dr. D.C. (David) van der Linden

NWO VIDI project Building Peace: Transitional Justice in Early Modern France

How can societies achieve a lasting peace in the wake of civil war? The United Nations advocate transitional justice, which aims to address wartime grievances and promote reconciliation by means of prosecution, truth and reconciliation committees, reparations, and memorials. Because research mostly focuses on recent conflicts, however, it remains difficult to evaluate long-term effectiveness.

To help determine impact, this project develops a historical framework for transitional justice. Our team will investigate the transitional justice mechanisms created in the aftermath of the French Wars of Religion (1562–1598). The Edict of Nantes famously ended the civil wars by allowing religious coexistence between Catholics and Protestants but also created mechanisms to promote peace, including bipartisan courts and peace commissioners. Yet by 1685 King Louis XIV revoked the edict and forced his Protestant subjects to convert. To explain this ultimate breakdown of peace, the project postulates that we must study the long-term viability of transitional justice, particularly the commitment of subsequent generations to uphold instituted mechanisms. Studying the effectiveness of pre-modern peacebuilding thus opens up a new, interdisciplinary field of study – that of historicising transitional justice.

Signed, Sealed & Undelivered

In 1926, a seventeenth-century trunk of letters was bequeathed to the Museum voor Communicatie in The Hague, then as now the centre of government, politics, and trade in The Netherlands. The trunk belonged to one of the most active postmasters of the day, Simon de Brienne, a man at the heart of European communication networks. It contains an extraordinary archive: 2600 letters sent from all over Europe to this axis of communication, none of which were ever delivered. In the seventeenth century, the recipient also paid postal and delivery charges. But if the addressee was deceased, absent, or uninterested, no fees could be collected. Postmasters usually destroyed such “dead letters”, but Brienne preserved them, hoping that someone would retrieve the letters – and pay the postage. Hence the nickname for the trunk: “the piggy bank” (spaarpotje). The trunk freezes a moment in history, allowing us to glimpse the early modern world as it went about its daily business. The letters are uncensored, unedited, and 600 of them even remain unopened. The archive itself has remained virtually untouched by historians until it was recently rediscovered. Our international and interdisciplinary team of researchers has now begun a process of digitization, preservation, transcription, and editing that will reveal its secrets for the first time – even, we hope, those of the unopened letters.