L’identité urbaine et les histoires locales publiées du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle en France

Abstract

Based on a set of 24 local histories published in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this article underlines the differences between local histories published when local identity was still of importance and local histories published later in the period when royal power succeeded in integrating local identities into a national identity. A literary genre, history in this period which focused on the local level can be divided into two categories: “Antiquities” and “Histories.” “Antiquities” emphasized specific urban features embodied in monuments (historic buildings, bridges and statutes, for example) and symbolic monuments (order of procession and lists of local personalities, for example). These “Antiquities,” especially those printed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, brought to the fore local identity and generally ignored the royal kingdom. By the seventeenth century, “Histories” or “Annals” came to dominate local history as local events recounted from the much larger royal perspective supplanted the “monument” descriptions which came to be regarded as historical curiosities. These local histories saw the merging of the history of the city and history of the kingdom. This article which examines local histories dealing with sixteenth-century religious wars suggests ways to use local history to understand changes in urban identities. Local context and power relationships have to be thoroughly analyzed but it is also necessary to pay attention to larger trends of writing history in this period.