Therefore, I say that the only means to [preserve] the long life of a flourishing city resides in its archives of papers, memoranda, registers, instructions, public documents, consultations, cartularies, chronicles, and histories, which keep citizens alerted to everything that has happened since the foundation of cities and towns up to their own time. … And I will simply say that if the walls of a city were made of paper and good ink, and if an abundance of instructions and documents could be found in urban archives, posterity would be led and guided in all its actions by domestic examples.
In particular, young people taking up public office for the first time could consult the actions taken by their predecessors and would not have to resort to Roman history for models of how to govern.1 Indeed, in his history of Lyon, Paradin followed his own advice in offering information on the beginnings of the city’s corps de ville, which he traced back to at least 1271, and in copying out a memorandum on the necessary qualities and obligations of the consuls (town councilors) in office.2
As the genre of French local history came increasingly to rest on a foundation of original documents from the mid-sixteenth century forward, writers frequently looked to the archives of the hôtel de ville as a crucial source of information on the urban past. Many city histories were published with the cooperation and monetary support of the city council, and a significant number of local historians either held civic office themselves or came from families with a long tradition of municipal service. Since the organization and rights of the corps de ville were grounded in a series of privileges obtained at important moments in the town’s past, views of municipal authority and understandings of local history tended to connect in a mutually reinforcing framework that grounded present practice and an ideal future in historical tradition.3 Municipal record keeping thus entailed a great deal of historical writing. In addition to collections of urban privileges and statutes that established a narrative of the rights and liberties of the corps de ville and the town’s inhabitants, history writing could extend to registers of deliberations; notations of succeeding elections of urban officials; lists of the mayors, aldermen, and councilors (conseillers) who had served since the foundation of the corps de ville; inventories of documents; and by the fifteenth century, developed series of mayoral annals, often substantiated with extensive supporting documentation. When local historians turned to the hôtel de ville for historical evidence, therefore, they found much more than raw facts. Instead, they confronted a range of documentary series that were already the products of historical practice and that often suggested a predetermined narrative.4
Just as local historians engaged with and often reproduced the historical interpretations they found in the archives, the kinds of documents in existence and the concerns that prompted them helped to determine the variety of forms that published municipal history would take in the early modern period. Urban histories often devoted significant attention to the founding, privileges, and personnel of the corps de ville, and in doing so frequently emphasized both the fundamental role of municipal elites in shaping civic history and the significance of the town’s relationship with the French crown over time. Drawing on manuscript cartularies, election lists, and mayoral annals, historians often emphasized the stories they found there and had sometimes helped to shape as participants. These concerns included the expanding prerogatives of the city council, the municipal administration’s blamelessness for any instances of unrest or opposition, the long tradition of civic service exercised by prominent families, and their excellent stewardship of the public weal.
Yet these urban histories were not the only source of information on urban government and history available to local readers. The same era that saw the development of this genre in France also witnessed the proliferation of books of urban privileges, a related kind of published text designed to make important points about civic authority and historical tradition. Although compendia of privileges at first sight may seem simply to have reproduced a series of royal grants and judicial rulings on urban liberties for informational purposes, they were in reality carefully composed texts that conveyed a sense of urban history in multiple ways. The texts of the royal privileges themselves often contained extensive historical accounts that sought to narrate the relationship between the town and the kings of France in mutually beneficial ways.5 These series of privileges were often chosen and organized to emphasize a particular story—one that was often closely related to the reason that the work was published in the first place. Further, books of privileges also often contained a great deal of explicitly historical commentary, presented as introductions, explanatory links, and learned glosses on the texts provided.
Given that some urban histories also included the texts of privileges as proofs of their claims, it is helpful to see these two kinds of publications not as distinct categories but as existing within a spectrum of overlapping approaches to urban history writing. They included varying amounts of narrative and interpretation and inspired different degrees of direct, practical use, but they all drew on similar archival foundations and made comparable points about the civic past. This tendency for historical genres to overlap was reinforced by some of these works having been composed by the same authors, lending a certain consistency to their concerns and outlook. Further, as more of these works were published and gained in visibility, they inspired a noticeable comparative tendency across both cities and genres. Jean Chenu’s Recueil des antiquitez et privileges de la ville de Bovrges, et de plvsievrs autres villes capitales du royaume (1621) was the most obvious example of this comparative project, including material on a wide variety of French cities in addition to a detailed analysis of Bourges’s history and privileges. Nevertheless, the attempt to use the experiences of other French towns to comment on the rights of the author’s own was commonplace. In this way, works that were primarily concerned to detail the historical tradition of a particular locality could also be used to argue for changes to current practice elsewhere.
This chapter is thus concerned to examine the ways that urban historians used the documentary sources of the hôtel de ville to shape their writings and to analyze the ways that local histories and books of privileges cohered in presenting the urban past. First, it focuses on the various forms of history writing to be found in municipal archives, from registers of privileges and statutes to the fully formed mayoral chronicles that could be found in certain towns by the early modern period. These texts often presented extended, highly sophisticated narratives of the corps de ville’s attempts to obtain or preserve important privileges and to maintain or restore order in difficult situations. At the same time, they also preserved the memory of individual ambitions and familial conflicts, as those charged with recording municipal events used their privileged access to city registers to aggrandize themselves and to promote family members. Second, this chapter turns to the range of published texts that focused on the municipal historical tradition. These texts included the urban histories that focused on the origins and development of the town government, books of privileges that informed readers of the details of urban rights and liberties, and much work in between. All these texts drew on sources available in municipal archives and reflected the concerns of those sources in reproducing some of their historical interpretations and formats. Finally, it examines the ways these works influenced each other, both within the same city and across the French kingdom. Although each historical tradition emphasized the particularities of local experience, historical writers came to recognize common elements that made these experiences comparable and thus suggested successful practices that could profitably be employed at home.
1 Historical Writing at the Hôtel de Ville
Archival documents in municipal treasuries were often carefully composed and deliberately grouped to make important points about the civic past, particularly the ways that the urban administration had acquired and exercised important rights and the beneficial relationship that the town had maintained with its rulers. As the study of medieval cartularies makes clear, collections of documents testifying to the rights, properties, and decisions of particular institutions, whether ecclesiastical or municipal, could be framed or even outright manipulated to conform to a desired historical narrative or to make assertions over contested rights.6 Instances of creative forgery were seemingly less prevalent in French urban treasuries than in the ecclesiastical sphere, even if Loisel, lawyer in the Parlement of Paris, was so dubious of the authenticity of most of the early charters granted to the commune of his hometown of Beauvais that he decided not to include any of their texts in his local history.7 Nevertheless, urban registers recording series of royal privileges, judicial rulings, and municipal statutes frequently had a particular story to tell. For example, Bordeaux’s “Livre des bouillons,” a register of urban privileges first copied out in the early fifteenth century and then updated after the conclusion of the Hundred Years’ War, testified to the town’s excellent relationship with its rulers, who in the late medieval period happened to be the kings of England as the dukes of Guyenne. Described by its modern editor as “the monument of English domination in our area,” the register was carefully organized to demonstrate the legitimacy of the English dukes through peace treaties between them and the kings of France from 1259 to 1303; the favor the dukes showed to Bordeaux with the text of numerous privileges arranged mostly chronologically by reign from King John (r.1199–1216) to Henry iv (r.1399–1413); and the excellent commercial and political order that existed in the capital of Guyenne as a result of this relationship as demonstrated by the texts relating commercial privileges, rights of police, and electoral practices.8 It is true that later additions to the register acknowledged the transfer of Bordeaux’s allegiance to the kings of France at the end of the Hundred Years’ War with the transcription of Charles vii’s ratification of the terms of Bordeaux’s treaty of submission of 1451. Yet, because Charles vii upheld the vast majority of Bordeaux’s existing privileges, this text could be seen as a rounding out of a previous tradition rather than a sudden break with it. Only a narrative text from 1457 relating French success in pillaging English-held islands suggests the fundamental shift of loyalties that was taking place at the time.9
By contrast, Bordeaux’s “Livre des privilèges,” first redacted in 1564 and then supplemented through the reign of Henri iv, tells the story of how the city slowly reacquired its privileges after their confiscation by Henri ii as a result of Bordeaux’s disobedience during the Gabelle Revolt of 1548, when numerous communities in western France rebelled against the new system of royal taxation on salt. The subject is introduced early on in the register with Charles ix’s 1563 order that his confirmation of the 1451 treaty between Charles vii and Bordeaux be verified and registered by all appropriate parties, followed by the text of the treaty itself, now viewed as a founding document of Bordeaux’s privileges. Significantly, the text of Henri ii’s edict of August 1550 follows, narrating the previous sedition at Bordeaux and the king’s current decision to forgive the inhabitants’ trespasses and to re-establish the corps de ville, known as the jurade, on a modified model.10 The subsequent documents from the 1550s to 1561 then trace the slow process by which Bordeaux reacquired most of its previous privileges and rights of police, and as the register stood in 1564, this chronological narrative could be seen as having a natural conclusion in the 1563 order of Charles ix that served to introduce it.11 Subsequent additions to this collection of privileges up to the early seventeenth century virtually all pertained to the rights that Bordeaux had regained by the 1560s, thus confirming the register’s original focus.
In addition to these implicit emphases, some municipal archives contained significant examples of complex historical writing, complete with extended narratives and supporting documents, in the form of annals and mayoral chronicles. In Poitiers, for example, historical accounts organized by mayoral tenures were drafted beginning with Jehan Macé in 1406–8 and continued intermittently until the mayoralty of François Aubert in 1564–65.12 Although many of these accounts were relatively short, some of them achieved considerable length and sophistication. The narrative for Jasmes de Lauzon, avocat du roi, mayor in 1541–42, for example, begins with dedicatory verse to the mayor in Latin and French extolling the wisdom and excellence of those who formulate the laws, which are after all a gift from God, and then reports a speech praising Lauzon and the corps de ville for drafting extensive police ordinances and presenting them to the Parlement of Paris sitting in the Grands Jours of Poitiers for ratification.13 It is only after the entire contents of the police ordinances of 1541 and the record of their publication aloud is presented that the text turns to the unanimous election of Lauzon as mayor, his traditional visit of the fortifications, his exercise of mayoral justice against masters of the crafts who were not obeying ordinances, and most significantly, his success in having the police ordinances ratified at the Grands Jours.14 At the same time, the hôtel de ville’s lawsuit with the prestigious chapter of Saint-Hilaire-le-Grand was provisionally concluded in the city’s favor, an important victory considering that it had been the canons of Saint-Hilaire who were contesting the corps de ville’s rights to set police ordinances for their bourg in the first place.15 After the relation of the entry ceremony for the new bishop, the whole was then signed by Lauzon in verification of its authenticity.16 That a different, less elaborate mayoral chronicle also exists for this year implies that Lauzon was especially concerned to have the highlights of his tenure in office recorded in a particular way.17
Where Poitiers’s mayoral chronicles had points to make about discrete successes achieved under the guidance of individual mayors, other collections of annals presented a more sustained narrative over time. A decade after the consuls of Limoges began their “Registre consulaire” in 1508, they entered into a lawsuit with Henri ii, king of Navarre (r.1517–55), concerning his rights of lordship in the town as viscount of Limoges. References to this suit remained cryptic until 1538, when despite all the actions taken by the consuls to prevent the judgment, the Parlement of Paris ruled in favor of Navarre, confirming his rights of lordship, justice, and jurisdiction over the château and town of Limoges as its viscount. A second judgment of 1544 ruled provisionally on many further points of contention, including whether the inhabitants of Limoges could elect their consuls, who had police jurisdiction, and whether the consuls could call assemblies and arrange general processions.18 Once the terms of the dispute are clearly articulated, however, it becomes clear that they had been a major premise of the mayoral chronicles in the preceding decades. The detailed reports of criminal judgments, the elaborate account of the entry of Henri ii of Navarre into Limoges on January 7, 1530 preceded by the consuls’ act to preserve their rights the day before, and the description of the effective ways in which the consuls registered vagabonds and set them to work on the fortifications all speak to the issues at stake. Even the multiple processions that the consuls helped to arrange in order to seek the intervention of St. Martial, St. Loup, St. Aurelien, and the Virgin to put an end to frosts that were killing the vines reflect on the contest between the council and the viscount, implicitly arguing the town’s suit.19
Once Limoges had accepted the king of Navarre’s authority, however, he became a resource in difficult times. The consuls for the year of 1549 recorded the events of the Gabelle Revolt in Guyenne from June to August 1548, admitting that there was certainly unrest in Limoges but blaming it on “some individual vagabonds and foreign craftsmen, gathered and assembled in the town.” During the night, they rose in arms and sacked the salt hanger, holding the corps de ville in subjection for two days. On the third day, the inhabitants were finally able to gain the upper hand, but Limoges was still subjected to garrisons and punished as if it had truly rebelled. Here, the consulat turned to the king and queen of Navarre to intercede with the king to have some of their punitive sanctions allayed.20 The consuls of 1551 then repeated much of this narrative, still insisting that the uprising in Limoges was the work of foreigners and lowlifes, without the participation of the principal citizens. They then recorded their success in negotiating a payment to the king, so that they were finally able to remount all of the bells and clocks in the town, which had remained silent for the previous three years. Therefore, they concluded, it was in their year that everything was restored to its original order.21
This kind of historical narrative was hardly less complex than contemporary versions of similar events to be found in published sources. In attempting to explain the violence that occurred in Bordeaux during the Gabelle Revolt, which resulted in the death of Tristan de Moneins, lieutenant of the governor of Guyenne, all commentators attempted to lay the blame on the common people and strangers to the city and to exonerate the Parlement and jurade from culpability.22 Their relations of the intense disorder in Bordeaux were also followed by descriptions of the exemplary punishment of the city, with Paradin providing the entire text of the punitive edict of November 1548 and Jean Bouchet commenting that he had decided not to describe the city’s retribution in full since the king had since graciously rescinded it.23 For Paradin and Bouchet, the narrative of Bordeaux’s disobedience, punishment, and re-establishment in the king’s good graces offered an important lesson for the future, just as the consuls of Limoges in 1551 concluded their narrative with a moral: “And we pray to God to conserve and keep the said town and immediate area from re-descending into this kind of harm and distress, and that we live in peace under the sacred Christian faith and obedience to the king, our sovereign lord.”24
the present town remained firm in obedience to the king and sent deputies to Saint-Germain-en-Laye to assure His Majesty of this present town’s fidelity to his service. [They] were well received, and His Majesty honored the corps de ville by writing that this deputation had been agreeable to him and that he would remember it.26
This excellent beginning was followed by the more elaborate and self-congratulatory narrative of the double term of Jean Guymard in 1650–52, almost certainly drafted by the mayor himself. Guymard began his account of the Fronde with the arrest of the princes of Condé and Conti and the duke of Longueville and transcriptions of numerous letters that Angoulême received from the king, the governor, and other important officials urging a secure guard—instructions that the mayor fully carried out.27 Not only did these letters testify to the good relationship the town had with its ruler and record local efforts to preserve it from attack but they also extolled the mayor and glorified his role in the current crisis. Letters from Charles de Sainte-Maure, marquis of Montausier, governor of Angoumois, specifically mentioned that Guymard was his good friend and described the mayor as “so necessary” for the public good of his city.28 The narrative continued with the royal entry of Louis xiv, accompanied by the Queen Mother and Cardinal Mazarin, on July 25, 1650, during which the mayor gave a welcoming speech comparing the inhabitants’ current loyalty with their ancestors’ repulsion of the English during the Hundred Years’ War. The king also paid Angoulême the signal honor of going on foot to hear Mass at the cathedral, a favor he had reportedly not shown to any other town.29 With the resumption of war in Guyenne in 1651, the mayor took “continual care” to assure that the town maintained an exemplary guard, prompting the king to send a letter of October 27, 1651 thanking the inhabitants for their loyalty, expressing his pleasure with their state of defense, and promising to come to their aid should the prince of Condé’s army attack.30 The text thus highlighted Angoulême’s profound loyalty at the same time that it promoted the mayor’s active role in preserving it.
This self-serving message did not remain sequestered within the pages of an archival register, but was soon available to the public in a less prolix version. As Jean Sanson, lawyer and member of Angoulême’s corps de ville, was finishing his Noms et ordre des maires, eschevins et conseillers, de la maison commune d’Angoulesme (1651), he incorporated many of the basic elements of the narratives provided in the manuscript registers into his work. Although he omitted the letters from Montausier testifying to the governor’s warm feelings for the mayor, he included the text of a letter from Louis xiv, dated March 14, 1649, acknowledging the loyalty of Angoulême’s inhabitants and thanking them for it.31 After a description of the royal entry and visit, in which he similarly emphasized the king’s satisfaction with his stay and positive reception of the mayor, Sanson turned to an account of the valiant actions the mayor and inhabitants undertook in 1651 to guard the town against the armies of the princes of Condé and Conti. Here, the people had demonstrated “an invincible steadfastness in the king’s service,” and the mayor had undertaken “a marvelous labor” and shown “an assiduousness worthy of his zeal.” The king then acknowledged their efforts in his letter of October 27, 1651, transcribed in full.32 Historical writing within an institutional context, in this case the manuscript register, could thus serve as the first step to its wider diffusion, as in Sanson’s published work.
As Guymard’s self-congratulatory account of his mayoral administration suggests, historical memorials could easily be enlisted to justify or aggrandize oneself or one’s family. At Étampes in the second half of the seventeenth century, an interrelated group of municipal and royal officials adopted multiple genres of writing to justify and lament their town’s siege by royal troops in 1652, and one of them, René Hémard, took advantage of his term as mayor in 1667–70 to write extensive commentary in the register of deliberations, some of which directly pertained to his father-in-law’s actions as mayor during the Fronde.33 Since a long record of municipal service was a point of pride for many families, served as an important testament to nobility where civic offices were ennobling, and provided an argument for descendants to share in the honor and authority of office, mayoral annals could serve as a site where family ambitions and electoral conflicts were displayed. In Poitiers, for example, the mayoral election of 1506 pitted Maître Nicolas Claveurier against Maître Michel Favereau, both from established, well-connected families in the town, and the closeness of the vote led to a disputed election and a legal suit before the Parlement of Paris. This suit was of such intense interest to Poitiers’s corps de ville that a complete copy of the resulting judgment was transcribed into an inventory of the archives of the hôtel de ville being drawn up at the time.34 Likewise, mayoral chronicles testifying to the municipal traditions of both families were added in unused spaces of the current “Registre des statuts” long after the mayors in question had served. Thus, a short chronicle for Jean Claveurier, mayor in 1488–89, specified that he had been elected in consideration of multiple voyages he had made on the town’s behalf, for which he had received no remuneration, except that the corps de ville “did him the honor of giving him the charge of the mayoralty for this year.” Immediately following this addition and in the same hand appeared an entry for Maurice Claveurier, lieutenant général of the sénéchaussée and mayor in 1499–1500. On a previous page, however, could also be found the mention that Pierre Prevost had been elected mayor in 1493 and subsequently obtained the office of lieutenant général.35 The legal suit of 1506 made a point of noting that Prevost was Favereau’s father-in-law, and Jean Claveurier was the uncle of Nicolas Claveurier, so that this clan rivalry almost certainly dictated the added historical references.36
In Angoulême, certain mayors’ desires to memorialize their own achievements led to elaborate displays. Guillaume Calveau, mayor in 1517–18 and 1530, led the way with detailed painted images and acrostic poems, praising the royal family while representing himself in close proximity to it. The first poem celebrates the birth of two sons to François i and Queen Claude in 1517 and 1518 and assures them of the obedience of their Angoumois subjects. Calveau’s involvement cannot be missed, since the letters of the acrostic, picked out in red, form the name “M Guillaume Calveau Escuier.”37 For his mayoral term in 1530, Calveau supplied a second acrostic poem, mentioning not only the entry of Queen Eleanor, François i’s second wife, into Angoulême but also Calveau’s accomplishments as mayor. An accompanying miniature depicts Louise de Savoie, duchess of Angoulême, represented as Prudence, seated on a throne and holding the hand of the king. A man kneeling and holding up a representation of Angoulême to François i and his mother is without doubt meant to be Calveau himself, since the device “Privs mori” is written under him, and the text of the accompanying poem ends with what must have been his full motto: “Plus tost mourir que faire vng Lache tour” (Better to die than to perform a cowardly act).38 The mayor thus found a particularly striking way to get across the message both of his good service and his proximity to the duchess and king.
In addition to these carefully planned representations of the mayor’s effectiveness and prestige, less formal writings also bore witness to the desire of Angoulême’s mayors to leave their mark on civic memory. When Itier Julien served as mayor in 1541–42, he left a relatively well-developed chronicle that reported his achievements in a congratulatory way. Thus, not only were thieves and vagabonds brought to justice but the chronicle emphasizes that this delivery of the town from a longstanding scourge had been accomplished “by his good management, diligence, and pursuit.” Similarly, when the mayor called out the inhabitants of Angoulême in arms, he could be seen “at the center of the bands … mounted and fully armed.”39 In addition to this relatively common means of memorializing his successes, however, Julien also left his mark all over the municipal register. In a blank space left in the original list of mayors copied out in the register, it is noted out of chronological order that Julien was elected “par tout le commun” in 1541 and continued as mayor in 1542, while next to the name of Therot Jullyen, one of the peers of Angoulême in 1498, is marked that his son, Ythier Julien, was elected mayor in 1541.40 The mayor also could not resist reporting his election as alderman on the death of Helies de Lagear in 1542, a fact that he added to the register in two separate places.41 In Périgueux in 1653, a conflict broke out over whether the mayor or the procureur-syndic (legal administrator) had the right to keep that town’s Registre-mémorial in his possession.42 As the behavior of the urban officials of Angoulême and Poitiers demonstrates, this question was not insignificant, since physical possession of the register enabled its holder to shape civic memory in a way favorable to himself and his family.
The importance of familial tradition, especially in towns where holding office conferred nobility, led to a particular interest in the early modern period of recording the long series of individuals who had held civic office. Because of the destruction of records in the late Middle Ages, or lack of record-keeping to begin with, however, it was often difficult for individuals in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to ascertain when their town had first obtained the right to elect a mayor and who had served in that office since its creation. When the corps de ville of Angoulême decided to assemble and record a list of the names of all the previous mayors in 1499, the clerk charged with the task could only find names beginning in 1460.43 Although historian François de Corlieu was certain that mayors had existed in Angoulême since the early thirteenth century, Sanson maintained that the office had only been created in 1373, when Charles v rewarded the town for its expulsion of English troops with an administration possessing all of the rights of those of St. Jean-d’Angély and La Rochelle, including the right of nobility for the mayor and aldermen. Still, the first mayor Sanson could locate held office in 1390.44 In Poitiers, the mayoral record was more robust, with some names remaining from the thirteenth century. Uncertainty persisted, however, leading to the drafting of numerous lists of mayors, none of which were exactly alike. The list of mayors first copied into a seventeenth-century compendium initially covered the period of 1298–1629 and was extracted from a small parchment booklet containing a mayoral list for the period of 1333–1629 and including an armillary of the mayors from 1462 to 1545. It was later corrected and updated to 1661.45 A second mayoral list, covering the period of 1332–1632, with a later update to 1727 and corrections to the first part of the list, was copied into another municipal register, but despite the similarity of period covered, the lists in these two registers differ noticeably for the mayors holding office between 1332 and 1371.46 Yet a third list provides the names and arms of the mayors of Poitiers from 1372, when Charles v granted the mayors and aldermen the privilege of nobility, up to 1644. The mayors provided for the late fourteenth century are not identical to those in the other lists, nor do any of the lists exactly match the mayoral list provided in the new edition of Bouchet’s Annales d’Aquitaine published in 1644.47
The historical record in the hôtel de ville was thus a multilayered and complex one. Numerous organizers, transcribers, and authors had disposed and copied the existing documents in deliberate ways or drafted texts to make specific points about the history of the corps de ville and the town at large. Since holding civic office conferred prestige, authority, and sometimes valuable privileges, this documentation could also be enlisted to highlight the participation and contributions of particular individuals or families. Given the prevalence of historical interpretation in the archives, it should be no surprise that published texts that engaged with municipal history drew heavily on the messages and formats they found there. In doing so, they publicized to a much wider readership the historical assumptions underlying civic authority.
2 Municipal History in Print
Many, but by no means all, urban histories devoted attention to municipal history, here defined as the development of the group of urban residents as a communal body with a governing council selected from within its ranks. Even though many local historians insisted that the origins of their community long predated the existence of the kings of France, they still traced the development of the rights and liberties of the inhabitants and the urban administration through the series of privileges that were generally carefully preserved in the municipal archives. For example, when Loisel turned his attention from French law to local history at the end of his life, he identified Beauvais with Bratispantium, the head town of the Belgian Bellovaci at the time of Caesar, an aristocratic community governed by its own senate.48 This form of government, he speculated, continued under the Romans in the form of decurions, under the Merovingians and Carolingians in the form of counts, aldermen, and consuls, and finally under the current line of French kings as mayors, governors, peers, capitouls (town councilors at Toulouse), jurats, and others. Thus, when Louis vi (r.1108–37) came to the throne, the Beauvaisins requested that he confirm and continue their commune with its existing rights. The king duly issued a charter that does not survive, but the text was mentioned in charters issued by his son, Louis vii (r.1137–80).49 These privileges were again confirmed by Philippe ii (r.1180–1223) in 1182, the first text to mention the thirteen peers of the city and permitting them to elect a mayor from among their ranks—and revealingly, the first text to be copied into a cartulary of the town’s most important documents early in the sixteenth century.50 Loisel then traced the history of the conflict between the commune and the bishop over judicial and fiscal rights in Beauvais, a contest mediated by royal institutions. However, Beauvais’s greatest freedoms, he alleged, were accorded by Louis xi in 1472, in gratitude for the town’s resistance against a Burgundian siege. This assessment of the importance of the 1472 royal grant must have been shared, since editions of the Privileges de la ville et commune de Beauvais published around 1611 and in 1634 begin with this text.51 Thus, Loisel, whose uncle, Pierre Loisel, had served as mayor of Beauvais, carefully charted the development of the commune’s slow accretion of privileges, thanks to a series of specific royal judgments and favors promoting them over the bishops’ competing claims, the texts of which he had clearly examined in manuscript. In this historical delineation, moreover, he was able to argue both that Beauvais had possessed the attributes of a commune since its time as the capital of an ancient Belgian people and that its rights of governance ultimately derived from the kings of France, since, Loisel did not fail to point out, no community holds the right to assemble without royal permission.52
This dual sense that civic association was a fundamental attribute of existing communities dating back to antiquity and that it was dependent on a series of specific royal grants and their confirmations was common in local history writing. Like Loisel, Adrien de la Morlière, canon of the cathedral of Amiens, identified a charter granted by Philippe ii as a founding document of Amiens’s commune, while nevertheless maintaining that his town had possessed mayors and privileges during the reign of its previous counts and even before. This was due to the fact that “peoples existed before kings, and societies of men assembled together under the rule of order were in being before any superior administered or ruled them, either in the temporal or spiritual [domain].”53 He then provided a history of Amiens organized by the tenures of its mayors beginning in 1228 but pointed out that it should have been possible to provide information from an earlier period, were it not for the lack of curiosity of previous inhabitants.54 Despite his view that any privileges that the kings of France accorded to the city were “nothing but clarifications of the ancient immunities of the town,” La Morlière placed his greatest emphasis on the record of loyalty and good relations that bound Amiens and the kings of France, even though the town had spent time under the rule of the dukes of Burgundy from 1435 to 1470.55 Indeed, La Morlière’s entire presentation seems focused on implicitly demonstrating the unfairness of Henri iv’s edict of November 1597 from Paris depriving Amiens of its privileges as punishment for Spanish troops having gained control of the city on March 11 of that year. For the canon, the town’s previous record of service should have vouched for its current loyalty, but the Amiénois who had remained within the walls in an attempt to restore French control were instead executed as traitors and the town’s excellent privileges, enjoyed for all time, reduced to nothing.56 This sense of loss, the historian continued, had been reflected in his presentation of local history, which he had once refrained from extending beyond the tenure of the town’s last mayor in 1595–96. In history, however, it was necessary to present the bad with the good, and La Morlière continued to hope that Louis xiii (r.1610–43) would restore the privileges revoked by his father.57
The narrative of municipal history, therefore, could not help but evoke a town’s relations with the French crown, even when there existed a pronounced tradition of local autonomy or that relationship had not always been smooth. This focus rested on the contemporary assumption that the history of an urban community was grounded in the chronology of its privileges, sometimes supplemented by a record of its officials, who likewise based their authority on royal grant. Thus, the kinds of archival sources that attested to those privileges could have a large impact on published urban histories. In Bordeaux, for example, the manuscript “Livre des bouillons” and “Livre des privilèges” noticeably influenced the history of the city that Gabriel de Lurbe provided in his Bvrdigalensivm rervm chronicon (1589), quickly translated and published as the Chroniqve bovrdeloise (1594). For the medieval period, Lurbe noted that once Eleanor of Aquitaine married King Henry ii of England (r.1154–89) in 1152, all of Guyenne acknowledged the English crown and Bordeaux received the right to elect its own mayor by royal charter in 1173.58 He then recorded that King Edward iii (r.1327–77), the “benefactor of the Bordelais,” confirmed all of the city’s privileges in 1360 and reported extensively on the actions of Edward, Prince of Wales (the Black Prince), in Guyenne in this period. Edward iii’s concern to “restore the state of the town to better order” in 1378 then led Lurbe to explain how Bordeaux’s jurade was composed and functioned at this time.59 The influence of the “Livre des bouillons,” with its emphasis on the privileges granted to Bordeaux by the kings of England, is evident, and Lurbe specifically identified this register as one of his sources for his history.60
Just as the “Livre des bouillons” informed the medieval portions of the Chroniqve bovrdeloise, the “Livre des privilèges” underwrote much of its treatment of the period after the Gabelle Revolt of 1548. Immediately after Lurbe had described the uprising and the disastrous loss of privileges that followed, he related how Henri ii, acting as a clement prince, had revoked the punitive judgment, reestablished the jurade, and restored many other privileges. Subsequently, both François ii and Charles ix followed in their father’s footsteps by restoring the mayor and jurats’ rights of criminal justice and permitting the great bell to be rehung in its bell tower, respectively.61 As previously noted, this narrative of Bordeaux’s slow re-acquisition of its privileges was a major theme of the “Livre des privilèges.” Given that Lurbe served as the procureur-syndic of the jurade from 1582 to 1595, he certainly had extensive access to these archival sources, and it is not surprising to see him incorporating their points of view into his history. Nevertheless, that kind of appropriation was not obligatory in a municipal servant. When Jean Darnal, previously clerk of the jurade, came to comment on Lurbe’s history and update it to 1619, he clearly rejected his predecessor’s emphasis on the good relationship that Bordeaux had maintained with the kings of England. Seeing the English as enemies and taking a stance of loyalty to the French crown, Darnal remarked that the period in which Henry ii became duke of Guyenne marked the beginning of great problems in France. When the French held Guyenne, he noted, everything had been peaceful, but when the English finally departed, they left behind a great hatred of them in the areas they had controlled. Rather than emphasizing all of the privileges that the English kings had lavished on his city, he preferred to note the extensive liberties guaranteed to Bordeaux through its treaty of reduction of 1451.62 Once Bordeaux had remained loyal to Henri iv during the period of the Catholic League, it was likely easier to present the city’s relationship with the French crown in this more traditional light. Given that Darnal’s Supplement (1620) accompanied Lurbe’s original text in publications throughout the seventeenth century, however, we can only speculate how readers responded to these two conflicting versions of their city’s history presented in a single book.
Published urban histories thus drew on municipal archives and focused on the story of the gradual accretion of privileges that was often represented there. This emphasis, though, was not unique to urban histories per se, but was equally, if not more, central to the books of urban privileges that began to be published in the 1570s and multiplied in number over the course of the seventeenth century. Although books of privileges may at first appear to contain simple transcriptions of documents and thus to be purely informational texts, they nevertheless provided a great deal of historical analysis and argument. It is thus fruitful to see them as a historicizing genre related to, and indeed overlapping with, urban history writing in both methodology and outlook.
the said supplicants were besieged from all sides by the English, our former enemies and adversaries, who for about two months held them in great distress and necessity, to such an extent that they no longer had anything on which to live. [N]evertheless, in maintaining their loyalty to us, they preferred to elect death or resign themselves to fate rather than to fall subject to the enemy, and they maintained themselves and resisted them so virtuously that even though [the English] were at the siege in great numbers, by the grace of Our Lord and the good aid and help we gave them, the said siege was raised.
As a result, many of the enemy were killed or dispersed, a victory that inaugurated a turning point in the king’s fortunes and eventually allowed him to regain his kingdom.63 Thus, Montargis’s crucial role in supporting the French monarchy in a period of crisis was deployed in every version of the town’s privileges and stood as a justification for their preservation and extension in the future. When a new edition was published in 1662, a prefatory letter addressed to Louis xiv repeated much of the preferred historical narrative presented by the texts of the privileges, informing the king that in holding out against the English siege for two months, the inhabitants had enabled Charles vii to come to their aid and then participated actively in the counterattack against the enemies of the kingdom. The letter then requested that Louis xiv uphold the privileges that were the result of a predecessor’s gratitude and ensure that they could be passed down intact to future generations.64
Most books of privileges were composed and published in particular circumstances with particular ends in view, and so had specific arguments to make, often conceived of and deployed historically. In 1634, for example, the prévôt des marchands (mayor) and aldermen of Lyon redacted and published a compendium of privileges designed to reassert consular authority in several areas of urban administration, including rights of police, control over the positions of municipal accountant and secretary, and authority to call general assemblies and post citizens to guard duty.65 The resulting Privileges, franchises et immvnitez octroyees par les roys tres-chrestiens aux preuost des marchands, escheuins & habitans de la ville de Lyon (1634), therefore, completely reproduces all of the texts compiled for an edition of Lyon’s privileges published in 1619, but then includes numerous series of additional documents presented in a logical development of texts designed to emphasize the consulat’s rights through a controlled historical narrative. For example, in regard to the aldermen’s rights to oversee the bureau charged with urban police matters, the text first provides the general edict of Charles ix of January 1572 creating such bureaus, followed by letters patent of January 18 in which the king insisted that his edict be registered by the presidial court of Lyon and the bureau set up. These inaugural texts are then supplemented by an article further defining the terms of office of those elected to the bureau, seemingly copied from Antoine Fontanon’s Ordonnances rather than an original document; documents demonstrating an argument in 1633 concerning who had the right to appoint sergeants for the police; and concluding with the ruling of the Conseil d’État dated June 20, 1633 upholding the rights of the prévôt des marchands and aldermen of Lyon to name police officials. The narrative arc to this group of texts should have been obvious to readers, but just in case it was not, a title announced that it would include an “edict, letters patent, and ordinance of the king concerning ordinary police matters in the town of Lyon, the nomination of judges, and the establishment of its tribunal.”66
The concern to embed these questions in a robust historical narrative is revealed in the Lyon book of privileges’ presentation of the aldermen’s rights to assign guard duty, call general assemblies and penalize absentees, and take appropriate measures during outbreaks of plague. This story begins in 1581, when Henri iii recited in letters patent of September 3 that he had been informed by the aldermen of Lyon that the town was then so afflicted with plague that no-one was obeying their orders. The most notable inhabitants were setting a bad example by not doing guard duty and, when the aldermen called a general assembly to deliberate on what measures should be taken in the emergency, they did not show up, leaving an insufficient number of attendees to deliberate. The king therefore confirmed the aldermen’s rights to rule on these matters and to impose fines for noncompliance. By 1585, however, it was clear that the king’s orders were not being obeyed, resulting in further letters patent of May 10, 1585 confirming the preceding ones, followed by orders of the governor of Lyon requiring that the king’s orders be obeyed. When the consulat desired to have these prescriptions confirmed by Henri iv in 1607, moreover, they did not act on their own but applied to Philibert de la Guiche, governor and lieutenant general for the king in Lyon, for his support. After considering the case, La Guiche reports that after the previous troubles of the civil wars, it is now necessary to renew these measures, and that in light of Lyon’s obedience and fidelity to the king, he fully supports the confirmation of the rights granted in the letters patent of 1581 and 1585. The whole episode then resulted in the letters patent of Henri iv dated June 22, 1607 granting the requested confirmation.67
Books of privileges thus presented a series of historical claims designed to demonstrate the town’s excellent relationship with the French crown at key moments in the kingdom’s past and the valuable privileges that had resulted from it, as well as the longstanding record of the right of the corps de ville to wield authority over the urban community. These attributes made these compendia of documents inherently historical publications, but their tendency to include directly overlapping kinds of writing with those to be found in urban histories meant that these genres were even more closely related.
Collections of privileges sometimes included developed historical passages. The Recveil des privileges de la ville de Bovrges (1643), for example, begins with a short introduction, entitled “Sommaire description de la ville de Bovrges.” Touching on all of the highlights of Bourges’s historical tradition in antiquity, it mentions that Bourges was known as the Gallic head city of Avaricum in the time of Caesar; that it was the capital of First Aquitaine under the Romans; that St. Ursin was its first bishop, and its archbishops retain the status not only of metropolitans but also of primates and patriarchs, thanks to the city’s status in Gallo-Roman times; and that five disastrous fires had befallen the city. If this short history should prove insufficient, readers are directed to a general history of the province that a better writer will produce.68 The better writer indicated was almost certainly Labbe, Jesuit and erudite historian from Bourges, whom the mayor and aldermen of Bourges originally requested to contribute a historical introduction to the work but who withdrew his participation in light of a dispute with the publisher. Since Labbe published the text in question shortly afterward, it is clear that the mayor and aldermen had originally envisioned an extensive historical introduction to accompany their collection of the privileges of Bourges.69 When the corps de ville put out a new edition of Bourges’s privileges in 1659 and 1661, moreover, the revised work included a newly drafted introduction providing an “Abbregé de l’antiquité, privileges et noblesse, de la ville de Bourges.” This text clearly engaged with Chaumeau’s Histoire de Berry (1566) in holding that Bourges was not in fact founded by Gomer, grandson of Noah, but that, as the capital of Celtic Gaul, it was the site from which many inhabitants set out in 615 bce to found Bohemia, Austria, and Swabia, establishing lands whence their descendants, the Franks, returned to France hundreds of years later. According to this introduction, inhabitants from Bourges also founded Bordeaux, and the archbishops of Bourges were the only French prelates to be patriarchs of the Roman Catholic Church.70 This exposé of Bourges’s history was meant only to whet the appetites of readers, since a list of existing histories of Bourges, both published and in manuscript, concluded the account for further consultation.71
If books of privileges sometimes contained and referred to historical writings and if urban histories could draw from collections of privileges, both kinds of texts could also include the lists of municipal officials and emphases on familial traditions that proved so common in the archives of the hôtel de ville. In his Privileges octroyez avx maires, eschevins, bovrgeois et habitans de la ville et cite de Chalon svr Saone (1604), Bernard Durand included a yearly list of the mayors of Chalon-sur-Saône, beginning in 1565, when the office of mayor was created, and continuing until 1603. Immediately following the published list, the printer left room to fill in subsequent mayors up to 1623, and in a copy owned by the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the mayors from 1604 to 1618 are duly recorded.72 In Tours and Bourges, as well, books of privileges included lists of the mayors of those communities.73
but having been told, as the chapter on the mayoralty was in press, that there is no book on the antiquities of towns in which the names of the jurats, capitouls, maiours, mayors, aldermen, and consuls are not recorded, … I inserted their names according to the order that was given to me.
Despite this seeming requirement for all urban histories, however, Le Maire thought better of this choice and omitted the list of the aldermen of Orléans from his 1648 edition.76
As in the manuscript registers, this attention to the record of individuals having served in the corps de ville in published urban histories could easily reflect the familial ambitions and instances of factionalism frequently prevalent in urban administrative bodies. Le Maire’s list of the aldermen of Orléans, for example, includes the texts of letters of Henri iii and Henri iv written to express royal satisfaction with Mayor François Colas, sieur des Francs, and his son, Michel Colas, alderman of Orléans, in the 1580s—just the kind of self-aggrandizement that was readily copied into collections of mayoral annals or registers of elections and perhaps one of the reasons that the entire list of aldermen was omitted in the 1648 edition.77 For his part, La Morlière’s record of the mayors of Amiens captures the intense electoral squabbles that occurred at the beginning of the sixteenth century. When Pierre de May, mayor in 1507, obtained royal letters calling for his continuation in office in 1508, La Morlière notes that there were “hard words” in the hôtel de ville, and the mayor was blamed “for having procured [the continuation] out of his own particular interest to the prejudice of the town’s privileges.” Further, although the mayor of 1510 was installed by a royal commissioner to prevent any illicit electioneering on the part of May and his son-in-law, by 1511 May was back in the mayoral seat.78 The professional background of the mayors of Amiens was a going concern in the sixteenth century, and La Morlière’s interest in these quarrels may also have stemmed from his desire to demonstrate how socially prominent the mayors had once been.79
Books of privileges, too, could be harnessed to memorialize social interests or to commemorate the victory of one factional group over another. At Bourges in the mid-seventeenth century, the municipal government was prone to extensive factional fighting among the ranks of local royal officials and gens de loi (men of the law), and these disputes came to inform the books of privileges published at the behest of the urban administration. Although the corps de ville of Bourges had published a collection of the city’s privileges in 1643, a new compendium appeared in 1659. At first sight, the reasons for this publication are unclear, given that the most recent texts included had to do with Louis xiv’s visit to Bourges in 1651, when the town abandoned its flirtation with the princes of Condé and Conti during the Fronde and fully acknowledged its obedience to the young king. During his stay in Bourges, Louis xiv confirmed the town’s privileges, declared that mayors of Bourges had to be natives of the city and aldermen of ten-years’ residence, and replaced the entire personnel of the municipal government and militia with the exception of Robert Hodeau, captain of the quarter of Saint-Privé.80 Although the inclusion of the letters by which the king ousted the entire corps de ville may seem to contradict the usual desire of French cities to represent themselves in an entirely positive light, this partially veiled reference to the politics of the Fronde may have been one of the main points of the text. The 1659 book of privileges also included a list of the mayors and aldermen of Bourges up to 1658, but likely did not go further since the election of 1659 was hotly disputed, with Hodeau, the popular choice for mayor, eventually losing out as a result of the complex maneuvering of the lieutenant général (with whom he did not get on), the president of the presidial court, the outgoing mayor, and the governor of the province.81 This implicit context was then made clear in 1661, when a new edition of the privileges of Bourges included a Bref récit of the election of 1659, a pamphlet narrating the electoral contest and demonstrating that the hôtel de ville did nothing but carry out the commands of the king and the governor throughout the proceedings.82 As if further to establish the legitimacy of the winners of 1659, the 1661 edition also contained an account of the mayoral year of 1660 (for which the previous mayor was continued in office by royal command), which, among other things, recounted the establishment of a general hospital in Bourges, an action but for which “there remained nothing to render this last mayoralty famous to posterity.”83 In this case, an extensive collection of urban privileges was adapted to make veiled (or to contemporaries, not so veiled) reference to the factional conflicts of the preceding decades and to mark the victory of one group over another.
Urban publications were open to this kind of manipulation since the local record of royal privileges generally inscribed a series of contests between different social groups within the town, resulting in a specific configuration of urban authority.84 Historical texts therefore interwove these social logics into their presentations of the past, with varying degrees of explicitness. This result was only amplified by the fact that historians who devoted attention to municipal history were almost always either one-time members of the corps de ville themselves, like Bouchet, Lurbe, Darnal, Sanson, and Bernard Durand, or had obtained their materials from associates who were, like Paradin, Loisel, Le Maire, and La Morlière. Together, these men created a literature on urban government and civic authority in early modern France that was at the same time rooted in the histories of particular communities and of relevance to a broader group of urban elites throughout the French kingdom.
3 The Comparative Impulse and Its Effects
While each French town cherished its own historical tradition(s), the large variety of sources focused on municipal history in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries tended to reflect and influence each other within and across communities. This confluence stemmed from the fact that within a given town, the same people could be responsible for advertising and preserving the rights and privileges of the corps de ville and for articulating a historical narrative that set the city’s past in the best possible light. It also arose from the tendency of men of letters and men of the law to look for precedents and comparisons that would burnish their own preferences and points of view. In Toulouse in the early sixteenth century, for example, a small group of individuals was responsible for inventorying the city’s archives, collecting and articulating its privileges, recording its history in the form of annals, and fashioning a civic historical tradition in print. Thus, Nicolas Bertrand, who authored an Opus de Tholosanorum gestis ab urbe condita in 1515, had served as a capitoul in 1499–1500 and 1510–11, and drew on a manuscript account of the founding of the city first imagined in the mid-fifteenth century and copied into the “Livre blanc,” a cartulary begun in 1295 and recopied in 1539–40.85 Bertrand’s history was subsequently annotated and translated into French by Guillaume de la Perrière, prior of the Collège Saint-Mathurin and author of the elaborate municipal annals of Toulouse for the years of 1538–41 and 1548–53. Further, when the capitouls ordered the recopying of the “Livre blanc” in 1539, they chose La Perrière to provide a historical introduction to it. In his “Catalogue et summaire de la fundation, principalles coustumes, libertez, droictz, privileges et aultres actes des cité, conté, capitoulz, citoyens et habitans de Tholoze” (1539–40), he emphasized the ancient freedoms of the Toulousains and their patrimonial right to elect their own representatives, the capitouls. The reference to antiquity and invocation of a tradition of liberties dating back to Roman rule were deliberate, since in 1522 Pierre Salomon, the municipal secretary, had quietly changed the name of the city council from the capitulum (chapter) to the capitolium (capitol or capitoulat) to reflect this association, and in 1549, La Perrière would explicitly compare this body to the Roman senate.86 Antoine Noguier, La Perrière’s son-in-law and successor in drafting the municipal annals from 1555 to 1558, then published his own Histoire tolosaine in 1559.87
Although Toulouse’s self-conscious re-imagination of its past as an important means to support the privileges of the municipal government against the competing ambitions of the local parlement was precocious, several cities owed the elaboration of a municipal historical tradition to a productive connection between local history writing and formulations of urban privileges, sometimes by the same authors. In Lyon, Rubys, procureur général (chief legal administrator) of the consulat, may have decided to draft his work, Les privileges, franchises et immunitez octroyees par les roys treschrestiens, aux consuls, eschevins, manans & habitans de la ville de Lyon (1573) in response to two other texts treating the history and institutional organization of Lyon: Nicolay’s “Généralle description de l’antiqve et célèbre cité de Lyon” and Paradin’s Memoires de l’histoire de Lyon. Although Nicolay dedicated his description of Lyon to Catherine de’ Medici in December 1573, he was in Lyon and actively collecting materials for the work in 1570.88 Paradin, for his part, dedicated his work to the consuls of Lyon on March 15, 1573, giving Rubys sufficient time to read it and accumulate dissatisfaction with it by the time he dedicated his own Privileges, franchises et immunitez to François de Mandelot, governor of Lyonnais, and the consuls of Lyon in August 1573.89 While Paradin mentions that the major privilege of the consulat consists in the right of nobility of the councilors and their offspring, his lack of specificity regarding this privilege may have motivated Rubys to dedicate his entire work to providing the text of these letters patent of Charles viii (r.1483–98) of 1495 from Lyon, followed by subsequent royal confirmations, a short history of the city’s foundation, and most originally, a discussion of the qualities of nobility and virtue that should characterize the consuls. Indeed, Paradin’s invocation of the reason, stability, and good intentions that were necessary for all councilors stood at variance with Rubys’s emphasis on the noble virtue and knowledge of letters essential for civic office.90
Over the following decades, Rubys’s representation of the workings of the consulat, social logic of urban government, and history of his city would prove foundational. Despite being deprived of his position of procureur général in 1594 as a result of his record of adamant support of the Catholic League, many of his recommendations laid out in 1573 were subsequently implemented.91 These included his assertion that the form of the consulat should be altered from twelve councilors to four aldermen and a prévôt des marchands, following the model of Paris, and his notion that councilors who hailed from families with a history of municipal office holding (patrices) should hold precedence over those who did not.92 With the publication of his Histoire véritable de la ville de Lyon in 1604, moreover, Rubys had the opportunity both to emphasize the significant role that he had played in key municipal functions, such as ensuring the grain supply in 1573 and welcoming Henri iii to the city in 1574, and to argue for the importance and authority of the procureur général in maintaining the privileges and dignity of the corps de ville in a system where the prévôt des marchands and aldermen barely had time to learn their duties.93 As Yann Lignereux has argued, Rubys’s conception of Lyon’s historical relationship with the French crown became the guiding one for at least a generation.94 Further, his focus on the charter of 1495 as a founding document in the story of Lyon’s privileges in his Privileges, franchises et immunitez was repeated in subsequent collections of the city’s privileges, which began with this text and its confirmations, even though both Paradin’s Mémoires de l’histoire de Lyon and Rubys’s own later Histoire véritable de la ville de Lyon rather laid emphasis on an agreement between the archbishop and inhabitants of Lyon from 1320 as an essential declaration of the inhabitants’ liberties and right to consular government.95
In Bordeaux, Lurbe, jurat in 1580–81 and procureur-syndic from 1582 to 1595, and Darnal, jurat in 1602–3 and 1620 and clerk from 1604 to 1619, played a similar role in founding a historical tradition and mapping the authority of the jurade, the articulation of which would endure until the beginning of the eighteenth century.96 As Lurbe was translating his Latin chronicle of Bordeaux’s history into French and bringing it up to date to 1594, he also drafted Les anciens statvts de la ville et cite de Bovrdeavs (1593). An edition of the police statutes confirmed in the jurade of July 14, 1542, this publication was critical in informing the inhabitants of Bordeaux on such matters as the composition and electoral practices of the jurade, the procedures and costs of the municipal court, and the statutes governing a large variety of crafts. Yet the Anciens statvts was also an inherently historical text, demonstrating Lurbe’s expertise and reflecting his interest in how municipal structures and authority had shifted over time. In regard to the organization of the municipal government, for example, the original statutes had relied heavily on the descriptions provided in the “Livre des bouillons,” while updating some of their terminology (the conseillers of the fourteenth century became the prud’hommes of the sixteenth) and order of presentation.97 Lurbe then commented on the changes that had occurred since 1542, particularly following the reorganization of the jurade by Henri ii in 1550, but also as a result of intervening judgments of the Parlement of Bordeaux. Thus, the previous organization of a perpetual mayor aided by twelve jurats had been transformed to a corps de ville consisting of a mayor elected biannually flanked by six jurats, the office of under-mayor had been discontinued, and parlementary rulings had specified that jurats must wait five years before being eligible to serve again and that the clerk would replace two of the jurats and prud’hommes in drawing up an account of the elections.98 This interest in municipal institutions clearly reflected what Lurbe had previously recounted in his Chroniqve bovrdeloise, where he also made a point of articulating how the organization of the jurade had been transformed as a result of the Gabelle Revolt of 1548. He also pointed out in his Anciens statvts that a ruling of 1538 had upheld the jurats’ rights of precedence on the high benches when attending audiences of the Parlement, a judgment that he also did not fail to mention in his history.99 Lurbe also added considerable information on the prerogatives of the mayor and jurats in regard to the guard of the city, particularly their responsibility to hold the keys to the gates and fortified towers, a right confirmed by royal letters patent of Charles ix in 1566 and Henri iv in 1591. These particular rights were clearly deemed crucial to the authority of the jurade, since they formed a large part of the documents added to the 1618 edition of the Privileges des bovrgeois de la ville et cité de Bourdeaus when it was updated from its original version of 1574.100 In publishing his Anciens statvts alongside his Chroniqve bovrdeloise, Lurbe may have been concerned to record decades of experience and information concerning his city and to provide a historical cushion to the picture of civic order and municipal authority the statutes provided. These motivations may explain why he simply added the texts of new statutes without deleting any of the old ones, such as the new plague regulations of 1588, and why he provided a good deal of information that was interesting, but not of any practical use in maintaining public order.101
Lurbe’s works on the history and civic administration of Bordeaux became the pillars of the city’s historical tradition, since subsequent works did not replace them but rather built on them chronologically and thematically. In the invocation to the reader of his Supplement des chroniqves de la noble ville & cité de Bourdeaus, Darnal explains that he had undertaken the work at the request of his fellow jurats, who asked him to provide a continuation of Lurbe’s original chronicle. It was only when erudite friends requested that he expand on ancient history and speak in greater depth of the city’s affairs that he determined to do so, and indeed, he greatly expanded on Lurbe’s analysis by making use of the registers of deliberation of the jurade where Lurbe had only canvassed the registers of statutes and privileges.102 Still, he refrained from retreading ground that Lurbe had already fully surveyed, including a detailed account of the Gabelle Revolt of 1548, the reinstitution of Bordeaux’s privileges thereafter, and the new organization of the jurade imposed by Henri ii in 1550.103 Darnal’s text therefore presupposed familiarity with Lurbe’s, an assumption borne out by the two works being published together. Subsequent local historical efforts built on this pattern, providing updates for the periods of 1620–71 and 1671–1700, so that the edition of the Chronique bordeloise of 1703 included the texts by Lurbe and Darnal, followed by the two continuations.104 Likewise, when Lurbe’s Anciens statvts was republished in 1612, the new edition contained no rewriting and very few updates. By 1701, this 1612 edition had become very rare, so a new edition was produced.105 While this version did provide many additions of craft statutes decreed since 1593 (the 1612 edition was not exhaustive in this respect), it preserved the distinction between the original statutes of 1542 and Lurbe’s commentary on them and marked any new material with a hand sign. There were no updates, however, to the portions of the text focused on the jurade, including the elections of the mayor and jurats, their oaths of office, and the duties of other municipal officials.106 In regard to the history of Bordeaux, the expression of public order, and the relationship between the two, therefore, Lurbe’s original view, as it was elaborated on by Darnal, remained in force for generations.
Although urban histories were focused on a particular community’s past, and a town’s record of privileges testified to specific rights enjoyed by discrete groups, the concerns underlying municipal historical writing tended to prompt comparison across traditions and locales. At a time when the duties of parlementary judges, royal secretaries, notaries, and many others were being historicized, theorized, and explained, town councilors and mayors in France had no general treatises informing them about the role of cities within the kingdom or the nature of French municipal government. It may have been this lack that led urban elites to examine the productions from other towns, with an eye to establish models for their own efforts and to ascertain best practices that could be imposed at home. Just as jurists looked for parallel cases with rulings to support their arguments, historians built on the works of others to support their points of view.
The most developed example of this comparative tendency was Chenu’s Recueil des antiquitez et privileges de la ville de Bovrges, et de plvsievrs autres villes capitales du royaume (1621). An expansion of his 1603 Privileges octroyez avx maires et eschevins, bourgeois, & habitans de la ville & septaine de Bourges, the later work provided the texts of Bourges’s main privileges with extensive commentary and historical context, making it a kind of hybrid production.107 Yet it also provided considerable information on the organization and privileges of the municipal governments of many other cities in France, facilitating comparison on the part of readers, even if Chenu himself made explicit comparisons only rarely. Still, the author had clearly read many of the works published to date that treated the subjects of municipal history and urban privileges. In describing the composition, electoral practices, and main privileges of the corps de ville of Beauvais, for example, he references Loisel’s Mémoires de Beauvais, just as he based a similar description of Bordeaux’s jurade on Lurbe’s Chroniqve bovrdeloise and Anciens statvts. In defense of his project to discuss the privileges of Bourges, moreover, he cites, in addition to Loisel and Lurbe, Rubys’s Privileges, franchises, et immunitez, works on the privileges of Paris published in 1595, 1608, and 1617, and the book of the privileges of Montargis published in 1608.108
In addition to simply consulting other texts for information, Chenu sought to use some of what he found to support his own preferences for how urban government should function. For example, in reporting that the mayors of Bourges must be natives of the city according to a decision of the general assembly in 1592, Chenu noted that this stipulation was also observed in Paris, Tours, Beauvais, and Périgueux thanks to a ruling of the Parlement of Bordeaux, and that Rubys had counseled that the same rule be honored in Lyon.109 Chenu then opined that the requirement should be extended to the aldermen of Bourges. His emphasis on the many towns that observed this rule for their mayors may have reflected a certain insecurity, however, since when the corps de ville put together a list of articles they wished to propose to Louis xiv when he visited the city in October 1651, the members included a request “that no-one may be elected to the position of mayor who is not native of the said town, as it has always been concluded and practiced by our elders [in an] assembly of the inhabitants.” As we have seen, the king granted this request, and the royal letter to that effect was published in the books of privileges of 1659 and 1661.110
In composing his section on the forms of government observed in other French towns, Chenu did more than simply consult the limited group of published works on the subject. He also actively solicited information from a range of contacts who could provide him with texts of privileges and legal decisions, historical accounts, and, significantly, lists of mayors who had served in different communities. Thus, for Périgueux, Chenu provided the text of a ruling of the Parlement of Bordeaux from 1603 illustrating electoral practices observed there and summarized the town’s major privileges based on the text of Louis xiii’s confirmation of 1610, provided to him in 1614 by Baptiste Chancel, former mayor and judge in the presidial court.111 For Poitiers, Chenu again listed the town’s most significant privileges and then provided the terms of a 1609 ruling of the Conseil d’État on the form of Poitiers’s elections—a text that Chenu also referenced when insisting that Bourges’s municipal elections should be “free” and not subject to illicit electioneering (brigues).112 He then provided a detailed mayoral list for Poitiers, from 1242 to 1620, interspersed with significant historical commentary.113 Although Chenu did not specify who had supplied this list, its high level of knowledge about events in Poitiers in the sixteenth century and the particular attention paid to the activities of the brothers Gaucher ii (Scévole i) and Louis de Sainte-Marthe, both influential royal officials and one-time mayors of Poitiers, strongly suggest that it was composed by a member of the Sainte-Marthe family or a close ally.114 Indeed, although the historical comments were entirely independent of any other mayoral list produced for Poitiers, the names of the mayors conformed very closely to a mayoral list in the possession of Scévole ii and Louis i de Sainte-Marthe, twin sons of Scévole i de Sainte-Marthe and royal historiographers resident in Paris.115 Best known as the authors of the Gallia christiana ultimately published in 1656, the Sainte-Marthe brothers were in active correspondence with Chenu, also the author of an Archiepiscoporum et episcoporum Galliae chronologica historia (1621) in the period when he was composing his Recueil des antiquitez.116 Thus, likely through his erudite contacts in Paris, Chenu was the first to publish a list of the mayors of Poitiers, thereby privileging one of the many competing versions of these mayoral lists being composed and copied at the time.
We might inquire what the interest of these mayoral lists could possibly be outside of the individual towns where the families named would have conveyed some social meaning for readers. Chenu’s Recueil des antiquitez, however, shows that they held general significance. In addition to the list for Poitiers, Chenu provided similar materials for La Rochelle, Tours, Paris, and Bordeaux, following, of course, his similar list for Bourges, with the lists from La Rochelle, Tours, and Bourges comprising new publications.117 Moreover, in a copy of Chenu’s work housed at the Bibliothèque muncipale de Bourges, a contemporary owner saw fit to add to Chenu’s mayoral lists by copying out the entire list of Angoulême’s mayors provided in Sanson’s Noms et ordre des maires, eschevins et conseillers, de la maison commune d’Angoulesme, thereby supplementing the very short entry that Chenu himself had provided on that town with evidence from a subsequent publication.118 Further, just as Chenu had sought materials on numerous French towns from published works and personal contacts, later civic officials relied on Chenu. Thus, when the aldermen of Tours decided to put out a book of privileges in 1660, they did not start from scratch but rather began by borrowing from Chenu’s quite extensive edition of their own privileges. Although the text of the Tiltres de l’establissement dv corps de ville de Tovrs (1661) claims that all of the privileges were copied directly from the archives, the aldermen’s shortcut is revealed by the identical nature of the marginal comments in both texts. This overlap even includes a comparative mention of an exemption enjoyed in Bourges, when no reference to Bourges is made in the text of the privilege of 1461 itself.119
As these examples show, there was pronounced interest in what the historical record of urban privileges, electoral procedures, and office holders meant across numerous different genres and locations, making urban histories and books of privileges interesting and relevant beyond the particular communities they described. The kinds of stories that were told in each case and the forms that these relations took, to be sure, were strongly influenced by the preexisting arguments and formats to be found in municipal archives. Many of these specifically historical approaches had been developed in the quest for urban privileges and administrative authority to be enjoyed and exercised within a given community and through the memorialization of how particular individuals, families, or groups had achieved these aims. Yet, since the issues facing many French towns were broadly similar, including the construction of a productive relationship with the French crown, the wide variety of specific past experiences and administrative forms still had much to contribute to a broader notion of how urban communities had contributed to the kingdom over time and how French towns should ideally be governed. It was this conjunction of interests, pursued by urban elites from all corners of the kingdom, that helped to make urban history writing a recognizable genre, in which writers not only relied on a local group of likeminded scholars to share documents and points of view but also appropriated models, borrowed ideas, and cherry-picked facts from works focused on other problems and places. Indeed, one of the spurs to local history writing in the sixteenth century was precisely Belleforest’s Cosmographie universelle, a work that presented the history and situation of each of the towns of France as together constituting the historical character of the French kingdom. It is to that work and its role in encouraging the significant development of urban historical writing in the second half of the sixteenth century that we now turn.
Guillaume Paradin, Memoires de l’histoire de Lyon … (Lyon: Antoine Gryphius, 1573), a 4r, *5.
Ibid., 266–68.
For a particularly good example, see Crouzet, “Écritures de l’histoire et idéologie urbaine.” See also Hilary J. Bernstein, “Le livre des privilèges à l’épreuve du temps: Entre histoire municipale et théories politique et sociale de la ville,” in À la croisée des temps: Approches d’histoire politique, juridique et sociale, ed. Pierre Bonin et al. (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2016), 169–79.
For comparative studies on municipal archives as deliberately constructed bodies of evidence, see Randolph C. Head, “Mirroring Governance: Archives, Inventories, and Political Knowledge in Early Modern Switzerland and Europe,” Archival Science 7 (2007): 317–29; Ketelaar, “Records Out and Archives In”; De Vivo, “Ordering the Archive in Early Modern Venice.”
I illustrate this point in relation to Poitiers in Between Crown and Community, 170–72.
For example, Patrick T. Geary, “From Charter to Cartulary: From Archival Practice to History,” in Representing History, 900–1300: Art, Music, History, ed. Robert A. Maxwell (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 181–86; Brigitte Bedos-Rezak, “Towards an Archeology of the Medieval Charter: Textual Production and Reproduction in Northern French Chartriers,” in Charters, Cartularies, and Archives: The Presentation and Transmission of Documents in the Medieval West, ed. Adam J. Kosto and Anders Winroth (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2002), 43–60; Daniel Le Blévec, ed., Les cartulaires méridionaux (Paris: École des chartes, 2006); Constance Brittain Bouchard, Rewriting Saints and Ancestors: Memory and Forgetting in France, 500–1200 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).
Antoine Loisel, Memoires des pays, villes, comté et comtes, evesché et evesqves, pairrie, commvne, et personnes de renom de Beavvais et Beavvaisis (Paris: Samuel Thiboust, 1617), 164. For a classic example of urban forgery in medieval England, see Susan Reynolds, “The Forged Charters of Barnstaple,” English Historical Review 84, no. 333 (October 1969): 699–720.
Archives Municipales de Bordeaux, Livre des bouillons, vol. I (Bordeaux: G. Gounouilhou, 1867), quotation at xli.
Ibid., 533–41, 558–59.
Archives Municipales de Bordeaux, Livre des priviléges, vol. II (Bordeaux: G. Gounouilhou, 1878), 37–62.
Ibid., 63–167. Having consulted the published text, I judged what articles were added after 1564 based on the dates of the texts involved.
The vast majority of these chronicles were included in the sixteenth-century “Registre des statuts,” preserved in ac Poitiers Casier 42, Registre 11, 1r–64r. In addition, descriptions of the mayoralties of Jehan Macé (1406–8), Jaimet Gernain (1465–66), and Jean Crouzilles (1533–34) were included in the “Mansucrit de St. Hilaire,” bm Poitiers ms 391 (51), 85v–86v, 89v, and 87v; elaborate accounts of the mayoralties of Jasmes de Lauzon (1543–44) and Philippe Lucas (1555–56) appear in ac Poitiers Casier 43, Registre 18, no. 1; copies of most of these previous chronicles and additional ones for the mayoralties of Nicolas d’Elbenne (1556–57) to François Aubert (1564–65) appear in a seventeenth-century collection, ac Poitiers Casier 42, Registre 12, 486–579. Long ago, Alfred Richard demonstrated that the Manuscrit de St. Hilaire was “the official record of the mayoral adminsitration [mairie] of Poitiers.” See his “Le manuscrit no 51 de la Bibliothèque de Poitiers a-t-il eu un caractère officiel?,” Bulletin de la Société des Antiquaires de l’Ouest, 2nd series, 3 (1883–85): 297–306, at 303.
ac Poitiers Casier 42, Registre 12, 545–46. The original version of this narrative in ac Poitiers Casier 43, Registre 18, no. 1 is missing its beginning and concluding pages, but the seventeenth-century copy provides the full contents.
ac Poitiers Casier 42, Registre 12, 546–64; ac Poitiers Casier 43, Registre 18, no. 1, [1r–v] (unpaginated).
ac Poitiers Casier 43, Registre 18, no. 1, [1v].
ac Poitiers Casier 42, Registre 12, 568.
ac Poitiers Casier 42, Registre 11, 63r–v.
Émile Ruben, ed., Registres consulaires de la ville de Limoges, 6 vols. (Limoges: Chapoulaud Frères, 1867–97), 1:320–22, 375–86.
Ibid., 181–83, 185–92.
Ibid., 422–26, quotation at 422.
Ibid., 447–49.
Guillaume Le Blanc, “Remonstrances faictes au roi pour les habitans de Bourdeaus par Maître Guillaume le Blanc, l’an 1549”; Guillaume Paradin, “La Revolte de la gabelle en Guienne l’an mil cinq cens quarante-huit”; and Jean Bouchet, “Histoire de la Révolte de la gabelle en Guyenne & à Bordeaux, l’an mil v cents xlviii,” in La Révolte de la gabelle en Guyenne & à Bordeaux en 1548: Textes de Guillaume Paradin et de Jean Bouchet; Présentation, documents, et un plan de la ville de Bordeaux au XVIe siècle (Bordeaux: Also Manuzio, 1981), xvii–xxii, 8–11, 86–91.
Ibid., 56–65, 72, 92–95.
Ruben, Registres consulaires de la ville de Limoges, 1:449.
ac Angoulême aa 5, 18r–19v (plain list of mayors, 1460–97), 20r–37v (mayoral list with short annals, 1498–1504); G. [Gustave] Babinet de Rencogne, Nouvelle chronologie historique des maires de la ville d’Angoulême, 1215–1501, publiée avec de nombreuses pièces justificatives (Angoulême: F. Goumard, 1870), 1–2.
ac Angoulême aa5, 132v.
ac Angoulême aa7, 104r–105v.
Ibid., 104v–105r. These letters have been published in J.-F. [Jean-François] Eusèbe Castaigne, Entrées solennelles dans la ville d’Angoulême, depuis François Ier jusqu’à Louis XIV, recueillies & publiées avec de nombreux éclaircissements (Angoulême: J. Lefraise et Cie, 1856), 113–15.
ac Angoulême aa7, 106v–109r; Casteigne, Entrées solennelles dans la ville d’Angoulême, 118–25.
ac Angoulême aa7, 114r–15v.
Jean Sanson, Les noms et ordre des maires, eschevins et conseillers, de la maison commune d’Angoulesme, dépuis la concession des privileges de noblesse … (Angoulême: M. Mauclair, 1651), 113. This letter was not included in either Lambert’s or Guymart’s chronicles but was transcribed in ac Angoulême aa7, 99v.
Sanson, Les noms et ordre des maires, 114–20, quotations at 118.
Christian Jouhaud, Dinah Ribard, and Nicolas Schapira, Histoire, littérature, témoignage: Écrire les malheurs du temps (Paris: Gallimard, 2009), 145–88, especially 161–65.
ac Poitiers Casier 42, Registre 13, 27–30. For context, see Robert Favreau, La ville de Poitiers à la fin du Moyen Âge: Une capitale régionale, 2 vols., Mémoires de la Société des Antiquaires de l’Ouest (Poitiers: Au Siège de la Société, 1978), 2:494–500.
ac Poitiers Casier 42, Registre 11, 48v, 47r.
ac Poitiers Casier 42, Registre 13, 28–29.
ac Angoulême aa5, 46r.
Ibid., 64r. For a discussion of the miniatures for Calveau’s mayoral terms, see Castaigne, Entrées solennelles dans la ville d’Angoulême, 25–27.
ac Angoulême aa5, 88v–89v, quotations at 88v–89r.
Ibid., 19v, 21r.
Ibid., 37v, 43r. In Angoulême, the office of mayor was annual but the position of alderman was for life, so mayors who were not yet aldermen were often elected during their term.
Michel Hardy, Département de la Dordogne, ville de Périgueux: Inventaire sommaire des archives communales antérieures à 1790 (Périgueux: R. Delage et D. Joucla, 1894), xvii.
ac Angoulême aa5, 18r–19v (the first list of mayors beginning in 1460); Babinet de Rencogne, Nouvelle chronologie historique, 1–2.
François de Corlieu, Recveil en forme d’histoire de ce qvi se trovve par escrit de la ville et des comtes d’Engolesme … (Angoulême: Jean de Minieres, [1576]), 80, 120; Sanson, Les noms et ordre des maires, 1. See also Babinet de Rencogne, Nouvelle chronologie historique, 13, 97.
ac Poitiers Casier 42, Registre 12, 577–607; BnF ms Français 5940. Françoise Gaulon identifies the parchment register at the Bibliothèque nationale de France as the origin for a portion of the mayoral lists in Registre 12, in “Manuscrits et annales municipales de Poitiers au Moyen Âge,” Bulletin de la Société des Antiquaires de l’Ouest et des Musées de Poitiers, 5th series, 11 (1997): 19–40, at 24.
ac Poitiers, Casier 43, Registre 18, no. 2.
ac Poitiers, Casier 43, Registre 16, 205–42; Jean Bouchet and Abraham Mounin, Les annales d’Aqvitaine: Faicts et gestes en sommaire des roys de France et d’Angleterre, pays de Naples & de Milan … Avgmentees de plvsievrs pieces rares et historiques extraictes des bibliothecques … (Poitiers: Abraham Mounin, 1644), 59–75.
Loisel, Memoires des pays, 1–8, 161.
Ibid., 162–63.
Ibid., 164, 170–71; Renaud Rose, Ville de Beauvais: Inventaire sommaire des archives communales antérieures à 1790 (Beauvais: Imprimerie Centrale Administrative, 1887), 1–2.
Loisel, Memoires des pays, 165–75; Privileges de la ville et commune de Beavvais (n.p. [c. 1611]), 1–4; Privileges de la ville et commvne de Beavvais (n.p., [1634]), 1–4, included in the Collection Bucquet-Aux Cousteaux, 53:336–419, consultable at:
Loisel, Memoires des pays, 162, 217.
Adrien de la Morlière, Le troisiesme livre des antiqvitez, histoires et choses plvs remarqvables de la ville d’Amiens: Contenant l’ordre et la suite des anciens majeurs d’Amiens, des gouuerneurs & lieutenants de la prouince, des baillifs, & des capitaines ou gouuerneurs de la ville en particulier, dedié a messievrs dv corps de ville … (Paris: Denys Moreau, 1626), 317, 319, quotation at 317.
Ibid., 319–431.
Ibid., 333, 349–93, quotation at 333.
Ibid., 421–23.
Ibid., 421; La Morlière, Le premier livre des antiqvitez, histoires et choses plvs remarqvables de la ville d’Amiens, poëtiquement traicté: Troisiesme edition dediee av roy … (Paris: Denys Moreau, 1627), 87.
Gabriel de Lurbe, Chroniqve bovrdeloise composée cy-deuant en Latin … (Bordeaux: Simon Millanges, 1594), 14v–15v.
Ibid., 27v–28r, 31r–v, quotation at 31r.
Ibid., 3r.
Ibid., 43r–44v, 45v–46r.
Jean Darnal, Supplement des chroniqves de la noble ville & cité de Bourdeaus … (Bordeaux: Jac. Millanges and Cl. Mongiroud, 1620), 9v–10r.
Les privileges, franchises, et libertez des bourgeois & habitans de la ville & fauxbourgs de Montargis le Franc (Paris: Pierre Chevalier, 1608), 2v, 15r (the point that the defeat of this siege constituted a turning point in the king’s fortunes comes from the preamble of the letters patent of Charles vii dated March 1430 from Saumur instituting Montargis as a “ville d’arrêt”).
Les privileges, franchises et libertez des bourgeois & habitans de la ville & faux-bourgs de Montargis le Franc (n.p., [1662]), [i–viii].
Lignereux, Lyon et le roi, 511–12, 551–56.
Les privileges, franchises et immvnitez octroyees par les roys tres-chrestiens aux preuost des marchands, escheuins & habitans de la ville de Lyon, & à leur posterité … (Lyon: Guichard Jullieron, 1634), 88–106, 111–14. For the comparison with the 1619 edition, see Les privileges, franchises et immvnitez octroyees par les roys treschrestiens aux preuost des marchands, escheuins & habitans de la ville de Lyon, & à leur posterité … (Lyon: Guichard Jullieron, 1619).
Les privileges, franchises et immvnitez (1634), 143–64.
Recveil des privileges de la ville de Bovrges (n.p., [1643]), bi r–biii v. See chapter 6 for the context of these historical claims.
Philippe Labbe, Histoire dv Berry abbregée dans l’eloge panegyrique de la ville de Bovrges capitale dvdit pais … (Paris: Gaspar Meturas, 1647), 1–107. Labbe explicitly identifies his historical text as the one commissioned for the book of privileges, 106–7.
Privileges de la ville de Bovrges et confirmation d’icevx: Avec la liste chronologiqve des prvd’hommes maire et eschevins qvi ont govverné la ville depvis l’an 1429. ivsques a la presente année 1661 … (Bourges: Jean Chaudiere, 1661), 1–3, 5, 10. For Chaumeau’s treatment of these issues, see Chaumeau, Histoire de Berry, 1, 8–16, 41, 74.
Privileges de la ville de Bovrges (1661), 15–16.
[Bernard Durand], Privileges octroyez avx maires, eschevins, bovrgeois et habitans de la ville et cite de Chalon svr Saone par les anciens roys de France & ducs de Bourgogne, confirmez par leurs successeurs, & verifiez ez cours souueraines … (Chalon-sur-Saône: Jean des Prez, 1604), 60–64, BnF 4-lk7 1724.
Tiltres de l’establissement dv corps de ville de Tovrs: Privileges de messievrs les maires, eschevins et habitans d’icelle ville (Tours: Estienne La Tour, 1661), 90–93; Jean Chenu, Recueil des antiquitez et privileges de la ville de Bovrges, et de plvsievrs autres villes capitales du royaume … (Paris: Nicolas Buon, 1621), 133–48 (the latter page misnumbered, since 153 is misnumbered 123); Recveil des privileges de la ville de Bovrges (1643), 97–138; Privileges de la ville de Bovrges (1661), 1–96 (second pagination).
Darnal, Supplement, 37r–95v.
Ibid., 30v–36v.
Le Maire, Histoire et antiquitez (1645), 473–96, quotation at 473.
Ibid., 488–90. As will be demonstrated further in chapter 9, Le Maire’s 1645 edition met with extensive criticism, particularly concerning his treatment of the Wars of Religion in Orléans. Since the letters of support of Colas, father and son, related to religious tensions in the town, Le Maire may have judged it politic to leave these out of subsequent editions.
La Morlière, Le troisiesme livre, 401–402, quotation at 401.
La Morlière, Le premier livre, 84; La Morlière, Le troisiesme livre, 318, 320.
Privileges de la ville de Bovrges, et confirmation d’icevx (Bourges: Jean Chaudiere, [1659]), 82–91. Events in Bourges during the Fronde are recounted in detail by Claude Le Large, avocat de la ville, in his papier-journal, published in Henry Jongleux, ed., Chroniques berrichonnes du XVIIe siècle: Journal des choses mémorables arrivées en la ville de Bourges et autres lieux de la province, 1621–1694 (Bourges: Pigelet & Fils & Tardy, 1881), 84–144 (events of 1648–51). The royal letters of October 11, 1651 named Robert Hodeau as first captain, and in his own journal, Hodeau proudly noted that a copy of these letters had been published in the book of privileges. See Paulin Riffé, ed., “Mémoires inédits de Me Robert Hodeau, ancien maire de Bourges, avec un introduction et une généalogie de sa famille,” Mémoires de la Société des Antiquaires du Centre 8 (1879): 205–65, at 256.
Jongleux, Chroniques berrichonnes, 173–78.
Bref recit de ce qui s’est passé en l’election derniere de messieurs les maire & eschevins de Bourges, & lettres du roy enuoyés [sic] sur ce sujet … (Bourges: J. Chaudiere, 1660).
Privileges de la ville de Bovrges (1661), unpaginated addition, [2v]. For the mayor’s continuation in office, see Gaspard Thaumas de la Thaumassière, Histoire de Berry … (Bourges: François Toubeau, 1689), 247.
David Rivaud makes this point for an earlier period in Les villes et le roi: Les municipalités de Bourges, Poitiers et Tours et l’émergence de l’état moderne (v. 1440–v. 1560) (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2007), especially chapters 6, 9–10, 12.
Véronique Lamazou-Duplan, “Une image de fondation? La gravure sur bois au colophon de l’Opus de Tholosanorum gestis ab urbe condita de Nicolas Bertrand (1515),” in “Ab urbe condita …” Fonder et refonder la ville: Récits et représentations (second Moyen Âge–premier XVIe siècle), ed. Véronique Lamazou-Duplan (Pau: puppa, 2011), 493–513, at 494, 497, 502; Cazals, “La constitution d’une mémoire urbaine,” 172–73.
François Bourdes, “D’Étienne de Gan à Jean Balard: Les récits de fondation de Toulouse (1453–1532),” in Lamazou-Duplan, “Ab urbe condita,” 345–64, at 348–50; Géraldine Cazals, “Une contribution inédite à l’historiographie toulousaine: Le Catalogue et summaire de la fundation … de Tholoze de Guillaume de la Perrière (1539–1540),” Mémoires de la Société Archéologique du Midi de la France 65 (2005): 139–61; Cazals, “La constitution d’une mémoire urbaine,” 182–84, 186–87; G. [Greta] Dexter, “Guillaume de la Perrière,” Bibliothèque d’humanisme et Renaissance 17, no. 1 (1955): 56–73, at 57, 65; Robert A. Schneider, Public Life in Toulouse, 1463–1789: From Municipal Republic to Cosmopolitan City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 70–71.
Dexter, “Guillaume de la Perrière,” 57; Cazals, “La constitution d’une mémoire urbaine,” 188–89.
Nicolas de Nicolay, Description générale de la ville de Lyon et des anciennes provinces du Lyonnais & du Beaujolais, ed. Victor Advielle (Lyon: Mougin-Rusand, 1881), v, 9, 49.
Paradin, Memoires de l’histoire de Lyon, *5; Claude de Rubys, Les privileges, franchises et immunitez octroyees par les roys treschrestiens, aux consuls, escheuins, manans & habitans de la ville de Lyon, & à leur posterité … (Lyon: Antoine Gryphius, 1573), *2r–[*6r].
Paradin, Memoires de l’histoire de Lyon, 267–68; Rubys, Privileges, franchises et immunitez, 62–70. I discuss Rubys’s prescriptions for municipal office-holding in “Le livre des privilèges à l’épreuve du temps,” 176–78.
Lignereux, Lyon et le roi, 173.
Rubys, Privileges, franchises et immunitez, 45–46, 81–83; Rubys, Histoire veritable de la ville de Lyon, 468, 471.
Rubys, Histoire veritable de la ville de Lyon, 422–23, 425, 477.
Lignereux, Lyon et le roi, 117–18.
Les privileges, franchises et immvnitez (1619), 3–62; Les privileges, franchises et immvnitez (1634), 3–62; Paradin, Memoires de l’histoire de Lyon, 184–88; Rubys, Histoire veritable de la ville de Lyon, 305–6.
The most reliable information on when Lurbe and Darnal served in the jurade comes from a register kept by Richard Pichon, clerk of the jurade from 1551 to 1603, and from Darnal himself. See Pierre Harlé, ed., “Registre du clerc de ville de Bordeaux, XVIe siècle,” Archives historiques du département de la Gironde 46 (1911): 45–358, at 166, 170, 292, 322; Darnal, Supplement, 55v–56r, 64r–v. The tradition that Lurbe became procureur-syndic in 1575 is clearly incorrect, since Lurbe was elected to the office in March 1582 (“Registre du clerc,” 166; Darnal, Supplement, 45r, 55r). Michel Cassan highlights the importance of the office of clerk of the jurade to the social advancement of Darnal in “De Jean Barrère écolier à Jean Darnal avocat en Parlement, écuyer, jurat et chroniqueur bordelais au début du XVIIe siècle,” in À la recherche de la considération sociale, ed. Josette Pontent ([Talence]: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme d’Aquitaine, 1999), 121–34, at 130–31.
[Gabriel de Lurbe], Les anciens statvts de la ville et cite de Bovrdeavs, enrichis d’aucuns nouueaux statuts, de plusieurs reglemens & annotations: Auec indice du tout (Bordeaux: S. Millanges, 1593), 9; Livre des bouillons, 505.
Lurbe, Anciens statvts, 1, 3, 8.
Ibid., 5; Lurbe, Chronique bourdeloise (1594), 42r, 44v. Pichon also mentions this ruling (“Registre du clerc,” 55).
Lurbe, Anciens statvts, 69 (mispaginated as 99); Privileges des bovrgeois de la ville et cité de Bourdeaus, octroyez et approvvez par les rois tres-chrestiens Henry II; Charles IX; Henry III; Henry IV; & Louis XIII à present regnant … (Bordeaux: Simon Millanges, 1618), 34–36, 37–42.
Lurbe, Anciens statvts, 122, 131–34.
Darnal, Supplement, 4r–v.
Ibid., 36v–37r.
[Clément] Tillet, Chronique bordeloise, corrigé & augmentée depuis l’année 1671 jusqu’au passage du roy d’Espagne & de nosseigneurs les princes, ses freres, en cette ville l’année 1701 … (Bordeaux: Simon Boé, 1703).
Anciens et nouveaux statuts de la ville et cité de Bordeaux, reveus, corrigez et augmentez de tous les arrêts du conseil & du Parlement, des ordonnances & reglemens qui ont été rendus sur iceux dépuis l’edition de 1612 de Simon Millanges jusques à present … (Bordeaux: Simon Boé, 1701), front matter, 3r.
The first addition to the 1701 edition concerned a royal edict pertaining to the publishers and booksellers of Bordeaux, dated 1688 (ibid., 69–90). Several statutes were added in 1701 that dated from before 1612, including those of the bahutiers from 1597 (92–95), the fourbisseurs from 1602 (95–100), and the royal surgeon and his lieutenants from 1611 (247–58). The table of contents clearly indicates what material is new in the present edition (655–[659]).
I discuss Chenu’s Recueil des antiquitez at greater length, as well as contemporary comments on it, in “Reading Municipal Lists, Interpreting Civic Practice from the Insights of Robert Descimon to Seventeenth-Century Bourges,” in Social Relations, Politics, and Power in Early Modern France: Robert Descimon and the Historian’s Craft, ed. Barbara B. Diefendorf (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2016), 134–57.
Chenu, Recueil des antiquitez, 341–42, 461–63.
Ibid., 127.
ac Bourges aa5, no. 3; Privileges de la ville de Bovrges (1661), 85.
Chenu, Recueil des antiquitez, 468–71.
Ibid., 128, 481–85. For the import of the 1609 ruling, see my Between Crown and Community, 262–66; S. Annette Finley-Croswhite, Henry IV and the Towns: The Pursuit of Legitimacy in French Urban Society, 1589–1610 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 148.
Chenu, Recueil des antiquitez, 486–501.
Ibid., 495–99.
BnF ms fr. 20157, fols. 165r–78r, “Recueil certain des noms et armoyries des mayres de la ville de Poictiers despuis lan 1200.” For my assertion that the historical commentary in Chenu’s list was independent of any others, I compared it with the comments to be found in ac Poitiers, Casier 42, Registre 12, 573–607; ac Poitiers Casier 43, Registre 18, no. 2; and bm Poitiers ms 574, “Recueil au vray de ce qui se peult trouver des armes des mayres de Poictiers despuis leur institution: Faict par J[ehan] le R[oy] escuyer sieur de la B[oissière], 1609,” 30r–44r.
For example, the Sainte-Marthe brothers received letters from Chenu inquiring about the identities of certain bishops and archbishops of France on December 20, 1614 and January 7, 1621. See BnF naf 6208, fols. 176r, 177r, 180r–181v.
Chenu, Recueil des antiquitez, 130–40 (mispaginated for 170) (Bourges), 235–62 (La Rochelle), 319–26 (Tours), 336–40 (Paris), and 467–68 (Bordeaux).
Ibid., 480, ms pp. 519–26 (bm Bourges, By 1189). This copy is available in digitized form on the site of the Bibliothèques Virtuelles Humanistes;
Chenu, Recueil des antiquitez, 263–330 (section on Tours), especially 274 (marginal comment on Bourges); Tiltres de l’establissement dv corps de ville de Tovrs, 3 (claim regarding original texts), 7 (marginal comment on Bourges).