Construire une mémoire urbaine : Les cartulaires municipaux bordelais et libournais (xive-xve siècle)

Abstract

The elaboration of the Bordeaux and Libourne cartularies (Livre des Bouillons, ms. AA3 - Livre des Coutumes, Livre Velu) converged with the desire to build an urban memory enhancing community identity and emphasizing the relationship of these municipalities with the English Crown, whose codices legally and historically justify the power over Guyenne, with a view to legitimize the source of the rights and privileges obtained. The turn of the fourteenth-fifteenth century, the period when the Bordeaux cartularies were created, seems to have been the time of communal affirmation in Guyenne, concomitant with memory construction. The Libourne Livre Velu belongs to a second phase of this movement, to be compared with the tensions following the French victory of 1453. Strategies were developped to implement the memory construction, touching, first, on the content of the collections : insertion of the History of Cenebrun in each of them, construction of a textual historical-memorial set in the ms. AA3, Livre des Coutumes, sacralizing and juristic ensemble in the Livre Velu, account of the transmission of Guyenne in the Livre des Bouillons. In addition, it appeared necessary for the sponsoring aldermen to mark, by different means, the status of community monument and memorial of these codices, thus differentiating them from the other urban books that they could produce (account books, aldermen register, etc.). To do this, they gave them an imposing materiality, in size or in volume, and sometimes original (hairy cover, broths), coupled with great care taken in their realization, which reads in homogeneity, real or apparent, their form (notebooks, layout, ceremonial letters, etc.). Their structures, finally, were intensely thought through upstream of the design, in order to consolidate their documentary content (thematic, geographic - even political, concentric organization). Among the diversity of the acts and collections kept in these communes, the cartularies are thus distinguished mainly by the strategies implemented in order to confer them a statute of community monument vector of the municipal memory, as well in legal matter (ms. AA3), that political (Livre des Bouillons and Livre Velu), based in part on selected historical arguments, sometimes mythical, serving the municipal objectives. If loyalty to England, the source of municipal power and community rights, is common, Bordeaux and Libourne are attached to distinct identities, which are their own : city of merchands origin became capital of the duchy for one, town of merchands, sacred for its relation to religion for the second. The emphasis was thus placed, in Bordeaux, on the political power of the commune (and its hierarchical superiority in the duchy), while Libourne, without excluding the political aspect of its cartulary, endeavored to defend its economic prosperity and focused more on defining his community.