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Since the records of the late medieval Apostolic Penitentiary have been made available to a select group of scholars in 1983, a considerable amount of work on the subject has been published, including repertories with original documentation from Norway, Poland, and the Empire. France, on the other hand, has not been the focus of major studies. Following a section devoted to bibliography, the present article provides a brief introduction to the functioning of the papal office from its origins in the 1200s to the abandonment of its medieval format by way of reform in 1569. The final two parts discuss concrete case material in connection with violence, surveying absolutions from sin, dispensations from sacramental impediments, and more extensively, the so-called declaratory letters, the contents of which invite further comparison with contemporary royal Letters of pardon from England and the French Lettres de rémission.

This paper offers a reading of the introduction in the French royal law of the imprisonment for debt in 1303. Can this king's new ability to seize individuals' bodies for financial and private grounds, that contributed to the definition of a public socioeconomic order, be explained by the will to prevent interpersonal assaults carried by private credit ? The article deals first with the relations between private debt and uses of force at the end of the Middle Ages, thanks to Paris judicial archives. On a background made of assaults committed by rebellious debtors and by impatient creditors, it shows that imprisonment for debt was codified by royal courts as a public, consented and euphemistic use of force.

The election of a new incumbent to the chair of forensic medicine at the Faculty of medicine in Paris in 1879 reflects a particular dimension of the history of medicine, i.e. the relation between doctors within the context of cursus honorum. It illuminates the actors, the networks and the stakes in the academic world. Three main characters emerge from the analysis of the opposing parties : the incumbent to the chair, Tardieu, a prestigious Professor, and the two candidates, Brouardel and Bergeron, the latter being supported by Tardieu. The election of a junior lecturer in forensic medicine in 1877 marks the first stage. However, the winner is Brouardel. Tardieu's illness undoubtedly plays an important role. His death provokes the 1879 election. Brouardel's victory in 1879 confirms the evolution of the balance of power, but also the importance of scientific stakes. Only Brouardel has a project. His victory is an intellectual on, confirmed by posterity. All these hypotheses can only attenuate the opacity of a decision process. The academic election makes for a genuine biopsy into the medical world and deserves a detailed historical analysis.

It is often asked how the various historical avant-gardes were able to persist in their avant-gardism and gain recognition, when support from the art market was denied them out of hand. From the Realism of the 1850s to the virulent varieties of avant-gardism in the 1910s, artistic innovation was made possible by avant-garde painting's physical as well as symbolic detour abroad. This detour allowed artists to remain avant-garde within the Parisian field while at the same time exporting a more saleable kind of painting. On the symbolic level, especially, it was a basis for the legitimacy of avant-garde claims about the internationalization of their careers, stirring European elites' national guilty consciences. This internationalization was rendered possible by the large range of cultural divisions among various countries. One could therefore work to adapt avant-garde exhibitions abroad. From the Realist period onward, the artists themselves, then increasingly their dealer friends, critics, and collectors, took charge of this vast movement of cultural transfer, but at the risk of making many compromises.