Faire la paix devant notaire (Saint-Germain-des-Prés, première moitié du xviie siècle)
Abstract
As a legal professional, the notary appears to be a discreet but central actor in the resolution of conflicts in the shadow of the judicial institution from which historians are accustomed to conducting their research. This article thus proposes to reverse the point of view by starting from notarial sources to highlight the role of the notary, for a long time the missing link in studies on the mechanisms of social regulation. The study is based on a corpus of agreements for criminal matters, made by the notary Jacques Legay in Saint-Germain-des-Prés in the first half of the 17th century. Minor acts, apart and unclassifiable, these agreements are not easily found by the historian but nevertheless constitute a common practice of the notary. Although enclosed in a rigid and uniform form, the agreements reveal the different conditions, gestures and words by which the parties in conflict manage to heal their wounds of honor and blood. Conceived as the best remedy to the lawsuit, the agreements nevertheless maintain close links with the local seigneurial justice. The sociology of the contracting parties and of the litigants thus sheds light on some of the motivations and demands of the populations in their choice to navigate more or less willingly between the one and the other recourse.
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