Portraits de magistrats vers 1660 : émergence d’une caractérologie informationnelle
This article studies a corpus of manuscripts containing brief “portraits and characters” of Parisian magistrates -known as masters of requests (maîtres des requêtes) - [MC1] [JP2] and officeholders in the Parlement de Paris, around 1660. These manuscripts attest to a work that served the administrat...
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| Formato: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Lenguaje: | Français |
| Publicado: |
2024
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| Acceso en línea: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Sumario: | This article studies a corpus of manuscripts containing brief “portraits and characters” of Parisian magistrates -known as masters of requests (maîtres des requêtes) - [MC1] [JP2] and officeholders in the Parlement de Paris, around 1660. These manuscripts attest to a work that served the administrative and private purposes of Nicolas Fouquet and Jean-Baptiste Colbert, both masters of information. This article analyzes the forms, styles, and intertextual resonances of these character portraits, thereby overcoming the literary/non-literary binary that all too often limits our understanding of such material. The article formulates a new historicization of the manuscript corpus, in order to highlight affinities between its “portraits and characters” of magistrates and various other literary portraits, mostly derogatory, written at the same time with the intent to mock. The most frequently targeted figures are the bourgeois, the dissimulators, the extravagants eccentrics, and the misanthropes. Among the “portraits and characters” in the manuscript corpus, the portraits of Guillaume de Lamoignon (First President of the Parlement de Paris, 1658-1677) and of Nicolas Potier de Novion (First President of the Parlement de Paris, 1678-1689) highlight the importance of what is left unsaid in the portrait, its “outside.” It is thus necessary to nuance the documentary status usually accorded to these portraits by historians, via an intertextual mode of analysis that opens up a new line of enquiry: the emergence of a distinctive form of informative character writing. |
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