Préférant miséricorde à rigueur et sévérité de justice. Lettres de pardon des ducs de Lorraine au XVIIe siècle. By Antoine Follain

The tens of thousands of letters of remission in the Trésor des Chartes, surviving from the fourteenth century until 1568, have long been highly prized by historians for the wealth of narrative detail they provide about ordinary people. We know a lot less about pardons outside the kingdom of France. The 3,000 letters issued by the dukes of Lorraine from the end of the fifteenth century until 1634, when they ceased to be issued following the French invasion, have been known about since the antiquarian Raymond des Godins de Souhesmes, published a small selection of the letters in Annales de l’Est in 1901. But as Antoine Follain explains, Godins de Souhesmes based his articles on only about a tenth of the corpus, and he not only privileged an unrepresentative sample but also embroidered and even romanticized some of his choices when retelling their tales. Follain’s new edition is particularly welcome as it focuses on the seventeenth century, a period for which it was once thought there were few surviving pardons, and consequently, there has been very little scholarly work anywhere in Europe. The present volume contains full transcriptions of one-sixth of the 884 letters issued by the dukes between 1600 and 1634, a triage made necessary by the cost of publication. Follain expects to publish the entire corpus digitally in the near future on the website Criminicorpus. His introduction provides both a scholarly analysis of the ducal legal system and an extremely useful state of the art on the historiography of letters of remission more generally. The system of pardoning in Lorraine was very different from that in France, relying much less on regulation and codification and much more on customary practice. Follain follows the most recent historians in rejecting Natalie Zemon Davis’s claim that the pardons themselves are fictions. To suggest this is to misunderstand the procedure in which the facts had to conform to the judicial investigation and tally with witness statements. They were not a ‘tissu de contre-vérités’, but verifiable discourses. This is demonstrated when claims were challenged in court. For example, the widow of Jean Bedel was able to demonstrate that her husband’s killer used false information to obtain his pardon in 1624; it was struck down 3 years later, and he was hanged. Unlike Godins de Souhesmes, who picked out the high-status and most noteworthy cases, Follain’s selection is more representative of the corpus. The overwhelming proportion of letters were issued in cases of male-on-male homicide. The corpus suggests a high degree of weapon ownership in rural society and the existence of deadly peasant duels and feuds rooted in economic and social grievances. To this reviewer, the emphasis on customary legal practice, the absence of appeal courts and the prevalence of rural feud-like practices means that Francophone Lorraine resembles the system of dispute settlement that characterized neighbouring German-speaking parts of the Holy Roman Empire rather than the kingdom of France. But, as elsewhere on this frontier, French cultural influences were strong, as the spread of duelling demonstrates. The overrepresentation of students in the corpus is evidence for changes in elite behaviour and yet more evidence of the brutalization of masculine manners in the aftermath of the French Wars of Religion, in which Lorraine became embroiled during the wars of succession after 1584. This is an important addition to the corpus of published pardons, and Follain promises more to come. As well as the complete digital edition of the seventeenth-century letters, he is working on the eighteenth-century pardons, which the dukes issued following their reinstatement to the duchy in 1697. Follain’s project is a monumental undertaking. It has only been made possible due to the size of the team: the transcriptions were done by 270 undergraduate and master’s students. In a fitting tribute, his co-workers are named individually in the present volume.