Marc Jaffré
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Dr. Marc W.S. Jaffré (Ph.D., University of St Andrews, 2017) is a post-doc on the project Building Peace in Early Modern France. Since obtaining his PhD, Marc has been a lecturer at the University of St Andrews, the University of Oxford (Balliol College), and most recently Durham University, where he remains an honorary fellow. His research is motivated by an interest in understanding the relationship between human experience and the state, and how culture is represented and performed. Within the context of his first major research project, this has meant broadening out the historiography of princely courts beyond the traditional top-down perspective, to better understand how courtiers, merchants and financiers constructed the world of the court.
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Marc's forthcoming book, The Courtiers and the Court of Louis XIII, 1610-1643, demonstrates that contrary to received opinion, the court of Louis XIII of France was highly influential. The book emphasizes the role that these courtiers, merchants and financiers played in shaping the institutional, political, cultural, economic and military framework of Louis' court. This research has drawn wider public attention, and he was interviewed in January 2023 by public historian Suzannah Lipscomb for the Not Just the Tudors podcast. Marc has also published on Henri IV's court, during the difficult initial years, when Henri was embroiled in civil war with the Catholic Ligue (French History 31, 2017), and on Henri's use of printers during this same period (in Wilkinson and Kemp (eds.), Negotiating Conflict and Controversy in the Early Modern Book World, Brill, 2019). He is also editing a volume for Brepols, Marginalised Voices and Figures in French Festival Culture, 1500-1800 (with Bram van Leuveren and Alexander Robinson). Aside from his specific interest in court history, Marc has a broad interest in the political, cultural and economic history of the early modern period, and increasingly in the history of early modern hospitality.
Project Arbiters of Peace: Local Transitional Justice in Early Modern France
This project will analyze local transitional justice by focusing on royal peace commissioners. Composed of one Catholic and one Protestant magistrate, they toured the provinces to oversee the implementation of the Edict of Nantes. Commissioners dealt with the restoration of Catholic worship, the placement of Huguenot churches and cemeteries, and disputes over confiscated property. They also received petitions and complaints on exclusion measures and violations of the edict. Peace commissioners were an enduring feature of French peacebuilding: first sent out during the wars, King Henry IV revived them in 1599, as did Louis XIII in 1610–1630, and Louis XIV in the 1660s. The aim of this project is to assess the commissioners’ effectiveness by comparing their efforts across time and in different regions. The long-term approach is crucial, because the post-1598 missions differed from their predecessors: whereas previous commissioners had no regional attachment and were neutral, those of the seventeenth century were bipartisan and drawn from local elites. These regional and confessional entanglements may well have hindered their efficacy, however, because commissioners could be seen as partial.
This project will analyze local transitional justice by focusing on royal peace commissioners. Composed of one Catholic and one Protestant magistrate, they toured the provinces to oversee the implementation of the Edict of Nantes. Commissioners dealt with the restoration of Catholic worship, the placement of Huguenot churches and cemeteries, and disputes over confiscated property. They also received petitions and complaints on exclusion measures and violations of the edict. Peace commissioners were an enduring feature of French peacebuilding: first sent out during the wars, King Henry IV revived them in 1599, as did Louis XIII in 1610–1630, and Louis XIV in the 1660s. The aim of this project is to assess the commissioners’ effectiveness by comparing their efforts across time and in different regions. The long-term approach is crucial, because the post-1598 missions differed from their predecessors: whereas previous commissioners had no regional attachment and were neutral, those of the seventeenth century were bipartisan and drawn from local elites. These regional and confessional entanglements may well have hindered their efficacy, however, because commissioners could be seen as partial.