UNE SOURCE À REDÉCOUVRIR: LES PREMIÈRES ARCHIVES DU PARLEMENT DE PARIS, LES OLIM (1254-1318)

During the XIII century the king of France, king-judge, exercised his sovereign power surrounded by his vassals and above all by his advisers, clergymen with a juridical education in Roman law and Canon law, from which the importance of these judicial sessions at court. Louis IX (St. Louis) strengthened the role and the importance of it through a great reform of the procedure that enlarged the access to the royal justice of appeal to the generality of the subjects. The rigor of the new procedure was also prescribed for the same royal agents as the respect of the “common good” – that is to say the general interest – was also imposed to the feudal castellans. The enormous archives of this court, the Parliament, have been preserved (and they are denominated Olim because of the first word of one of the registers). They are constituted by around 4600 decisions made between 1254 and the 1318. Published in 1848 without a complete summary, they still remain little studied. A complete index of these decisions has been realized by the Centre d’études d’histoire juridique and published online in 2003 (on the CNRS and Université Panthéon Assa, Paris II sites).