La Grande guerre qui n’a pas eu lieu – agir au futur dans l’historiographie
Abstract
The great war who takes not place – acting on future in historiography. In a retrospective view, the years 1605-1610 build the last years of King Henry IV’s reign with the crisis of Jülich and Kleve as major element. The two sources taken in consideration in this contribution represent two possibilities of writing expectations, more nearby one to the other than it seems in first view. First, Pierre de l’Estoile’s Journal, who documents and constitutes the space of experiences for the whole family. The journal holds several temporal perspectives: One present for every day, who is expanded to a perspective of a short-time past but also to a future, formulating expectations – and finally a reflexive perspective, virtually out of all temporality.The second source, the « décade contenant la vie et les gestes de Henry le Grand, Roy de France et de Navarre IIII du nom » of Jean-Baptiste Legrain is a semi-official historiography. But before all, it is a historiography who reflects the distinct state of knowledge for the different actors and the different human and natural elements (as an eclipse of the sun or Siamese twins) who influence the events, the history.The possibilities to act with and on expectations appear as questions of a kind of rationality, but primarily as questions of power. The narrations of Pierre de l’Estoile and Jean-Baptiste Legrain show the power in the event. The king is the creator of the history and so the master of the expectations of his subjects – but also of his opponents. The passive expectations show on the other side the subordination of the subjects, the recognition of a complete dependence.
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