Contenu du sommaire

On January 27, 1461, a trial opened at the criminal Parliament, which the king's prosecutor conducted ex officio. Jean d'Aigreville, a knight, had denounced the insults that Jean des Ulmes, a squire from Nivernais, would have pronounced against Joan of Arc, who was called a “ribald whore”, and against Charles VII, as well as other capital offences, in particular the use of private gaol and poison. The hatred between the two men could not have been politically motivated, for while they served the king in his wars, they were both sympathetic to the Duke of Burgundy and the Dauphin Louis. Jean des Ulmes was Perrinet Gressart's son-in-law, and much of his inheritance had been confiscated by the king; Jean d'Aigreville, captain of Montargis, was known to have been violent against Charles VII's officers when Louis XI acceded to the Throne. It is, in fact, a rivalry to obtain the Maison-Fort, a domain which depended on Saint-Vérain in Nivernais, that Jean des Ulmes has just acquired from Pierre III d'Amboise who claimed to be the main possessor. The documents of the civil trial which opposed the two men and preceded the criminal one could be found. They show that the conflict was about the custom which had to regulate the noble inheritances in this border country and which differentiated between that of the Donziais, in favor of male primogeniture, and that of the Ile de France which allowed women to inherit. Nonsuited by the Parliament, Jean d'Aigreville chose a radical path, that of denouncing his adversary for a serious crime, pertaining to lèse-majesté, in the hope of seeing the Maison-Fort confiscated and redistributed for his benefit. This small political trial reveals that now the nobles could nourish their revenge by knowing how to use the courts to achieve their ends. Nevertheless, Jean des Ulmes was not proscuted. He benefited from the death of Charles VII, on July 22, 1461, but also from the justice carried out in the Parliament, based on the inquiry, which took the time to question the witnesses. We will never know if Jean des Ulmes really uttered these insults against the Pucelle and the king, but they are considered likely thirty years after the Rouen punishment, a sign that opinion is far from unanimous in the kingdom, but also that the Pucelle has gained legitimacy to be defended by the royal justice.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in the Venetian lagoon, it was not easy to define what the popolo was. The term is ambiguous and if, as elsewhere in Italy, it designates a collective of inhabitants defined by economic fragility as much as a political concept, it also refers to many other social, political and legal realities. In the theoretical and political writings produced in Venice between the second half of the fifteenth century and the first third of the sixteenth century, we can find a multitude of uses and varied definitions, which this article attempts to inventory in order to unravel the polysemy of the term popolo. It thus appears how these imprecisions and indecisions reflect both the hesitations of the authors and the choices of the patricians who, by not defining precisely what the people is, end up depriving the inhabitants of a capacity for collective action and of the possibility of thinking about the collectives to which they belong.

In spite of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, a great many Huguenots continued to serve in the French army during the 18thcentury. They were often accepted, provided they avoided scandal. The army needed men and often cast a blind and pragmatic eye on their religious beliefs. It remained a refuge for Huguenots. In foreign regiments, a multisecular tradition of service to the French king ensured toleration for mercenaries hailing from across Europe. Capitulations guaranteed freedom of conscience and religion to foreign soldiers, even if these religious privileges were closely limited. From the 16thcentury onwards, protestant soldiers from Switzerland, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Scotland or Hungary served by the thousands in the royal troops. They were tolerated as long as their religious practices remained inconspicuous. Over the course of the 18th century, the French army invented an original form of religious coexistence. This military toleration, whilst limited, offered religious minorities a way to serve the royal state and, by doing so, to gain honor and rewards. The army remained a shielded microcosm within a broader French society where non-catholics were largely cast out. In doing so, the military offered up an opportunity for social inclusion. 

This article traces the story of the encounter of two young people in a Parisian suburb in 1950. The source is composed of a set of exceptional documents, and in particular a poem of about fifty pages which tells hour by hour this meeting and the first appointments, until the consent torn from the parents. The precision of the narrative allows us to address many themes concerning these young adults who belong to one of the last generations of couples who met before the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s: the importance of the ball and the dance in the process of seduction, of public benches and the cinema for the appointments that follow; the choice of spouse and the place of the parents in the consent to marriage; but also how one kisses, slowly gets closer, while promising to be with the other for life.

In 1954, a Soviet laboratory synthesized aminazin, the Soviet equivalent of Largactil, the commercial name of chlorpromazine. This article analyses the conditions for the production of aminazin and the multiple uses of neuroleptics: its prescription in hospitals in order to allow patients to return to society; the introduction of “supportive therapies” outside the hospital walls to limit recidivism; and the implementation of “forced care” to silence “protesters.” This recourse to neuroleptics certainly echoed the ideological orientations of the regime, between valuing the social utility of individuals and sanctioning political dissent. By making possible the advent of a new regime of control over the body, these drugs gave psychiatrists the possibility of playing a new political and social role, which they had long been claiming.

Though Guillaume Cuchet's essays show that religious practice strongly regressed in France around 1965, even before the 1968 crisis, the motives which prompted Catholics to ignore the Sunday precept remain to be elucidated. Without looking back at the frequently examined social, political and cultural motives which contribute to explaining the disaffection for the Mass in the long run, this article aims at establishing to what point the Sunday precept may have been weakened by certain orientations of Vatican II Council (1962-1965). Based on pontifical documents, Episcopal orders and the Catholic Church's internal sources of canonical, catechetical and pastoral nature (insufficiently explored in this context by historical research), the purpose of this contribution is to evaluate the collateral effects produced on the Sunday practice of the cult by problems which prevailed in French parishes and dioceses at the time of the Council. Seven sets of problems, very fashionable in the clerical speech of this period, are examined: the Church pastoral conversion, the dynamics of adaptation to the world, the call for freedom and diversity, the priority given to social relationship and charity, the simplification of the rites, the active participation of parishioners and the indulgence towards sinners and non-Catholics.A close examination of sources reveals that this decline in the practice of Catholicism cannot be attributed to a definite reform, event or text, but rather to a new atmosphere somewhat unsettling due to doctrinal and disciplinary inflections bearing on fundamental aspects of the Sunday precept. While seeking to enhance the participation of parishioners in the Sunday Mass, the Fathers of Vatican II display priorities which, paradoxically enough are not in favour of assiduity to the Cult. The insistence on pastoral care relegates to a secondary role the legal sequencing which regulates the baptized life. The desired adaptation to the world accredits the theory according to which all customs, laws and institutions are bound to evolve. The emphasis on the diversity of ways of expressing and living one's faith deemphasizes the importance of common ritual practices. The desire to reconcile with the world is an encouragement to place the virtues of social and charitable actions over the majesty of the Divine cult. The liturgical reforms modifying the Mass arouse disputes which divide parish assemblies. The active participation of parishioners in the ceremonies is a cause of uneasiness for Catholics whose links to the Church are already weak. The leniency of authorities toward non-practicing and non-Catholics leads one to believe that being present at Mass is not absolutely essential for salvation. These much-commented evolutions which started at different points of the Council process overshadow the more classical preoccupations of Vatican II, including the exhortation to sanctify the day of the Lord. Moreover, the official texts lead to profound reforms – liturgical changes, rewriting the catechism, the introduction of the Saturday night Mass – all of which impresses but obscures the permanent character of long-standing Church laws, including the Sunday precept. Finally, the implementation of these measures in a creative atmosphere tends to favour the advent of a more liberal Catholicism freed from landmarks of the religion of yesteryear.