Between administration and memory of crime: constitution and uses of Dijon Papier Rouge in the late Middle Ages

The Papier Rouge register contains more than 400 criminal sentences pronounced in the 14th and 15th centuries by the urban power of Dijon, which has high justice rights over the urban territory and its close suburbs under the franchise charter granted to the inhabitants by Duke Hugues III in 1183. Well-known to historians for its information on the criminality repressed in the city and the diversity of the social qualities of the convicts, it must also be placed in the context of the production of the writing in the city in the late Middle Ages, and especially the political context of Dijon. If the creation of the Papier Rouge was part of the administrative boom that characterized the commune at the beginning of the 15th century, a close analysis of the events surrounding it shows that its creation served a judicial but also a political purpose. The crossing of the sources, between this register and those of the deliberations, or the registers of the causes of the town hall and those of the public prosecutors, makes it possible to better follow the progress of the urban administration as for the methods of its drafting and its internal organization, while also taking into account the evolution of the tasks which fall to the scribe of the city which ensures its writing. The investigations and trials of the urban justice system still emphasize that the Papier Rouge constitutes a tool for social control over the inhabitants, because the fact of being inscribed on it can reduce the individual's fama to nothing. Finally, an examination of the jurisdictional trials between the town hall and the Duke of Burgundy, then the King of France, explains the multiple marginal annotations in the register as much as the drawings of hanged men. The analysis of the life of the Papier Rouge and its uses thus makes it possible to underline its multiple roles on the judicial, administrative, social and political levels.