Contenu du sommaire

In the Val de Loire at the end of the eleventh century, legal monastic accounts were carefully elaborated texts. Their scribe excelled in manipulating information. They made rhetorical choices, defined true discursive strategies to produce their ideal version of settlements of conflicts. Towards 1070, for some of these scholars, the purpose of a plea is to establish the truth and assert their rights at the end of a strict procedure. For others, twenty years later, it is to make peace and allow forgiveness during a ritual of reconciliation. That is the reason why, toward 1090, judicial narratives were deliberately rewritten, according to the new political, religious and intellectual context that was characterized by the affirmation of innovative ideas and an ideology of peace. These strongly ideological texts suggest a reconstituted history of the judicial practices and, therefore, of religious communities as well.

Based on the Venetian chronicle Diarii written between 1496 and 1533 by Marin Sanudo, this research work aims at seizing the importance of the symbolic figure of the monster in those crucial decades when the Middle Age was fading away and the Modern Age was beginning. On the one hand, the many testimonies supplied by the chronicler allow us to look at the paroxysmal figure of the monster from the point of view of its typological descriptions, but on the other hand the chronicler also reveals the many particularities which are peculiarly associated with this monstrous figure. These particularities tend to represent the monster as an entirely different natural entity. Put into an historical context particularly sensitive and receptive towards eschatological signs and towards distressing expressions of religious ardour, the figure of the monster stimulate our desire of comprehension and of knowledge. The monster hits the sensibility of the believers and the unanswered fearful questions elicited by its enduring presence seem to obsess the collective imaginary. Differently from the strange but marvellous Oriental creatures that strongly fascinated the West, the monster depicted in Marin Sanudo's Diarii looks in the excess or absence of its physical limbs more a deformed human being than an unnatural creature. Nevertheless, the monster is sign and symbol of a different language, perceived by the believers with mixed feelings of curiosity and repulsion. Certainly, it is a sign that needs interpreting within the boundaries of the divine scheme. From this point of view, the monster is the visible and warning metaphor of God's anger at men, a God ready to punish a sinful humanity. But the monster also becomes a political tool in the hand of the authorities, it becomes an effective tool of propaganda. With its polyphony of significations, of functions and of shapes, the monster reveals itself and needs to be revealed, because in spite of its difference and variety its appearance and presence is always carrier of meaning.

Created in the reign of François I. and definitely established in 1597, French royal notaries in Montluçon never formed a structured professional corporation, despite of their high number (8 to 15 officers). According to office trade, the institution suffered a long slump during the first part of the 18th Century, whereas it describes an unexpected rise from 1760's till the French Revolution. Commonly the notaries in Montluçon dealt also with several offices of the law, in spite of the growing level of their professional knowledge in the Enlightenment. Because of the mediating position of this small city between town and country, three types of offices may be distinguished : « urban office », « suburban office » and « secondary practice ». Geographical origins and social position of the notaries in the town explain that they took a great contribution in the regeneration of the traditional elite, living in such a small bureaucratic and economic capital of Central France.

During the inter-war period, the French firms carried out massive investments in the Danube Basin, which assured the French economy and the French diplomacy key positions. These investments proceeded from the conjunction of the means of big investment banks and big industrial enterprises within mixed investment companies of a new kind (outline of financial capital). The fact that these positions grew weaker is not due to the intrisinc lack of ressources, as often suggested, but to the difficulties of banks and industrial firms to cooperate : in some cases, the bank interrupted its collaboration, with the effect of bringing about grave financial troubles to the controlled asset (case of Skoda ; in other cases, the bank imposed its targets, which were of financial or speculative nature, so that it provoked the extinction of the controlled asset (case of Steava romana). This inability to collaborate, ending in the dissolution of the financial capital, is explained by the traditional estrangement of the big banks and of the big industrial firms in France.