Le bazar de l’hôtel de ville. Les attributs matériels du gouvernement urbain dans le Midi médiéval (XIIe-XVe siècle)

At the end of the Middle Ages, many urban communities in the medieval south of France sought to establish their autonomy with regard to the power of the local lord. As they wished to be recognised in legal and political terms as a universitas, their governing councils adopted different kinds of material symbols: a community house, arca communis, communal texts, seals, keys banners, bells … These markers of municipal freedoms, which constitute a really miscellaneous collection within the town hall, are the instruments of the everyday exercise of local power as they are means of political representation and communication. As such, they are the key pieces in the way the communal authority represented itself in signs and they carried a symbolic message which was viewed as a manifestation of the particular identity of a town. 

Up to now these material signs of urban governance were treated in the margins of historiography but here they now play a central role in an approach, based on their historic value, which aims to adopt a systemic and comparative approach in examining these categories of items found in towns in the south of France, from Aquitaine to Provence, during the latter centuries of the Middle Ages.