Le présent mémoire cherche à comprendre la nature des rapports entre la ville de Paris et le roi Charles IX grâce à l’étude de l’entrée royale de ce dernier dans la capitale en 1571. Pour l’historien, l’étude des grands rituels monarchiques permet de saisir les mécanismes symboliques de communication qui créent en quelque sorte le pouvoir royal. L’entrée royale, rituel codifié durant lequel une ville accueille son souverain, permet d’observer la nature des rapports entre le pouvoir monarchique et le pouvoir urbain. Généralement perçue comme un moment consensuel, l’entrée royale peut aussi servir de cadre pour les édiles urbains afin d’exprimer leurs désaccords à l’égard des politiques du roi. La confrontation entre la relation officielle de l’entrée et les archives municipales met au jour une série de ratés nous permettant de déconstruire l’image de concorde longtemps associée à l’entrée de 1571. Loin d’être un portrait élogieux du roi Charles IX, le programme de l’entrée parisienne de 1571 célèbre plutôt Catherine de Médicis et le duc Henri d’Anjou. En cela, les édiles parisiens expriment leurs critiques face à un pouvoir monarchique dont l’inaction durant les guerres de religion illustre la trop grande faiblesse. / This dissertation seeks to understand the nature of the relationship between the city of Paris and king Charles IX through the study of his royal entry in 1571. For historians, the study of the major monarchical rituals captures the mechanisms of symbolic communication that create the royal power. The royal entry, a codified ritual during which a city host his sovereign, shows the nature of the power dynamic between the monarchy and the urban centre. Generally seen as a consensual moment, the royal entry can also serve as a framework for the urban councillors to express their disagreement with the king’s policies. The comparison between the official relation of the entry and the municipal archives reveals a set of blunders that allows us to deconstruct the consistent image of concord long been associated with the 1571 entry. Far from being a glorious portrait of king Charles IX, the entry program rather celebrate Catherine de Medici and Duke Henry of Anjou. The Parisian councillors express therefore their critics against a monarchy whose inaction during the religious wars illustrates his weakness.

This thesis is a study of royal acts printed in French before 1601. The kingdom of France is a natural place to begin a study of royal acts. It possessed one of the oldest judicial systems in Europe, which had been established during the reign of St Louis (1226-1270). By the sixteenth century, French kings were able to issue royal acts without any concern as to the distribution of their decrees. In addition, France was one of the leading printing centres in Europe. This research provides the first detailed analysis of this neglected category of texts, and examines the acts’ significance in French legal, political and printing culture. The analysis of royal acts reveals three key historical practices regarding the role of printing in judiciary matters and public affairs. The first is how the French crown communicated to the public. Chapters one and two discuss the royal process of dissemination of edicts and the language of royal acts. The second is how printers and publishers manoeuvred between the large number of royal promulgations and public demand. An overview of the printing industry of royal acts is provided in chapter three and the printers of these official documents are covered in chapter four. The study of royal acts also indicates which edicts were published frequently. The last two chapters examine the content of royal decrees and discuss the most reprinted acts. Chapter five explores the period before 1561 and the final chapter discusses the last forty years of the century. An appendix of all royal acts printed before 1601, which is the basis of my research for this study, is included. It is the first comprehensive catalogue of its kind and contains nearly six thousand entries of surviving royal acts printed before 1601.

This thesis is an intellectual biography of the Swedish statesman Johan Skytte (1577–1645), focusing on his educational ideals and his contributions to educational reform in the early Swedish Age of Greatness. Although born a commoner, Skytte rose to be one of the most powerful men in Sweden in the first half of the seventeenth century, serving three generations of regents. As a royal preceptor and subsequently a university chancellor, Skytte appears as an early educational politician at a time when the Swedish Vasa dynasty initiated a number of far-reaching reforms, including the revival of Sweden’s only university at the time (in Uppsala). The contextual approach of the thesis shows how Skytte’s educational reform agenda was shaped by nationally motivated arguments as well as by a Late Renaissance humanist heritage, celebrating education as the foundation of all prosperous civilizations. Utilizing a largely unexplored source material written mostly in Latin, the thesis analyzes how Skytte’s educational arguments were formed already at the University of Marburg in the 1590s, where he learned to embrace the utility-orientated ideals of the French humanist Petrus Ramus (1515–1572). Moreover, the analysis shows that the expanding Swedish state administration in the early seventeenth century was in urgent need of educated civil servants, and that this basic demand favored an ideology based on education, skill and merit. It is shown that Skytte skillfully combined a Ramist and patriotic rhetoric with narratives of individual merit and rewards, conveying not least himself as an example. The thesis argues that Skytte’s rhetoric reflects the formation of a new professional category in the Swedish society, one that was distinguished from the royal courtier, the clergyman, the merchant, the warrior, and the scholar. This category is the professional civil servant whose identity was dependent on skills and education.

Tableau d’honneur de la Faculté des études supérieures et postdoctorales, 2009-2010 / À la mort d'Henri II, en 1559, les sujets protestants de France se sont trouvés sous l'autorité hésitante de rois en bas âge, entourés de conseillers influents à la légitimité contestable. Aux injonctions ambivalentes d'obéissance politique de Calvin, les apologues du prince de Condé, à la tête du mouvement réformé français, ont alors substitué une rhétorique de ferme allégeance aux coutumes constitutionnelles du royaume et au jeune roi. Interdite par Calvin, la violence politique des réformés était soudainement placée sous le signe de l'honneur nobiliaire. Or, à partir de la seconde guerre (1567-1568) la justification de la violence des réformés prendra aussi appui sur une conception contractualiste de l'État monarchique qui appelait au rétablissement des institutions intermédiaires dans leurs anciennes fonctions limitatives du pouvoir royal. Malgré une certaine parenté conceptuelle, cette évolution ne peut cependant être parfaitement assimilée à la théorisation dite «monarchomaque» de la résistance au roi devenu tyran, parvenue à maturité après le massacre de la Saint-Barthélémy (1572).