Aurélien Peter is an agrégé in history and a doctoral student in modern history. He is currently completing a doctoral thesis supervised by Pr Jean-Marie Le Gall (Paris 1/IHMC). After teaching at the University of Paris 1, since the start of the 2023 academic year he has held the position of temporary teaching and research associate (ATER) attached to Prof. Patrick Boucheron's History of Powers in Western Europe, 13th to 16th Centuries chair at the Collège de France. Within this framework, he is the editor of Entre-Temps, a digital journal of current history, which provides a wide readership with a set of reflections on our relationship with the past, on history and on the plurality of its forms of writing and transmission.
For his doctoral research, he is focusing on the staff of the clerks of the Paris parliament between the 16th and 18th centuries, in order to gain a better understanding of the workings of this institution, which at the time played a leading judicial, administrative and political role . To this end, he draws on two main corpuses : notarial deeds and the archives of the Paris parliament. His research has led him to analyze the activities of court clerks in terms of information management and control. Registrars, clerks and clerks administer the production, circulation and preservation of the writings, words and gestures required to run a central institution of the monarchical state. They give form to these data, making them part of an administrative norm that charges them with the authority of Parliament. In this way, he examines the construction and framing of the discourses of a central institution of the monarchical state, at the very level of paper and parchment, and as close as possible to the hands of the scribes. In the 16th century, the three clerks of parliament were lords of their clerks' offices ; they established themselves as masters of administrative knowledge and guardians of parliamentary memory. Over the course of the following century, their power waned, and they gradually came under the authority of the King's Attorney General, who relied more and more directly on the principal clerks to run the clerks' offices. These areas were then filled with a range of highly specialized clerks, supervised by the institution but not without a degree of autonomy.
