The monarchy investigates

The beginning of the 2000s saw an increase in work on the investigation into the Middle Ages. The names of the organizers of the first major conference to focus on this type of sources, which took place at the French School of Rome in 2004, are enough to indicate the origin of the revival of interest in these sources. François Bougard, Jacques Chiffoleau and Claude Gauvard are in fact three of the main specialists in the history of judicial practices in the Middle Ages, arriving at the investigation through their research on the development of the inquisitorial procedure, the investigation does not being originally nothing other than theinquisitivewhich is taking an increasing place in the context of judicial techniques for seeking the truth.

The use of this procedure, which is based on the gathering by investigators of sworn testimonies collected orally, was however not limited to the field of judicial practice and, in high times, it was also an instrument allowing the determination by writes the state of the possessions and jurisdiction of a princely or royal power over all or part of its domains, as evidenced by Domesday bookcarried out on the orders of William the Conqueror at the end of the XI^e century. Research on this second type of survey has shown that the aim was as much, if not more, to demonstrate the presence of the authority commissioning the survey in the field and to obtain a minimal form of submission from the populations, than having files allowing it to know the territories and the men it claimed to dominate.

In recent years, it is on these uses of the investigation as an instrument of government that historians have mainly focused, as evidenced by the work of the team gathered around Thierry Pécout.

A flickering monument

It is at the crossroads of these two main types of investigations that the sources at the origin of Marie Dejoux’s study are located, namely all the documents which were produced as part of the carrying out of the investigations. which were ordered by King Louis IX (1226-1270), at different times of his reign and in different regions. In fact, these investigations, which were the subject of an edition by Léopold Delisle in 1904, were immediately designated by him as belonging to the genre of “ administrative investigations », a genre then poorly defined, of which the historian Jean Glénisson attempted to defend the operative nature for the historian in a famous article from 1980. However, in these, it was not a question of carrying out an inventory rights and lands, but to investigate to do justice to those inhabitants of the kingdom of France who felt they had been wronged, in any way whatsoever, by the king’s officers or by the king himself: which authorizes Marie Dejoux to qualify them as reparation investigations, in order to distinguish themselves from both administrative investigations and reformation investigations, a choice that the entire work makes it possible to justify in a very convincing manner.

The investigations of Saint Louis present themselves as heavily weighted sources, with the weight of historiography on the investigations, but also that of studies on the history of the French monarchy within which they occupied, from the second half of XIX^e century, the monument place helping to build the image of Louis IX as a just and reform-minded king. The conservation of the majority of these documents in series J of the National Archives, that of the Trésor des Chartes, seemed to provide confirmation that these documents were perceived from the outset as essential milestones in the construction of the French monarchical administration.

In order to free herself from this double historiography, which she presents at the beginning of her book, Marie Dejoux’s approach consists of returning to the documents (chapters I and II) in order to restore their intelligibility and their singularity. His study is in fact based on a large-scale archival investigation, and it is no coincidence that the book is published in partnership with the National Archives, which provided support for this other type of investigation, which was the essential prerequisite for any attempt at critical rereading.

The careful collection of the written production established within the framework of these investigations, or alluding to it, allows the historian to establish an initial observation. At the end of the reign of Saint Louis, only a few religious people consulted during his canonization process insisted on the importance of the investigations, subsequently allowing some of his biographers, such as Guillaume de Saint-Pathus, to provide the first descriptions. idealized. His second observation is just as disappointing: these were only integrateda posterioriand often by a series of coincidences in the royal archives where, from the end of the XIV^e century, they were considered useless papers, before being forgotten until the XVII^e century.

Sloppy, scratched out, mutilated working documents, which very often do not allow an investigation to be followed from start to finish, requiring the crossing of sources from several different investigations to try to reconstruct its theoretical progress, these archives were erected as a monument in a completely artificial way, but this is precisely what allows the historian to draw a new interpretation from it (chapter VIII), not without first presenting in a methodical manner, in what constitutes the heart of the work, the objects of the investigation, the profile of the investigators and its results (chapters II has VII).

A successful communication operation

The central part of the book highlights the evolving nature of the practice of surveys. The instructions given to investigators, which often remain very general, combined with the practice of subcontracting and the short time allowed to process hundreds of complaints, lead to results which are sometimes difficult to compare from one investigation to another. other, and leave the investigators a large margin of maneuver, which allows for example the investigators of Picardy of 1247 to integrate into their mission the fight against Jewish usurers, which only becomes a royal request on the return from the crusade. We can, however, observe some striking common features, such as the well-known role of the mendicant brothers within the investigative teams, a role which they later abandoned so as not to be associated with royal politics, or the hitherto neglected role of of the king’s clerics, who more than others embodied the defense of his interests.

All these investigators and their subcontractors were often chosen because of their knowledge of the terrain in which they had to investigate, a terrain whose perception evolves as the procedure is perfected. While the investigations of 1247-1248 fit into the territorial mold of the diocese and its subdivisions, the investigations of the return from the crusade adopted the civil territorial frameworks, bailiwicks, seneschals and provostships: as an instrument of integration of the recently conquered provinces, the survey also becomes a tool making it possible to give reality to the new administrative frameworks of the kingdom.

Is it also a real tool for restoring justice? ? The elements gathered by Marie Dejoux require us to remain nuanced. The complaints retained by the investigators primarily target the royal power and the minor officers rather than the bailiffs, which refers less to their good behavior than to a deliberate desire to spare them, combined with the difficulty of tackling powerful people. Even if Louis IX is regularly questioned, it is less affected than its predecessors, the investigation aimed first of all at clearing old accounts, while preserving the current social order. It is therefore not surprising to see that, without being absent, and while winning their cases more often than men, women are very clearly under-represented among the applicants and one would look in vain for “ poor people » highlighted by historiography.

The study of all the indicators revealing the social level of the depositors shows that they are part of the wealthy strata of the population, “ poor » being here to be understood as the opposite of “ powerful » and not “ rich “. If the investigations after the crusade more often proved successful for the applicants than before, and if the attacks against the petty officers were more heard than those against the king, the investigation nevertheless appears more like one of the instruments making it possible to obtain the consent of the populations to royal domination as a true instrument of justice or reform.

Reparation versus salvation

It is moreover on this question that the work ends, the author convincingly showing that the investigations of Louis IX cannot be understood any more through the category of administrative investigation than through that of reform investigation, which has often been associated with them. The ideal of reform of the kingdom only asserted itself from the reign of Philip the Fair, by exploiting the time, idealized for the occasion, of the good king Saint Louis, to whom the reform claimed to return. At Louis IXthe investigation is above all a personal enterprise, which aims to obtain the salvation of the king, while making the kingdom stronger, not through administrative reform, but through the purgation of its sins. The important place occupied by men of the Church within this enterprise is therefore anything but the effect of chance.

The error of perspective of historians since the XIX^e century is however very understandable, to the extent that Marie Dejoux shows that it is knowingly that the men of the XIV^e century worked to eliminate the penitential dimension of Saint Louis’ investigations to make him the first great reformer of the kingdom. Now, if the holy king had indeed adopted some of the most recent theories of his time, these were the economic theories of the Church, in particular those which were developed in beggar circles around the question of ill-gotten goods and of the circulation of wealth.

This does not make his approach any less a fundamental milestone in the construction of the monarchy, because the investigations participated in the construction of the royal state as a rule of law, whose legitimacy was therefore continually based on a discourse of justice. . The investigations, failing to allow a real implementation of this justice, nevertheless had the effect of staging it, helping to pacify the populations by offering them, if not real reparation, at least the feeling of being listened to. The political significance of such a practice, which is reminiscent of the regular invocations of “ consultation » in contemporary political discourse, was visibly better perceived by Louis’s successors IX only by himself, which does not prevent others from thinking about it in his place from that time on.

It is all the merit of Marie Dejoux’s work to succeed, in the same movement, in providing access to the understanding of the successive instrumentalizations which were made of these investigations, and in restoring the meaning which they may have had for the who had designed them as well as their effects, anticipated or not, on the populations of the kingdom of France and on the construction of the French monarchy.