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Présentation

In search of agreement: historiography and principles of a conflict resolution research project

Anne Bonzon et Diane Roussel
Traduction de Nadine Wilstead
Cet article est une traduction de :
À la recherche de l'accord : historiographie et principes d'une enquête sur la résolution des conflits [fr]

Notes de l’auteur

This work brings together several contributions presented and debated during a workshop in Liège (18-19 May, 2018) and one in Louvain-la-Neuve (30 Sept-1 Oct, 2021) – Covid-19 having upset the original schedule planned for the period between the two. They were directed by Diane Roussel (Université Gustave Eiffel), Xavier Rousseaux (Université Catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve) and Anne Bonzon (Université Paris 8).

We would especially like to thank Annick Delfosse (Université de Liège), Aurore Drécourt, Quentin Verreycken and the team at the Centre d’Histoire du Droit et de la Justice of Louvain-la-Neuve’s Université Catholique for their welcome; Marie-Ange Paquita and Ouarda Yahiaoui for organising the workshops, which were financed by the Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique de Belgique and our respective research teams: the Centre d’Histoire du Droit et de la Justice, the Transitions research unit, the Analyse Comparée des Pouvoirs team and the Centre d’histoire des sociétés Médiévales et Modernes (MéMo), Universities Paris 8 and Gustave Eiffel. Finally, our thanks to Criminocorpus for their vital editing work on the articles in this work and on the virtual exhibition.

Texte intégral

1In the animated confusion of the village fete depicted in this Bruegel painting, gestures of peace and reconciliation jostle side-by-side with signs of conflict: in the foreground, a few centimetres from the knife hanging from the musician’s belt, two children are shaking hands; at the table, rowdy, drunken men tap each other in the hand as they share wine; behind them, lovers kiss. These rituals of exchange and sharing designed to seal an agreement remind us that, contrary to more sombre and caricatural representations, past societies were not marked solely by violence: gestures and words of peace also forged strong community bonds.

  • 1 “Finally, we should like to know about everyday rituals of making up” notes Stuart Carroll, “Peace- (...)

2If violence was part of everyday life for past societies, reconciliation was also just as routine a practice. However, the history of how settlements were reached after a dispute remains poorly known, so it would be fruitful to know more about which rituals of reconciliation were practiced1. If historians do agree on the omnipresence of, and the social evidence for, conflict resolution practices ahead or on the margins of official judicial proceedings, these are nevertheless treated as peripheral, sometimes only merely alluded to, in history of justice studies. This blind spot in our knowledge derives from the difficulty involved in finding information on what were often oral, ephemeral practices, rarely captured in the archival web, or so embedded in habit that they were only mentioned accidentally and cursorily. Agreement naturally leaves fewer documentary traces than conflict. Yet, far from being of minor interest, the subject seems essential to understanding Ancien Régime societies and their relationship to justice.

3This paper is the fruit of two days of workshops held in Liège in 2018 and at Louvain-la-Neuve in September 2021, bringing together researchers from a variety of historiographical traditions and disciplines (history and legal history, both medieval and modern periods) to reflect together on this central but elusive theme of settlement. During these workshops, which focused on sources and methods, we wanted first to return to the description of the practices and the words employed in settlements, and then go on to question preconceived categories and broaden our inquiry in new directions. After a quick historiographic overview, we will lay out in this introduction the research project’s guiding principles and its main findings.

Historiography of the border theme: from “infrajustice” to “forum shopping”

4Originally, the “Settlement” project, born of the two specialisms that are judicial and legal history, maintained the primacy of the judicial approach to sources and phenomena. Studies in the 1990s-2000s, however, could no longer ignore the fact that an indeterminate proportion of conflict resolution simply took place outside the legal system. In the past as today, the institutions of the police and the courts did not have an exhaustive knowledge of all litigation and crimes, a proportion of which inevitably escaped their notice (the ‘dark figure’ of crime that goes unreported to, or unrecorded by, the police.) In addition to this, the fact that in modern and medieval ordinary and low-level jurisdictions most trials remained unfinished led historians to formulate the hypothesis that court cases “evaporating” in this way could be explained by deals struck behind the judges’ backs. Despite this prevalence, out-of-court settlement was long considered in history studies as secondary to justice, a collateral effect which at best rivalled the court system, at worst was a parasite impeding the smooth workings of official justice. We therefore wanted to go beyond the single-track approach and take this way of settling disputes seriously.

Infra/extra/parajustice: pioneering terrain, first concepts

  • 2 Éric Wenzel, “La paix par la justice. Les modes alternatifs de règlement des conflits au coeur de l (...)
  • 3 Tomás A. Mantecón, “El peso de la infrajudicialidad en el control del crimen durante la Edad Modern (...)

5The question is not an entirely new one: “infrajudicial”, “extrajudicial” “negotiated justice”, “private justice” and “informal justice” – there is no shortage of more or less complimentary terms to refer to the vast continent of conflict resolution practices that took place on the sidelines of the official workings of the justice system. To use another image proposed by Éric Wenzel, it was the submerged part of the socio-judicial iceberg, where the harshness of royal penal justice was in fact merely the tip above the water line2. “Border themes”, as Tomás A. Mantecón3 puts it, are now an issue that occupies a growing place in European history of justice studies, depending on the various national traditions, each one founded on the diverse paths to state building and judicial centralisation taken by their respective countries.

  • 4 Yves Castan, Honnêteté et relations sociales en Languedoc (1715-1780), Paris, Plon, 1974 ; Nicole a (...)
  • 5 Alfred Soman, “L’infra‑justice à Paris d’après les archives notariales”, Histoire, économie et soci (...)
  • 6 Benoît Garnot (dir.), L’infrajudiciaire du Moyen Âge à l’époque contemporaine, Dijon, EUD, 1996.
  • 7 Id., “Justice, infrajustice, parajustice et extrajustice dans la France moderne”, Crime, Histoire e (...)
  • 8 Tomás A. Mantecón, “El peso de la infrajudicialidad... “, art. cit., p. 43-76.

6In France, the concept of “infrajustice”, already mooted at the end of the 1970s by Nicole and Yves Castan in their pioneering work on Languedoc, served to denote the compromises and other reparatory interventions which people preferred to invoking legal help4. Alfred Soman saw in this new category of analysis the instrument of a veritable “Copernican revolution” in justice studies5. In 1995, the Dijon Symposium on Infrajustice from the Middle Ages to the Present Day offered a first overview of what was known at the time and an opportunity to test the hypothesis collectively6. Benoît Garnot then proposed a more refined categorisation, making a distinction between whether a practice was an alternative to formal justice, or merely complementary to it; and sorting between the different levels of formality involved: thus were ushered in the terms infrajustice, parajustice and extrajustice7. Despite its fluidity, the concept undoubtedly provided a heuristic tool that allowed for a renewed social history of justice and crime which was more attentive to the common practices of the people and their role in the evolution of violence over the centuries8.

Justice instrumentalised? Social agents and social uses of justice

  • 9 Mario Sbriccoli, “Giustizia negoziata, giustizia egemonica. Riflessioni su una nuova fase degli stu (...)
  • 10 John Bossy (ed.), Disputes and Settlements: Law and Human Relations in the West, Cambridge, 1983.
  • 11 See in particular: James A. Sharpe, “The People and the Law”, in Barry Reay (éd.), Popular Culture (...)
  • 12 James A. Sharpe, “‘Such Disagreement Betwyx Neighbours’: Litigation and Human Relations in Early Mo (...)
  • 13 This is Martin Ingram’s expression, in “Law, litigants and the construction of ‘honour’: slander su (...)

7However, at the beginning of the 2000s, Italian legal historian Mario Sbriccoli invited scholars to eschew the perspective of the infrajudicial, which he considered an anachronism given the length of time taken for European state formation, preferring instead to study the dialectic between the “negotiated justice” of community pacification measures and the “hegemonic justice” of the state9. In England’s case, 1983 saw the publication of Disputes and Settlements, a collective work directed by John Bossy. It was a testimony to the new, crucial role of legal anthropology in justice and criminality studies10. Exploiting local court archives, especially from the ecclesiastic courts of urban consistories, historians began to look more specifically at social usage, using bottom-up approaches wherever possible. This was all part of an attempt to look at “history from below”, paying due attention to the agency of the actors involved and to how power relations were negotiated11. Using 17th century defamation cases in the city of York, James A. Sharpe noted that: “Judicial proceedings might sometimes be initiated, not as a means of furthering a dispute, but as a first step towards a settlement” out of court12. This hypothesis, played out in numerous other European scenarios, is now the consensus view, and streetwise strategies are now included in justice studies13.

  • 14 François Billacois, “Clio chez Thémis”, in François Billacois and Hugues Neveux (dir.), “Porter pla (...)
  • 15 For an outstanding example of this method, see Hervé Piant, Une justice ordinaire. Justice civile e (...)
  • 16 Anthony Musson, “Arbitration and the legal profession in late medieval England”, in Matthew Dyson a (...)

8Ancien Régime men and women are no longer considered to have been poor souls, ignorant and afraid, victims of a repressive, vertical, implacable and incomprehensible justice. On the contrary, those involved actively moulded the law and the system of justice, which they saw as one set of resources amongst others. They mobilised them as it served their purposes and were masters of their inner workings and codes – perhaps not “playing them like an instrument”14, but certainly navigating them with relative autonomy. By diving into the vast depths of the archives of lower jurisdictions – be they royal, municipal or seigneurial – historians can observe daily interactions between a society and its legal institutions under the magnifying lens15. “The vitality of out-of-court mechanisms and their acceptance by all social classes trumpets not only their popularity and inclusivity, but equally the adaptive nature of the law and the flexibility of the legal system”, notes Anthony Musson16.

  • 17 Martin Dinges, “The Uses of Justice As a Form of Social Control in Early Modern Europe”, in Herman (...)
  • 18 Aries Van Meeteren and Griet Vermeesch, “In hope of agreement: Norm and practice in the use of inst (...)
  • 19 Herman Roodenburg and Pieter Spierenburg (ed.), Social Control in Europe (1500-1800), op. cit.

9Recently, the debate has been enriched by the concept of “Justiznuntzung”, or uses of justice, proposed by the German historian Martin Dinges to describe how 18th-century Parisian litigants used the different options they had recourse to and instrumentalised them to negotiate an out-of-court settlement17. In places such as Leiden at the end of the 17th century, where conflict-resolution bodies were particularly numerous, the parties involved were so adept at passing from one to the other that Aries van Meeteren and Griet Vermeesch coined the term “forum shopping” to describe the strategic, even consumerist, uses of the myriad options available to residents18. With this, the courts were no more than one institution of social control amongst others. The Church and the clergy, the local community, the guilds and confraternities, the family and the neighbourhood all contributed to this control, either formally or informally19. If we conceive of the phenomenon in this way, then we have before us a wide field of enquiry into the roles of non-judicial actors in Ancien Régime society.

10This enquiry into the ways of brokering settlements and resolving conflict in both the Middle Ages and the modern period is therefore part of a deeper exploration of these profoundly revised perspectives, which broaden the scope of possible approaches, invite cross-historical study and open wide the full range of social control mechanisms employed.

For a collective, international and “full” enquiry into social control in legal matters

11Research into this area is far from complete. Who was seeing an agreement, and under which conditions? What types of dispute were resolvable in this way? Who were the actors involved and what were the mechanisms used? How did the various forms of settlement coordinate with any judicial procedures involved? Had these types of settlement not become, by the end of the Ancien Régime, simply a practice relegated to the realms of the archaic by the triumph of the state-run legal system, as has often been concluded? Not only must more evidence be gathered, but a comparative approach must be used in the research, looking across Europe and over a long period of time. To tackle this study, efforts must be pooled and researchers will have to move beyond their habitual confines and sources to include a much wider array of data.

Varieties of judicial system and international comparisons

12Contrary to the essentially “institutionalist” and theoretical approaches, the methodology here consists in taking into consideration – and taking seriously – all the forms of agreement practiced, in a holistic approach to the social control of disputes, without setting a priori boundaries on the phenomenon nor presupposing the existence of a hierarchy of the various procedures employed, which were often intermingled and which interacted with each other within the legal pluralism of the Ancien Régime. For, as useful as they may be, terms such as infra-, extra- and parajustice belong to French history and remain profoundly attached to the idea of a hierarchical relationship with the legal system, considered as central and superior to any others, when for so long it was but one port of call after or amongst many others. Moving away from the French case makes it possible to shed the weight of a historiography which has long been centred on describing the inexorable development of royal, absolute justice and the verticality of power, relegating other forms of conflict resolution to mechanisms all-to-hastily classified as “archaic”.

  • 20 Donald Dyson, “Legal Pluralism, Hybridization and the Uses of Everyday Criminal Law in Quebec, 1760 (...)
  • 21 Dominique Guillemet, “Proximité de la justice et justice de proximité dans les îles du Ponant aux X (...)

13The international dimension therefore imposed itself as crucial in expanding the researcher’s viewing angles and allowing comparisons to be made. This paper contains studies of contextualised cases, from various European sites from the end of the Middle Ages to the end of the modern period, which allow for a detailed study of the various legal systems in their own political and social contexts. Initially, it was a collaboration between French researchers and the Belgian team from the Centre d’Histoire du Droit that established the structure of mirroring the situation in France in parallel with the one in the Low Countries. The programme naturally widened its scope to include other European configurations (Italy, Switzerland, Duchy of Lorraine). Of course, it should be extended to include other European and extra-European areas. Indeed, the colonial and imperial contexts provide particularly interesting views of the complex forms of conflict resolution that were in use, given the multiplicity of legal systems coexisting in the same space20. In this way, cases arising in isolated milieux, faced with a legal vacuum, turned to other modes of social control, under the authority of those already exercising leadership functions (priest, governor or gentleman)21.

Sources: How to understand interactions during negotiations through usage, words and practices

14Applied more widely, the notion of legal pluralism makes it possible to look at the dynamics which existed between the various options available, whether they were in competition or, on the contrary, operating in complementarity and continuity with each other. It becomes a particularly useful tool when the vast depths of the lower jurisdictions are plumbed, allowing us to place our focus at the level of ordinary people: working on this scale reveals the procedural dimension of the dynamics at work in conflict resolution, and what made participants chose to turn to a court that was lay rather than ecclesiastical, royal rather than seigneurial, or urban rather than rural.

15For a resident of 15th-century Venice, the range of possibilities for reconciliation differed from what was available to a 17th-century bourgeois from Liège, or to a Parisian or an Angevin peasant of the 18th century. However different they may have been, these actors from the past had in common that they did not produce their own sources and that they often appeared only implicitly in the legal archives, which do often remain the first documentary port of entry on research into social control. Other, non-judicial sources provide direct or indirect proof of past settlements or ones under negotiation, or of those that failed. However, even here, there is a wide gap between the deal itself – as a social practice – and its written transcription as it appears in notarial minutes or administrative registers, which provide few or poor descriptions of those involved, their physical gestures or their motivations. To this end, it is best to start from the usages, words and practices as seen “from below” and from the interactions that took place during negotiations.

16Scrutinising the practices surrounding out-of-court settlements therefore led us to pay attention to physical gestures (handshakes, kisses, the sharing of food or drink); to the location – be it an everyday space (the inn) or a more formal place (courtroom, notary’s office or even a presbytery or parsonage); to the personality and qualities of the participants – individual or collective, institutional or not – whether party to the dispute or there as mediators (mutual friend, notary, man of the cloth, consistory), together forming a sort of community where conflict could be resolved; to the ways the terms of the bargain (oath, notarised transaction) were announced – either in writing or orally; and to whether the latter was done publicly or in private.

17The « Settlement » virtual exhibition presented in tandem with these workshop proceedings was put together thanks to our particular attention to the sources mined for this work. It highlights the diversity and materiality of sources which historians can use to track down the traces left by out-of-court settlements. The photos of original documents (archives, manuscripts and engravings) with their accompanying transcription allow the reader to delve into these past realities and understand the methodological requirements of the research.

Breaking down barriers between fields of study

18In researching settlements as an object of study in their own right, several angles of approach offered themselves to the historian. Breaking down disciplinary barriers became an imperative as research advanced, because it was not only legal and judiciary history that were concerned, but also religious, urban, military, economic and financial history.

  • 22 Élisabeth Labrousse and Alfred Soman, “Le registre consistorial de Coutras, 1582-1584”, Bulletin de (...)
  • 23 Anne Bonzon, La paix au village. Clergé paroissial et règlement des conflits dans la France d’Ancie (...)

19For example, it is only very recently that modern religious history has been interested in the significance and proceedings of agreements brokered by the clergy: this was long considered an activity that obviously went with their roles, and that was peripheral to their pastoral duties. The role of Protestant consistories – one of whose main features was its settlement of court cases – is well known: it is easy to understand why Protestants preferred to resolve their conflicts internally, rather than bring them before the royal courts22. Although Catholicism did not have any institutions dedicated to this type of pacification, many priests contributed to avoiding or ending conflicts between their parishioners. Anne Bonzon recently attempted to go beyond the misleading evidence before her to understand the mechanisms which brought priests to facilitating out-of-court settlement from the 17th century onwards23.

20Using this approach allows us to observe, thanks to sources not exclusively from the judicial realm, the similarities and disparities in the vocabulary, goals and proceedings employed in settlements, regardless of the nature of, and protagonists involved in, the dispute and its resolution. To capture this difficult-to-pinpoint information, we have therefore sought to use a multi-pronged approach and to classify the different types of situation in which settlement might have been attempted. The mechanisms deployed concerned not only civil and criminal justice, but also other, non-judicial situations, such as war or civil war. In these instances, it was possible to bring to light the similarities, as noted by the actors themselves, between peace negotiations after a war and the settlement of interpersonal disputes.

Words of agreement

  • 24 Christian Topalov, Laurent Coudroy de Lille, Jean-Charles Depaule, Brigitte Marin (dir.), L’aventur (...)

21The heuristic value of a study of manners of speech in history no longer needs to be proven24. Taken as the starting point for this collective enquiry, studying the vocabulary used made it possible to observe both points of convergence and changes over time, to compare official rules to the words used in practice and to spot terms that circulated in more than one context.

22Beyond the local particularities and vocabulary belonging to each type of source and each region, the words employed wove a common conceptual space of peace and justice. “Consent”, “comprise”, “agree”, “concordat” – so many words which integrate the prefix “con-“ (cum), underscoring the reciprocal will to agree. Central to these configurations was the notion of consent, which was also expressed through a number of terms – “agreement”, “compromise”, “amicable”, “amicably” – which remind us that without the voluntary participation of the parties involved, no settlement could succeed.

  • 25 Xavier Rousseaux, “Politiques judiciaires et résolution des conflits dans les villes de l’Occident (...)

23The expression “paix à partie”– used in the northern towns of France and in the Low Countries in cases of physical or verbal violence to describe a financial settlement between the parties involved25 – draws attention to possible parallels between the resolution of a dispute involving weapons and the brokering of a peace treaty. The expression echoes those encountered in trials settled out of court: “peace and unity”, “living in peace” or “nourishing peace as a family” – so many goals stated in acts agreed before a cleric, but also used when the case was resolved before a seigneurial court, and all of them testifying to the ideals aspired to by the given community.

24Putting the notion of pacification into words also included personifying disputes and trials, which needed to be “calmed” or, even better, “stifled”. In the long line of discourses denigrating recourse to legal institutions, trials come across as so many devouring “monsters”, as depicted in the Table of a Plaintiff’s Miseries, for example.

“Trial begets trial, through negligence and through envy”, extract from the Table of a Plaintiff’s Miseries, Jacques Lagniet, 17th c. (after 1657)

“Trial begets trial, through negligence and through envy”, extract from the Table of a Plaintiff’s Miseries, Jacques Lagniet, 17th c. (after 1657)

Gallica/BnF

25Words of agreement sometimes reflected situations from daily life26. A frequent word in the 16th century to denote an agreement, “chevir” (which gave us “achever”, to finish) had originally meant “to overcome” something, to get out of an awkward situation. “Stopping the trials” followed the same logic. With the term “département”, used in notarised acts in Cannes in the 18th century, its original meaning referred to the end of something, to a renunciation27.

26In practice, the settlement resolved all parties’ claims and therefore, in the end, the trial itself. Looking at it differently, agreeing to a deal was like becoming engaged, and the steps taken in preparation for marriage were not unlike those undertaken to conclude a bargain, where two parties with possibly diverging interests could manage, after some negotiation, to find common ground. The entry for “convention” in Furetière’s Dictionnaire universel (1690) defines it as a treaty, an accord, but also refers to matrimonial agreements. The entry for “to drink”, in its section on the practice of sharing wine to seal a reconciliation, likens settling out of court to musicians wanting to play together:

  • 28 Véronique Nahoum-Grappe, “Le boire et l’ivresse dans la pensée sociale sous l’ancien régime en Fran (...)

“Drinking together is also a sign of friendship, shown by offering each other some sort of meal. It is the same for reconciliation: when we want to reconcile feuding parties, we say that we will make them share a drink together. In the same vein, we even say figuratively that when the voices or instruments of two musicians are not in tune with each other, we have to make them drink together”28.

27Looking at legal terms and social usages has also made it possible to bring to light the disparities and convergences between these two lexical fields.

  • 29 Anne Bonzon, La Paix au village…, op. cit., p. 28.

28In this way a 17th-century cleric called himself an “arbitre, arbitrateur et amiable compositeur” and did not burden himself with legal distinctions, as to his mind, the key was to contrast two ways of settling disputes: the rigour of the justice system as opposed to the “gentleness” of an amicable agreement29. It must also be noted that this cleric was the only actor amongst those encountered to speak of a “concordat” to denote a settlement. The word is related to “to concord” of course, but given his clerical background, we can see that here he was borrowing from the ecclesiastical lexicon so familiar to him, as noted also by Furetière.

  • 30 For example, it is used in this sense in the Journal de Gilles de Gouberville. Le journal du sire d (...)
  • 31 Aurore Drécourt, Réguler les conflits violents. Le rôle du notaire dans la principauté de Liège, XV (...)

29However, legal vocabulary and social usage were not automatically mutually exclusive: an examination of the sources available reveals that certain words were common to both spheres, such as the verb “appointer”, which in the 16th century still meant “to agree”30. By sifting through notarised acts in Liège, the progressive evolution of the verb’s meaning can be observed until it disappeared from common usage altogether, to be confined thenceforth to the legal glossary. By the 18th century, “appointer” meant only “for a court to defer judgement”31.

The fiction of peace: deconstructing the language of negotiation to understand conflict and its resolution

30If settlements are so difficult to track down, it is not only because the vocabulary pertaining to them is as shifting as it is rich, but also because it has to be ferreted out in sources which often acted to conceal – more or less deliberately – the reality of the practices of conciliation, highlighting discourse that sought peace and, conversely, occluding disagreement and its resolution.

  • 32 Raphaël Eckert, « Le vocabulaire de l’accord dans les manuels pour praticiens et autres sources de (...)

31In the classic setting, professionals of the written word such as court clerks and notaries reformulated and imposed a nomenclature specific to the procedures of which they themselves were the guarantors. In the case of settlements, as with most legal proceedings, changes were also guided by strategic objectives: quite obviously, the transition from pacts agreed orally to a written form tended to mean that only the end result was registered, glossing over the tedious work that preceded it, the hesitations and the horse-trading. The fiction of the purity of a reconciliation freely entered into formed the guiding principle of the first Italian manuals of the 13th century: in a “pact” or a “peace”, it was preferable not to mention any money exchanged between parties, considered as it was to be an admission of guilt which could be deleterious to any final settlement. This changed later on, with any monies that “found their way” to either party to the dispute being explicitly placed at the core of the notarised agreement, such as was the case in Paris by the 16th century32.

  • 33 As Aurore Drécourt has done with Liège notaries’ papers of the 17th and 18th cent., op. cit.

32Saving appearances and encouraging forgiveness of wrongdoing were the sine qua non conditions required to make peace. This was doubtless why notaries were in the habit of using very vague formulae to describe the disputes between their clients. The historian can however manage to outsmart this strategy and to read between the lines – and even sometimes under the crossed-out words. When words, sentences, even whole paragraphs were struck through to silence the details of the quarrel and to downplay the severity of the violence suffered by the victims, the various transformations undergone by the text to arrive at the final deal can implicitly be reinstated by the reader33. Applying this method to debt payment proceedings, Jonathan Pezzetta has been able to make out between the lines the deals and negotiations involved, not only noting an “evaporation” of active trial proceedings, but also closely observing the procedures and material presentation of the texts to be found in the register. Behind the filter of legal writing, a discerning approach allows the researcher to uncover – or at least to suppose the existence of – out-of-court settlements. When the parties both had strong interests at play, agreement was preferable to letting the trial run its course, and judicial authority was only necessary to the extent that it made it possible to put pressure on the debtor.

  • 34 Natalie Zemon Davis, Pour sauver sa vie. Les récits de pardon au XVIe siècle, French translation, P (...)
  • 35 Stephen Cummins and Laura Kounine, “Confronting Conflict in Early Modern Europe”, in Id. (dir.), Cu (...)

33To obtain a pardon from the prince or king – as Natalie Zemon Davis has brilliantly shown – murderers had to be able to create a realistic and acceptable version of events34. The men of war studied by Quentin Verreycken on this issue used the same narrative in the pardons asked of the king of France or the duke of Burgundy in the 15th century: they stress their desire to reconcile with the victim’s family, while minimising their own responsibility in the murder they had committed. Similarly, the letters of pardon granted by sovereigns to their subjects after a revolt remained silent on the decisive role of numerous intermediaries shuttling between the king and the repentant rebels, drawing a veil over the obstacles and often tortuous progress of negotiations. By revisiting these sources to identify the mechanisms used to bring about agreement, Adrien Carbonnet has brought to light that what had been created here was the fiction of a pardon, serving the discourse of obedience and of the figure of the victorious king, who punishes and then pardons. The pardon submitted the settlement to the political imperative and it therefore could never appear to have been the fruit of haggling, at the risk of debasing royal majesty. In its form as seen in the peace treaties of the late Middle Ages and the early modern period, a pardon saw crimes by men of war such as rebel subjects absolved, erased from memory by a rewriting of history which constructed new power relations. Here as elsewhere, the researcher must be wary of the illusions of the official discourse, which can be “a product of domination and the reinforcement of inequality”35.

Back to the courts: how legal officials and litigants related to each over settlements

34Finally, if we have often sought to distance ourselves from courts and men of law to consider in a different light the various ways of concluding an agreement, we have never lost sight of the history of justice. In fact, we return to the field more knowledgeable than before, since understanding settlements has allowed us to grasp more fully the whole gamut of processes involved in upholding social control in disputes. In light of this, we can in turn reevaluate the role of the legal system – especially at the municipal and seigneurial levels – as an institution of power in Ancien Régime society.

35The most-expected and most manifest result extracted from the documentation studied pertains to the importance of interactions between the legal system and other non-legal actors or institutions. The workshops’ various contributions bring important and often original proofs to enlighten our understanding of the relationship between justice and society as it evolved over the centuries.

Chronology of legal social control: taking a long-term view

36Set within the broad and long chronology of the Ancien Régime, embedded in Medieval structures which appeared to persist until the end of the 18th century – and despite the backdrop of the considerable development of the state legal apparatus – the permanence of negotiated settlements stands out clearly from the situations studied in the articles here, as well as in the collection of sources offered in the virtual exhibition.

  • 36 Xavier Rousseaux, “De la négociation au procès pénal : la gestion de la violence dans la société mé (...)
  • 37 Xavier Rousseaux, “Le prix du sang versé. La cour des appaisiteurs à Nivelles (1430-1665)”, Bulle (...)
  • 38 Catherine Denys, “Les apaiseurs de Lille à la fin de l’Ancien Régime”, Revue du Nord, 60, 1995, p. (...)
  • 39 Aries Van Meeteren and Griet Vermeesch, “In hope of agreement”, art. cit., p. 143-164.

37Case studies do however make it possible to specify the chronology of these relationships and to call into question the idea that out-of-court settlement suffered an ineluctable and absolute decline during the modern period in the face of a victorious state-run judicial system. Indeed, most of the cases belong to the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the modern period, forming, as Xavier Rousseaux puts it, “the negotiation period” (“le temps de l’accommodement”), where negotiation was the predominant means of preventing crimes of revenge and of restoring peace thanks to solutions worked out jointly between the parties involved36. In Low-Country and northern Italian cities, the model of a communal, conciliatory form of justice which oversaw local practices more and more strictly also evolved over time. In the small town of Nivelles, Rousseaux has shown the long-term transformations in the ways of tackling everyday violence: the practice of the “fait mandé”, in which a culprit hands themselves in before two witnesses of good standing to avoid criminal prosecution disappeared in the 16th century. Similarly, the “appaisiteurs” (“appeasators”), created in 1430 to help parties conclude a truce or arrive at a private financial arrangement, found themselves progressively in competition with the rise in power of written justice and corporal punishment37. However, this transition was neither linear nor uniform in the northern European urban world: actions of “appeasers” were attested to until the end of the Ancien Régime in many Flemish cities38. In Leiden at the end of the 17th century, urban authorities mindful of ensuring public order encouraged the proliferation of social control mechanisms and institutions available to the population39.

  • 40 Xavier Rousseaux, “De la négociation au procès pénal”, art. cit.

38The transition to the “adjudication period” (“temps de l’adjudication”), embodied by the judge presiding over the quarrelling parties, was a product of the rise in monarchical power, the retreat of urban and ecclesiastical autonomies and jurisdictions, of the development of criminal procedure codes and the criminalisation of homicide. Adjudication progressively imposed itself in Europe, though without wiping out the old forms of settlement40. Stéphanie Blot-Maccagnan recalls that, contrary to the image of an all-powerful, Louis-XIV-style royal justice, the famous French Criminal Ordinance of 1670 did not put an end to transactional settlements. Article 19 of Title XXV on sentencing contains the possibility of an amicable settlement for all types of crimes, even the most serious. The construction of the legal system was itself a result of negotiations and adjustments, which took into consideration the necessary division of labour between the courts and the other modes of conflict resolution available.

  • 41 Bernard Dauven, Pardonner et être pardonné dans les Pays-Bas. Le gouvernement par la grâce en Braba (...)

39In this way, even the consequences of committing murder remained for a long time negotiable. Working out the compensation due to the victims as reparation was one of the decisive goals of dispute resolution. The “paix à partie” agreed between families was indispensable in the Middle Ages if the perpetrator was to be absolved of the crime, and the practice subsisted in the Habsburg Low Countries into the 17th century41. In France, the sovereign was the only person allowed to pardon such a grave offence. Sources on the practice do however show that in the 18th century in Anjou, for example, certain families continued to come to a preliminary agreement so they could then present before the court a version of events which best served their interests. During the Enlightenment, criminalists’ discussions on the licit or moral character of these practices was part of a wider debate on judicial reform, which included the desire of some to return them to the private sphere, along with endless criticism of the cost of meeting out justice or the slow pace of proceedings.

40Thus, without calling into question the rise to power and the unification of royal and state legal systems in Europe, which profoundly altered the relationship between subjects and the institutions of justice after the end of the Middle Ages, the relationship between settlements and formal justice can be analysed less as a mutually exclusive opposition but rather more as a way for the two to work together, more or less closely and more or less collaboratively or competitively, depending on the situation and the location. It is by no means negligible to note for example that The Charitable Arbitrator, a kind of user’s manual published by the religious lobby during the judicial reforms of the 1660s, placed on a par an audience granted by the king; justice as meted out to the poor; and the mediation functions exercised by clerics, underpinned by the Christian message.

Putting ourselves on the litigants’ level

  • 42 Griet Vermeesch, “Reflections on the relative accessibility of law courts in early modern Europe”(...)

41Approaching the law from the point of view of the litigants makes it possible in particular to look at access to the judicial system, as well to observe how it was used concretely, in everyday life42. Must out-of-court settlement necessarily be seen as in competition with the workings of the official institutions, asked Pierre-Benoît Roumagnou? The question is posited in his study of the complex toing-and-froing of the residents of Paris’s 18th-century banlieus between the various legal institutions at their disposal – both royal and seigneurial – and the other means of resolving a dispute. Chief amongst the latter was the notary, who was often also the court clerk for the local jurisdiction. Similarly, the activity of rural notaries in a period of heightened conflict observed by Lucien Faggion in Venice’s Stato da Terra confirmed that seeking agreement and negotiations under the aegis of the local authorities persisted, including in criminal cases. The parties implicated in the dispute, here as elsewhere, knew how to use the legal system when it came to putting pressure on their opponent, with a view to striking a deal.

  • 43 Hervé Piant, “Vaut‑il mieux s’arranger que plaider ? Un essai de sociologie judiciaire dans la Fran (...)

42It is difficult, often impossible even, for the historian to retrace the complete path of a case, in all its ramifications and convolutions across different archives. However, gathering together the sources available for the same jurisdictional space is surely the best way to bring to light the dynamics between the various institutions and to understand the extent of the litigants’ scope for manoeuvre. If the cases studied in this work do not properly allow one to speak of “forum shopping” in the widest sense of the term, certain strategic uses of the legal system do convey forms of popular agency long-ignored by historians. Going to the notary only hours after having filed a complaint before the seigneurial court or, on the contrary, waiting to see how the latter will rule, clearly reveals that a calculation was being made by the litigants: they had assessed the costs and benefits of the legal action according to their own interests, as Diane Roussel shows in the faubourg Saint-Germain-des-Prés case. Research into the comparative sociology of plaintiffs and parties to a contract confirms Hervé Piant’s analysis, for whom “in the face of infrajustice, a form based fundamentally on the search for unanimity, recourse to institutional justice allowed an individual to affirm their status, their social, economic and cultural identity. This was therefore the avenue taken by all those who wanted to break with community-based consensus and establish their own authority by hanging on to the coattails of the rising power of the state.”43

  • 44 Nadya Nazareva, “Les conflits et leurs accommodements à Paris au XVIe siècle d’après les accords no (...)
  • 45 Bernard Dauven, “La ‘paix des dames’”, art. cit.
  • 46 In her recent thesis, Marion Philip estimated that only a small portion of pre-nuptial pregnancy ca (...)

43One final note: gender differences – which were touched on during workshops on the case of women present in notarised Parisian agreements in the 16th century44 or on the role of widows in the settling of homicide cases45 – appear very little in this work. Researching women’s roles more specifically does however make it possible to broach another type of case settled by mutual agreement but much less visible than those involving violent crime: in cases of rape, promises to marry, illegitimate pregnancies or domestic violence, settlement outside of the secular or ecclesiastical courts was recommended so as to avoid publicly exposing the family honour46. From this point of view as well, the field lies open to further study.

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Bibliographie

Suggested bibliography

Billacois François and Neveux Hugues (dir.), « Porter plainte : stratégies villageoises et institutions judiciaires en Île-de-France (XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles) », Droit et Cultures, 1990, n° 19.

Bonzon Anne, La paix au village. Clergé paroissial et règlement des conflits dans la France d’Ancien régime, Ceyzérieu, Champ Vallon, 2022.

Bossy John (éd.), Disputes and Settlements: Law and Human Relations in the West, Cambridge, 1983.

Brizay François, Follain Antoine and Sarrazin Véronique (dir.), Les justices de village. Administration et justice locales de la fin du Moyen Âge à la Révolution, Rennes, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2001.

Broggio Paolo, Governare l’odio. Pace e giustizia criminale nell’Italia Moderna (secoli XVI-XVII), Rome, Viella, 2021.

Broggio Paolo and Paoli Maria Pia (dir.), Stringere la pace. Teorie e pratiche della conciliazione nell'Europa moderna (secoli XV-XVIII), Rome, Vieilla, 2011.

Castan Nicole and Yves, « Une économie de justice à l’âge moderne : composition et dissension », Histoire, Economie et Société, 1982, p. 361-368.

Castan Yves, Honnêteté et relations sociales en Languedoc (1715-1780), Paris, Plon, 1974.

Cummins Stephen and Kounine Laura (dir.), Cultures of Conflict Resolution in Early Modern Europe, New York, Routledge, 2016.

Dauchy Serge, Demars-Sion Véronique et. al., La résolution des conflits. Justice publique et justice privée : une frontière mouvante, Rapport de recherche, GIP Mission de Recherche Droit et Justice, Lille, septembre 2008.

Dauven Bernard, « La « paix des dames » : le rôle des veuves des victimes d’homicides, un facteur de pacification des mœurs ? », Crime, Histoire et Sociétés / Crime, History and Societies, vol. 24, n°2, 2020, p. 27-48.

Denys Catherine, « Les apaiseurs de Lille à la fin de l’Ancien Régime », Revue du Nord, 60, 1995, p. 13-28.

Dinges Martin, « The Uses of Justice As a Form of Social Control in Early Modern Europe », in Herman Roodenburg and Pieter Spierenburg (ed.), Social Control in Europe, vol. 1, Columbus, Ohio State University Press, 2004, p. 159-175.

Drécourt Aurore, Réguler les conflits violents. Le rôle du notaire dans la principauté de Liège, XVIIe-XVIIIe siècle, thèse présentée en vue de l’obtention du titre de Docteur en Histoire, Art et Archéologie, dir. Annick Delfosse and Xavier Rousseaux, université de Liège, 2019, dactyl.

Dupont Guy, « Le temps des compositions : Pratiques judiciaires à Bruges et à Gand du XIVe au XVIe siècle », in Bernard Dauven and Xavier Rousseaux (dir.), Préférant miséricorde à rigueur de justice : Pratiques de la grâce (XIIIe-XVIIe siècles) [en ligne]. Louvain-la-Neuve : Presses universitaires de Louvain, 2012, http://books.openedition.org/pucl/3366

Garnot Benoît (dir.), L’infrajudiciaire du Moyen Âge à l’époque contemporaine, Dijon, EUD, 1996.

Garnot Benoît, « Justice, infrajustice, parajustice et extrajustice dans la France moderne », Crime, histoire et sociétés/Crime, History and Societies, 2000, n° 1, p. 103-121.

Gauvard Claude and Jacob Robert (dir.), Les rites de la justice. Gestes et rituels judiciaires au Moyen Âge occidental, Paris, Le léopard d’or, 2000.

Gowing Laura, « Gender and the language of insult in early modern London », History Workshop Journal, 35, 1993, p. 1-21.

Grosse Christian, « “Pour bien de paix”. La régulation des conflits par les consistoires en Suisse romande (XVIe-XVIIe siècles) », in Jean-Luc Chabot, Stéphane Gal and Christophe Tournu (dir.), Figures de la médiation et lien social, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2007, p. 85-107.

Ingram Martin, « Law, litigants and the construction of “honour”: slander suits in early modern England », in Peter Coss, éd., The moral world of the law, Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 2000, p. 134-160.

Mantecón Tomás A., « El peso de la infrajudicialidad en el control del crimen durante la Edad Moderna », Estudis. Revista de Historia Moderna, n° 28, 2002, p. 44.

Mentzer Raymond A., « Le consistoire et la pacification du monde rural », Bulletin de la Société d’Histoire du Protestantisme français, 1989, 135, p. 373-389.

Mentzer Raymond A., « Sociability and culpability: Conventions of mediation and reconciliation within the sixteenth-century Huguenot community », in Memory and Identity: minority survival among the Huguenots in France and the Atlantic Diaspora, University of South Carolina Press, 2003, p. 45-57.

Muysson Anthony, « Arbitration and the legal profession in late medieval England », in Matthew Dyson and David Ibbetson (éd.), Law and Legal Process, Substantive Law and Procedure in English Legal History, Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 2013, p. 56-76.

Piant Hervé, « Vaut‑il mieux s’arranger que plaider ? Un essai de sociologie judiciaire dans la France d’Ancien Régime », in Antoine Follain (dir.), Les justices locales dans les villes et villages du xve au xixe siècle, Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2006, p. 97-124.

Piant Hervé, Une justice ordinaire. Justice civile et criminelle dans la prévôté de Vaucouleurs sous l’Ancien Régime, Rennes, PUR, 2006.

Rousseaux Xavier, « De la négociation au procès pénal : la gestion de la violence dans la société médiévale et moderne (500-1800) », in Philippe Gérard, François Ost and Michel Van de Kerchove (ed.), Droit négocié, Droit imposé ?, Bruxelles, Facultés Universitaires Saint-Louis, 1996, p. 273-312.

Rousseaux Xavier, « Politiques judiciaires et résolution des conflits dans les villes de l’Occident à la fin du Moyen Âge : Quelques hypothèses de recherche », in Jacques Chiffoleau, et al., Pratiques sociales et politiques judiciaires dans les villes de l’Occident à la fin du Moyen Âge, Rome, Publications de l’École française de Rome, 2007, p. 497-526.

Sbriccoli Mario, « Giustizia negoziata, giustizia egemonica. Riflessioni su una nuova fase degli studi di storia della giustizia criminale », in Mario Bellabarba, Gerd Schwerhoff and Andrea Zorzi (dir.), Criminalità e giustizia in Germania e in Italia. Pratiche giudiziarie e linguaggi giuridici tra tardo medioevo ed età moderna, Bologne, Il Mulino, 2001, p. 345-364.

Sbriccoli Mario, « Histoire sociale et dimension juridique : l’historiographie italienne récente du crime et de la justice criminelle », Crime, Histoire et Sociétés / Crime, History and Societies, 2007, 11, 2, p. 139-148.

Sharpe James A., « The People and the Law », in Barry Reay (éd.), Popular Culture in Sevententh Century England, Londres, St Martins Press, 1985, p. 244-270.

Shoemaker Robert B., Prosecution and Punishment: Petty Crime and the Law in London and Rural Middlesex, c. 1660-1725, Cambridge, Cambride UP, 1991.

Soman Alfred, « L’infra‑justice à Paris d’après les archives notariales », Histoire, économie et société, 1, 1982, p. 369‑375.

Soman Alfred, « Le témoignage maquillé : encore un aspect de l’infra‑justice », in Yves‑Marie Bercé et Yves Castan (dir.), Les archives du délit : empreinte de société, Colloque « Archives judiciaires et histoire sociale », Paris, 1988, Toulouse, Éditions Universitaires du Sud, 1990, p. 99‑109.

Van Meeteren Aries and Vermeesch Griet, « In hope of agreement: Norm and practice in the use of institutes for dispute settlement in late-seventeenth-century Leiden », in Griet Vermeesch, Manon van der Heijden, Jaco Zuiderduijn (dir.), The Uses of Justice in a Global Perspective, 1600-1900, London-New York, Routledge, 2019, p. 143-164.

Vermeesch Griet , « Reflections on the relative accessibility of law courts in early modern Europe »Crime, Histoire et Sociétés / Crime, History and Societies, vol. 19, n°2, 2015, p. 53-76, URL: http://journals.openedition.org/chs/1598DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/chs.1598

Wenzel Éric, « La paix par la justice. Les modes alternatifs de règlement des conflits au cœur de la procédure et de la doctrine françaises d’Ancien Régime », in Paolo Broggio and Maria Pia Paoli (dir.), Stringere la pace, op. cit., p. 517.

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Notes

1 “Finally, we should like to know about everyday rituals of making up” notes Stuart Carroll, “Peace-making in Early Modern Europe: towards a comparative history”, in Paolo Broggio and Maria Pia Paoli (dir.), Stringere la pace. Teorie e pratiche della conciliazione nell'Europa moderna (secoli XV-XVIII), Rome, Vieilla, 2011 p. 90.

2 Éric Wenzel, “La paix par la justice. Les modes alternatifs de règlement des conflits au coeur de la procédure et de la doctrine françaises d'Ancien Régime”, in Paolo Broggio and Maria Pia Paoli (dir.), Stringere la pace, op. cit., p. 517.

3 Tomás A. Mantecón, “El peso de la infrajudicialidad en el control del crimen durante la Edad Moderna”, Estudis. Revista de Historia Moderna, n° 28, 2002, p. 44.

4 Yves Castan, Honnêteté et relations sociales en Languedoc (1715-1780), Paris, Plon, 1974 ; Nicole and Yves Castan, “Une économie de justice à l’âge moderne : composition et dissension”, Histoire, Économie et Société, 1982, p. 361-368.

5 Alfred Soman, “L’infra‑justice à Paris d’après les archives notariales”, Histoire, économie et société, 1, 1982, p. 369‑375 ; “Le témoignage maquillé : encore un aspect de l’infra‑justice”, in Yves‑Marie Bercé and Yves Castan (dir.), Les archives du délit : empreinte de société, colloquium “Archives judiciaires et histoire sociale”, Paris, 1988, Toulouse, Éditions Universitaires du Sud, 1990, p. 99‑109.

6 Benoît Garnot (dir.), L’infrajudiciaire du Moyen Âge à l’époque contemporaine, Dijon, EUD, 1996.

7 Id., “Justice, infrajustice, parajustice et extrajustice dans la France moderne”, Crime, Histoire et Sociétés/Crime, History and Societies, 2000, n° 1, p. 103-121.

8 Tomás A. Mantecón, “El peso de la infrajudicialidad... “, art. cit., p. 43-76.

9 Mario Sbriccoli, “Giustizia negoziata, giustizia egemonica. Riflessioni su una nuova fase degli studi di storia della giustizia criminale”, in Mario Bellabarba, Gerd Schwerhoff and Andrea Zorzi (dir.), Criminalità e giustizia in Germania e in Italia. Pratiche giudiziarie e linguaggi giuridici tra tardo medioevo ed età moderna, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2001, p. 345-364 ; Id., “Histoire sociale et dimension juridique : l’historiographie italienne récente du crime et de la justice criminelle”, Crime, Histoire et Sociétés/Crime, History and Societies, 2007, 11, 2, p. 139-148. Very recently, Paolo Broggio showed that the persistence of private peaces in the 16th and 17th centuries was in no way incompatible with a modernising legal system: Paolo Broggio, Governare l’odio. Pace e giustizia criminale nell’Italia Moderna (secoli XVI-XVII), Rome, Viella, 2021.

10 John Bossy (ed.), Disputes and Settlements: Law and Human Relations in the West, Cambridge, 1983.

11 See in particular: James A. Sharpe, “The People and the Law”, in Barry Reay (éd.), Popular Culture in Sevententh Century England, London, St Martin’s Press, 1985, p. 244-270; Robert B. Shoemaker, Prosecution and Punishment: Petty Crime and the Law in London and Rural Middlesex, c. 1660-1725, Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 1991; Laura Gowing, “Gender and the language of insult in early modern London”, History Workshop Journal, 35, 1993, p. 1-21.

12 James A. Sharpe, “‘Such Disagreement Betwyx Neighbours’: Litigation and Human Relations in Early Modern England”, in John Bossy (éd.), Disputes and Settlements, op. cit., p. 181.

13 This is Martin Ingram’s expression, in “Law, litigants and the construction of ‘honour’: slander suits in early modern England”, in Peter Coss, (ed.), The moral world of the law, Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 2000, p. 134-160.

14 François Billacois, “Clio chez Thémis”, in François Billacois and Hugues Neveux (dir.), “Porter plainte : stratégies villageoises et institutions judiciaires en Île-de-France (XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles)”, Droit et Cultures, 1990, n° 19, p. 10.

15 For an outstanding example of this method, see Hervé Piant, Une justice ordinaire. Justice civile et criminelle dans la prévôté de Vaucouleurs sous l’Ancien Régime, Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2006. See also François Brizay, Antoine Follain and Véronique Sarrazin (dir.), Les justices de village. Administration et justice locales de la fin du Moyen Âge à la Révolution, Rennes, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2001.

16 Anthony Musson, “Arbitration and the legal profession in late medieval England”, in Matthew Dyson and David Ibbetson (ed.), Law and Legal Process, Substantive Law and Procedure in English Legal History, Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 2013, p. 57.

17 Martin Dinges, “The Uses of Justice As a Form of Social Control in Early Modern Europe”, in Herman Roodenburg and Pieter Spierenburg (ed.), Social Control in Europe, vol. 1, Columbus, Ohio State University Press, 2004, p. 159-175.

18 Aries Van Meeteren and Griet Vermeesch, “In hope of agreement: Norm and practice in the use of institutes for dispute settlement in late-seventeenth-century Leiden”, in Griet Vermeesch, Manon van der Heijden and Jaco Zuiderduijn (dir.), The Uses of Justice in a Global Perspective, 1600-1900, London-New York, Routledge, 2019, p. 143-164.

19 Herman Roodenburg and Pieter Spierenburg (ed.), Social Control in Europe (1500-1800), op. cit.

20 Donald Dyson, “Legal Pluralism, Hybridization and the Uses of Everyday Criminal Law in Quebec, 1760-1867 », in Manon van der Heijden, Griet Vermeesch and Jaco Zuijderduijn (dir), op. cit., p. 198-218.

21 Dominique Guillemet, “Proximité de la justice et justice de proximité dans les îles du Ponant aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles : justices seigneuriales et amirauté », in Journées régionales d’histoire de la justice, Poitiers, 1999, p. 327-357 (cited by Antoine Follain in “Justice seigneuriale, justice royale et régulation sociale : rapport de synthèse”, in François Brizay, Antoine Follain and Véronique Sarrazin (dir.), op. cit., p. 9-58, here p. 31).

22 Élisabeth Labrousse and Alfred Soman, “Le registre consistorial de Coutras, 1582-1584”, Bulletin de la Société d’Histoire du protestantisme français, April-June 1980, t. 126, p. 193-228 ; Janine Estèbe and Bernard Vogler, “La genèse d’une société protestante. Étude comparée de quelques registres consistoriaux languedociens et palatins vers 1600”, Annales E.S.C., 1976, t. 31, p. 362-388; Raymond A. Mentzer, “Le consistoire et la pacification du monde rural”, Bulletin de la Société d’Histoire du Protestantisme français, 1989, 135, p. 373-389; Id., “Sociability and culpability: Conventions of mediation and reconciliation within the sixteenth-century Huguenot community”, in Memory and Identity: minority survival among the Huguenots in France and the Atlantic Diaspora, University of South Carolina Press, 2003, p. 45-57 ; Christian Grosse, “’Pour bien de paix’. La régulation des conflits par les consistoires en Suisse romande (XVIe-XVIIe siècles)”, in Jean-Luc Chabot, Stéphane Gal, Christophe Tournu (dir.), Figures de la médiation et lien social, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2007, p. 85-107.

23 Anne Bonzon, La paix au village. Clergé paroissial et règlement des conflits dans la France d’Ancien Régime, Ceyzérieu, Champ Vallon, 2022.

24 Christian Topalov, Laurent Coudroy de Lille, Jean-Charles Depaule, Brigitte Marin (dir.), L’aventure des mots de la ville, Paris, Laffont, 2010.

25 Xavier Rousseaux, “Politiques judiciaires et résolution des conflits dans les villes de l’Occident à la fin du Moyen Âge: Quelques hypothèses de recherche”, in Jacques Chiffoleau et al., Pratiques sociales et politiques judiciaires dans les villes de l’Occident à la fin du Moyen Âge, Rome, Publications de l’École française de Rome, 2007, p. 497-526 ; Bernard Dauven, “La ‘paix des dames’ : le rôle des veuves des victimes d’homicides, un facteur de pacification des mœurs?”, Crime, Histoire et Sociétés/Crime, History et Societies, vol. 24, n°2, 2020, p. 27-48.

26 For the modern period the sources we work on have brought us to nuance the affirmation that there existed a fundamental difference between ritualised court settlement and the gestures of arbitration and conciliation, a statement instead more applicable to the Middle Ages. (Claude Gauvard and Robert Jacob (dir.), Les rites de la justice. Gestes et rituels judiciaires au Moyen Âge occidental, Paris, Le léopard d’or, 2000, introduction “Le rite, la justice et l’historien”, p. 5-18. Nicolas Offenstadt, “Interaction et régulation des conflits. Les gestes de l’arbitrage et de la conciliation au Moyen Âge (XIIIe-XVe siècles)”, p. 201-228).

27 Dictionnaire du Moyen Français en ligne http://zeus.atilf.fr/dmf/, accessed 27 June, 2024.

28 Véronique Nahoum-Grappe, “Le boire et l’ivresse dans la pensée sociale sous l’ancien régime en France (XVIe-XVIIIe siècles), in Véronique Nahoum-Grappe, Myriam Tsikounas, Thierry Fillaut (dir.), Histoire et alcool, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1999, p. 33-34. Thanks to Christian Grosse for having found this citation.

29 Anne Bonzon, La Paix au village…, op. cit., p. 28.

30 For example, it is used in this sense in the Journal de Gilles de Gouberville. Le journal du sire de Gouberville, republished, Bricqueboscq, les Editions des Champs, 1993, t. 1 (1549-52), t. 2 (1553-57), t. 3 (1558-62).

31 Aurore Drécourt, Réguler les conflits violents. Le rôle du notaire dans la principauté de Liège, XVIIe-XVIIIe siècle, doctoral thesis in History, Art and Archaeology, dir. Annick Delfosse and Xavier Rousseaux, Université de Liège, 2019, typed., p. 175-176. The Trésor de la Langue française retraces in detail this semantic evolution and underlines the fact that the use of the verb “appointer” in the sense of “concluding an agreement” was already absent by the end of the 17th cent in Furetière’s Dictionnaire (https://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/appointer, accessed 13 April, 2023).

32 Raphaël Eckert, « Le vocabulaire de l’accord dans les manuels pour praticiens et autres sources de la pratique à l’époque médiévale », journée d’études de Liège du 18 mai 2018.

33 As Aurore Drécourt has done with Liège notaries’ papers of the 17th and 18th cent., op. cit.

34 Natalie Zemon Davis, Pour sauver sa vie. Les récits de pardon au XVIe siècle, French translation, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1988 (original: Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France, Stanford, California Stanford University Press, 1987).

35 Stephen Cummins and Laura Kounine, “Confronting Conflict in Early Modern Europe”, in Id. (dir.), Cultures of Conflict Resolution in Early Modern Europe, New York, Routledge, 2016, p. 6.

36 Xavier Rousseaux, “De la négociation au procès pénal : la gestion de la violence dans la société médiévale et moderne (500-1800)”, in Gérard Philippe, Ost François, Van de Kerchove Michel (ed.), Droit négocié, Droit imposé ?, Brussels, Facultés Universitaires Saint-Louis, 1996, p. 273-312.

37 Xavier Rousseaux, “Le prix du sang versé. La cour des appaisiteurs à Nivelles (1430-1665)”, Bulletin trimestriel du Crédit communal de Belgique, 175, 1991, p. 45-56. See Guy Dupont, “Le temps des compositions : Pratiques judiciaires à Bruges et à Gand du XIVe au XVIe siècle”, in Bernard Dauven and Xavier Rousseaux (dir.), Préférant miséricorde à rigueur de justice : Pratiques de la grâce (XIIIe-XVIIe siècles) [online]. Louvain-la-Neuve, Presses universitaires de Louvain, 2012, http://books.openedition.org/pucl/3366

38 Catherine Denys, “Les apaiseurs de Lille à la fin de l’Ancien Régime”, Revue du Nord, 60, 1995, p. 13-28.

39 Aries Van Meeteren and Griet Vermeesch, “In hope of agreement”, art. cit., p. 143-164.

40 Xavier Rousseaux, “De la négociation au procès pénal”, art. cit.

41 Bernard Dauven, Pardonner et être pardonné dans les Pays-Bas. Le gouvernement par la grâce en Brabant, du duc Antoine à l’archiduchesse Isabelle (1404-1633), doctoral thesis in History, Art and Achaeology, Novembre 2021, Université catholique de Louvain, p. 198-199.

42 Griet Vermeesch, “Reflections on the relative accessibility of law courts in early modern Europe”Crime, Histoire et Sociétés/Crime, History and Societies, vol. 19, n°2, 2015, p. 53-76, URL: http://journals.openedition.org/chs/1598DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/chs.1598

43 Hervé Piant, “Vaut‑il mieux s’arranger que plaider ? Un essai de sociologie judiciaire dans la France d’Ancien Régime”, in Antoine Follain (dir.), Les justices locales dans les villes et villages du xve au xixe siècle, Rennes, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2006, p. 118.

44 Nadya Nazareva, “Les conflits et leurs accommodements à Paris au XVIe siècle d’après les accords notaries”, paper presented at the 30 Sept-1 Oct 2021 workshop at Louvain-la-Neuve.

45 Bernard Dauven, “La ‘paix des dames’”, art. cit.

46 In her recent thesis, Marion Philip estimated that only a small portion of pre-nuptial pregnancy cases appeared before the Parisian ecclesiastical courts (Marion Philip, La sexualité légitime comme privilège. Masculinités parisiennes à l’époque moderne (1600-1750), Sorbonne Université, 2022). In Lyon in the 18th century, the cases of illegitimate pregnancy studied by Julie Hardwich were taken on by a multitude of actors: the woman’s entourage and the clergy acted as mediators between the young parents, while settlements for “gallantry following a pregnancy” were routine cases for notatries (Julie Hardwick, Sex in an Old Regime City. Young Workers and Intimacy in France, 1660-1789, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2020).

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Titre “Trial begets trial, through negligence and through envy”, extract from the Table of a Plaintiff’s Miseries, Jacques Lagniet, 17th c. (after 1657)
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Anne Bonzon et Diane Roussel, « In search of agreement: historiography and principles of a conflict resolution research project »Criminocorpus [En ligne], 26 | 2024, mis en ligne le 28 juin 2024, consulté le 18 mai 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/criminocorpus/15870 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/11wcr

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Auteurs

Anne Bonzon

Agrégée d’histoire et ancienne élève de l’École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud, Anne Bonzon est professeure d’histoire moderne à l’université Paris 8-Vincennes-Saint-Denis et co-directrice du Centre d’histoire des sociétés médiévales et modernes (UR MéMo). Ses recherches portent sur le clergé paroissial et sur les liens entre religion et justice, du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle. Elle s’intéresse aussi aux écrits de curés, à l’histoire de la médiation sociale, aux différentes modalités de règlement des conflits et aux activités non directement religieuses du clergé d’Ancien Régime. Publications récentes : La paix au village. Clergé paroissial et règlement des conflits dans la France d’Ancien Régime, 2022 ; avec Caroline Galland (dir.), Justices croisées. Histoire et enjeux de l’appel comme d’abus (XIVe-XVIIIe siècle), 2021.

Diane Roussel

Diane Roussel est maîtresse de conférences en histoire moderne à l’université Gustave Eiffel et membre du laboratoire Analyse Comparée des Pouvoirs. Depuis sa thèse de doctorat, consacrée à la violence et à la justice à Paris au xvie siècle (Violences et passions dans le Paris de la Renaissance, Champ Vallon, 2012), elle travaille sur l’histoire sociale de la justice et de la régulation (Les justices locales et les justiciables. La proximité judiciaire au Moyen Âge et à l'époque moderne, co-dir. avec Marie Houllemare, PUR, 2015), en interrogeant particulièrement les relations de pouvoir entre les agents ordinaires de la justice et les populations. Elle s’intéresse par ailleurs à l’histoire de Paris et des Parisiens, notamment durant les guerres de Religion et la Ligue. Elle est membre du comité de rédaction de Criminocorpus depuis 2019.

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