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According to the records of the Hanse diets (the Rezesse ) in the 14th and 15th centuries, these meetings were supposed to be opened only to the consuls of the Hanse cities – i.e. to members of the city council of their home town. The secretaries (Stadtschreiber ) were explicitly excluded, although they used to be highly engaged in their town's diplomacy. However, a closer look at the sources reveals that these officers played in fact an important role behind the scenes, and that at certain moments they even had the possibility to plead publicly. This article examines the secretaries' agency and seeks to show that they could perform multiple and various tasks during the diets: information, message transmission, advice, as well as informal conflict management. Some notaries also played an important role in the drafting and archiving of the Rezesse . Their agency seems to have depended both on personal qualities and on the involvement of their hometown in the Hanse.

By the end of 1944, the French government headed by General Charles de Gaulle engaged a large program of rearmament. Among the ten divisions whose creation was planned, one was entrusted to the 1st French Army. The constitution of this division was part of the amalgamation of the French Forces of the Interior (FFI) within the African forces of General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny. The latter made it a personal purpose and gave it the name of the division he had commanded in 1940: the 14th Infantry Division (14th ID).


Depending on the needs, The FFI groups were considered sometimes as a pool of men to complete the depleted regular regiments, sometimes as independent auxiliary units. The first orientation resulted in October 1944 by substituting FFI to African fighters in colonial regiments. The second orientation generated a succession of combinations until the establishment of the FFI-manned 14th ID in February 1945.


References are lacking about the 14th ID. How can it be explained? Formed tardily, this division did not take part in any of the major battles of the 1st Army. Moreover, the subsequent career of its commander, General Raoul Salan, future putschist in Algiers in 1961, possibly cast a shadow over the 14th ID. Finally, studying the 14th DI leads to the observation of a flagrant discrepancy with the initial ambitions. Among the new divisions raised in France in 1944-1945, the 14th DI was part of the worst off, due to lack of access to modern Allied equipment: the 14th DI was an indicator of the precariousness of the resurgent French army. This paper proposed to explore this discrepancy, by considering the position of General de Lattre about FFI-manned units and the hard Franco-American negotiations relating to the French rearmament program.

Despite the lack of sources, this article aims to study the electoral practices of the petitores in through their bodies. From the Scipio Nasica's repulsa , we will then examine the body standards of aristocrats expected from the populus . Often downplayed, these appear to be more rigid than previously thought, as our data on the professio indicates. More broadly, we propose to study the strategies of staging bodies that are intended to convince, legitimise a candidacy or, quite simply, to proceed more easily to the traditional practices of the campaign (appellatio  ; prensio  ; supplicatio ). Without forgetting the leges de ambitu , we will also discuss the disruption of aristocratic competition, which is reflected on the bodies.

In the De Legibus , Cicero presents his vision of the republican censors and their duties. In particular, he specifies that they should regulate the morals of the people and not allow any scandal in the senate, evoking here the control of behavioral norms within the ciuitas . The traditional representation makes the censors as the incarnation, but especially the protectors of the ethos of the ideal Roman within the ciuitas , resting on a strict observation of the mos maiorum . This image is mainly based on sources dating from the imperial period, since few sources from the republican period, evoking the censors and their activities, have come down to us. The aim of this paper is therefore to try to explain the nature of the link between the censors and the construction of a republican ethos , notably through the respect of the mos maiorum . We will first study the strong moments of this construction. The censorship of 184 appears to be a crucial step in this process, making the censor the guardian and the incarnation of the republican ethos . However, the censorship of Cato is, paradoxically, in rupture with the mos maiorum , abandoning certain standards of behavior and traditional social representations of its time. This process is also found in the Augustan policy of (re)moralization of Roman society, putting forward a new ideal of senatorial ethos this time. We will then discuss two problems raised by these two moments: the question of the real capacity of action of the censors in this process of construction of this image and the reception of their actions; this leads to the particularity of the sources, mostly imperial, in this late social and political construction, managing to hide the fact that the construction of this ethos is sometimes built in rupture with the mos maiorum , however supposed to be the heart.

For a long time scholars have identified and studied the feudal revolution and the origins of the Italian city communes as two major phenomena of the central Middle Ages. But historians have seldom tried to compare them, even less understand them as two manifestations of a larger process. The point of this paper is to show how both are underpinned by the same logic: the breakdown of wider power structures and their simultaneous replacement by a set of increasingly formalized, locally-based, structures which were until then more informal. With that aim, it synthesizes the profuse literature of the feudal revolution and then analyses some Italian examples, which are the main focus of the paper. It suggests a new way of understanding the origins of the communes, as the result of a dialectic between formal and informal structures. In conclusion, the paper looks at the whole dynamics of social and political change in the central Middle Ages, through a discussion of Bourdieu's habitus theory.

More than 125 years after the Court of Cassation completed the work of rehabilitating Alfred Dreyfus by pronouncing the judgment of 12 July 1906, the judicial file on the case of the captain accused of high treason still raises new questions. The questions examined in this article concern the origin and the future of these archival documents, preserved in the Archives nationales, as part of the BB/19 subseries of the Ministry of Justice. The nonconformity which has characterized the archiving of these documents since they were first transferred has obscured the associated finding aids. As a result, the latter are of little service to historians, who are hardly able to unravel the classification logic and procedures used in creating the various subsets of this "fonds". Moreover, the judicial file brings together documents related to several cases, both criminal and civil, involving, among others, military courts. By analyzing the mechanics of the formation of this historical documentation, the article discusses the unusual material conditions which have marked the history of this corpus, from the ruling of the Court of Cassation to the present day. lmmersing oneself in the archival material of the "Dreyfus archives" implies grasping the organization and functioning of the highest French court, which underwent profound changes at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In addition, anyone wishing to study this documentation from an archival point of view will inevitably confront the lack of transparency surrounding it, starting with the "secret file", one of the components of the judicial file which was separated from the rest of the documents in 1906 and is now kept at the Service Historique de la Défense in Vincennes. The atypical materiality of these archival documents will also be discussed, further complicating any attempt at reclassification as it is very difficult to link the hundreds of iconographic documents from the various graphological assessments presented by Alphonse Bertillon to the rest of the written documentation. The recommendations presented here aim to remedy these difficulties in part by presenting the foundations of a new finding aid centred on the relationships between the services which produce these archival documents and the various judicial cases associated with them. ln light of the projects for the conservation and restoration of these documents implemented over the last two decades, several recommendations in continuity with those formulated by Vincent Duclert in the late 1990s will enable future research actors to apprehend the singularity of these archival documents before adopting any historical approach.