Rosanne Baars
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Dr. Rosanne Baars (PhD, University of Amsterdam, 2019) is a post-doc in the project Building Peace in Early Modern France. She has a broad interest in the political and cultural history of the early modern period, especially in diplomacy and peacebuilding, religious coexistence, and media and news reception. After graduating cum laude from the University of Amsterdam, she obtained an NWO Humanities Research Grant for her project on Franco-Netherlandish news exchange during the French Wars of Religion and the Dutch Revolt. In this project, she analyzed the impact of the religious troubles between Catholics and Protestants on a local level in France and the Netherlands. What were the connections between the Dutch Revolt and the French Wars of Religion, and how did knowledge about the wars impact urban audiences in both countries? The trade edition of her dissertation was published as Rumours of Revolt. Civil War and the Emergence of a Transnational News Culture in France and the Netherlands, 1561-1598 (Leiden: Brill, 2021). She has also published on Netherlandish reactions to the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre (French History, 2021), on Arab propaganda in Aleppo about Louis XIV's military campaigns during the 1672 Year of Disaster (with Josephine van den Bent, Early Modern Low Countries, 2020), and on Dutch-Ottoman news-gathering, diplomacy, and religious coexistence (LIAS, 2014). She is also the author of the popular scientific book on a surgeon’s travels in North Africa and the Caribbean, Het journaal van Joannes Veltkamp (1759-1764). Een scheepschirurgijn in dienst van de Admiraliteit van Amsterdam (Zwolle: WBooks, 2014).
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Photo: Arash Nikkah
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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.
