characterized the commune at the beginning of the 15th century, a close analysis of the events surrounding it shows that its creation served a judicial but also a political purpose. The crossing of the sources, between this register and those of the deliberations, or the registers of the causes of the town hall and those of the public prosecutors, makes it possible to better follow the progress of the urban administration as for the methods of its drafting and its internal organization, while also taking into account the evolution of the tasks which fall to the scribe of the city which ensures its writing. The investigations and trials of the urban justice system still emphasize that the Papier Rouge constitutes a tool for social control over the inhabitants, because the fact of being inscribed on it can reduce the individual's fama to nothing. Finally, an examination of the jurisdictional trials between the town hall and the Duke of Burgundy, then the King of France, explains the multiple marginal annotations in the register as much as the drawings of hanged men. The analysis of the life of the Papier Rouge and its uses thus makes it possible to underline its multiple roles on the judicial, administrative, social and political levels.

In the 18th century, France was the main trading partner of the Ottoman Empire. To compensate for the import of Levantine goods, the (French) kingdom developed a production intended for export: the broadcloths of Languedoc. In the 1870s, this market collapsed after several decades of struggles. To whom and to what can should the responsibilities be attributed: to the manufacturers who were not very eager to maintain quality production, to the merchants of Marseille who traded them but preferred to speculate on currencies, to the difficulties of the Ottoman Empire (weakened by wars, internal anarchy, epidemics), to France's loss of diplomatic influence, to the competition from other European woolens productions? The article addresses these questions using a global approach, by integrating the economic and technical aspects of manufacturing and trade. Going beyond the normative approach through a detailed study of the different concrete stages of manufacture, and by adding a comparative study of the production costs and the actual selling prices, the article demonstrates how the woolens produced in the German and Austrian states, as well as in the English worsteds, have become formidable commercial competitors of the French broadcloths on the main markets of the Levant. Gradually replacing them, they represented the main cause of the ruin of French manufacture and trade in the Levant.

In this article, I propose to shed new light on what is called a “territory” in the 18th century Holy Roman Empire by confronting his reality to the characteristics of the Personal Unions. Analysing the political construction of these unions which acquired a huge importance during the 18th century leads us to rethink the territory, and even more the phenomenon of “territorialisation” often described in the historiography. Yet, this fact is of huge consequence for the European diplomatic history. This can be proved thanks to the analyse of a border conflict in 1729 between two villages under the authority of the British King and Duke of Brunswick-Luneburg of the one hand side, and of the Prince-Elector of Cologne on the other hand side. The complexity of both territorial sets has as a consequence the imbrication of local, territorial, imperial and European stakes, which leads us to adress the strict opposition between “foreign” and “home” affairs during the 18th century.

The Franco-Romanian Symposium on History held in Bucharest from 6 to 11 October 1969 is a landmark event in the Romanian historiography of the communism period, thanks to the presence of several prestigious names of the Annales School. Based on the private archives of the main organizers – Alphonse Dupront, for France, Andrei Otetea, for Romania – this essay proposes an analysis of this aspect of the history of historiography.The old relationships between the two historians, their great influence on the scientific community of their countries and their direct involvement in organizing this project assured the success of this event. The importance of this French-Romanian meeting goes beyond the historiographical field. The Symposium was an opportunity for the Romanian researchers to assert themselves in the international scientific life, especially in France, since there was a thaw in relations between the two blocs. Their aspiration was all the more ardent for them because it was met with a certain mismatch with their colleagues of the other Eastern countries, in particular Hungary: the latter were much more active in the dialogue with western historians and more able to promote their interpretations of their controversial national past.The situation seems all the more paradoxical since Romania made a major shift on the international political scene, closing contacts with Western bloc. Two events have profoundly marked this rapprochement: De Gaulle's visit to Romania in 1968 and Nicolae Ceaușescu's visit to France in 1970. The symposium of French and Romanian historians is part of this process: this is its consequence and at the same time it contributes to its development. It remains the most prestigious expression of the Franco-Romanian historiographical exchanges. Unfortunately it did not have the expected results in the longer term, because of the new course of the Romanian history dominated more and more by ideological imperatives.

To study the experience of the road during the Middle Ages should allow us to understand not only where the roads were but also who were on these roads and why. Literary sources highlight how much the experience of space depended on the roads : the steps on the highways were famous and fixed in long-term memory in the form of road legends. This popular knowledge influenced the representations of royal elites, who chose for political reasons to focus on major axes to the detriment of landlocked areas, as in Auvergne. Were the people affected by such a hierarchy ? We can show that the people did not always circulate where we would expect and that the people did circulate where we did not expect. During the Hundred Years War, the Norman rebels and those who were fleeing Ile-de-France traveled away from the main roads so as not to be seen. Moreover, some infrastructure was built for the sole use of elites. In Forez, the villagers did not use the bridges but preferred to cross the Loire wading. Finally, the example of the Jura mountains proves that popular trafic was not tightly controlled : in some cases, the different social classes did not take the same roads.

If in republican Rome the triumph was the rite of war exit, the latter is here considered as a long-term process. It was indeed from the preparation of the war that the generals considered it and the consequences of the war could have an impact on their career for many years after its completion. However, the question here concerns the significance of victory in the career and in the mindset of exceptional politicians. Two examples are detailed: Scipio the African and Marius.

This article examines policies led by Charles VII in cities that were reconquered at the end of the civil war, and the alliance built with ruling elites, long described as a mutual recognition between the king and his subjects. The ideological milestones of this policy, constituted by the “letters of forgiveness”, have already been studied multiple times, but the practical modes, beyond the discourse, in which this reassertion of authority operated, remain on many levels unclear. In Troyes, the city council is maintained almost as it was, allowing ruling elites to keep their seat, but is dominated by a few faithful and trusted individuals, selected in July 1429, and remains tightly controlled by royal officers whose identity has been partly renewed. It is indeed necessary to repress oppositions more fierce than historiography has hitherto presented them, leading to ruin and death for those who continue to support the king's enemies. The aim is also to encourage the loyalty of families at the head of the township, by granting privileges to certain trades, at least temporarily: merchants and drapiers obtain a prominent position in the socio-economic equilibriums of the xvth century. Their interest will henceforth be to promote this alliance as “natural” in order to hold their place over the following decades.

The concept of war exit was hardly used in connection with the wars of the Empire. However, it is particularly operational for the years after 1815, as France and Europe have been permanently marked by the effects of 15 years of conflict, and even 25 if we add the time of the Revolution wars. By looking at the world of elites, large and small, we can see how physical and mental trauma prevented the war from ending overnight. Socially, the change of regime raises the question of the preservation of rank and fortune in an elite world already profoundly modified by the Empire itself. Finally, the return to peace accompanied by a change of regime raises for these elites the question of the political identities displayed, assumed or concealed.