B. Apsner, Vertrag und Konsens im frühen Mittelalter (Constance B. Bouchard)

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Francia-Recensio 2009/2 Mittelalter – Moyen Âge (500–1500)

Burkhard Apsner, Vertrag und Konsens im frühen Mittelalter. Studien zur Gesellschaftsprogrammatik und Staatlichkeit im westfränkischen Reich, Trier (Kliomedia) 2006, 322 p. (Trierer Historische Forschungen, 58), ISBN 3-89890-051-7, EUR 52,00.

rezensiert von/compte rendu rédigé par

Constance B. Bouchard, Akron

The 843 Treaty of Coulaines is little noted today, one of a series of agreements reached between Charles the Bald and the great lords of western Francia. The Synod of Quierzy in 877, once characterized as marking the disintegration of Carolingian central government, far outshadows Coulaines. But a century ago a number of scholars took Coulaines as a significant constitutional turning point, an important stage in the development of French government. More recently, however, discussions of the origins of the ideal of governance with the consent of the governed have focused, not on the ninth century but either on antiquity (the Old Testament, Roman law, and the writings of Augustine) or else on early modern political theory. Here Burkhard Apsner, in a lightly-revised version of his dissertation, sets out to make Coulaines once again an important stage in the development of the idea of consensus as fundamental to governance. The spelling out of the need for consensus in agreements such as Coulaines, he argues, was more than a theoretical notion kept alive from antiquity among the learned elite. Instead such a treaty between king and great nobles was for him a political instrument, a tool for defusing crisis and conflict arising between the central authority and the powerful periphery.

With Coulaines as the constant focus, the book is more narrow than the title suggests, despite an excursus at the end into the question of the long-term impact of this treaty’s ideas. After all, the proceedings of the synod at Coulaines run only seven pages in the MGH edition and provide a slim basis for a book of this length. Apsner’s broader purpose, highly laudable, is to incorporate the upper nobility into any discussion of medieval governance, along with the king himself and his great bishops, but the nobility has not been excluded from modern scholarly discussions of these topics as much as Apsner suggests.

In spite of Apsner’s best efforts to avoid becoming teleological, that is to see the ninth century interesting chiefly in so far as it presaged modern constitutional developments, the underlying approach is fairly simplistic. Even though he repeatedly and rightly insists that Coulaines cannot be treated as the seminal moment in the origins of modern government, constitutional issues still shape his discussion. He identifies what he considers key aspects of a social compact, what other scholars have argued first defined the relations between ruler and people in the thirteenth century, with the Magna Carta in England (1215) or the late thirteenth-century Privileges of Aragon. He then points out how Coulaines also included these aspects. These included arriving at a consensus between the participants, legal guarantees, penalty clauses, and a statement that the compact promoted just laws and was for the value of broader society, not just for the individuals involved. These parallels are undercut by the fact that, unlike Magna Carta, which was repeatedly referred to whenever kings and lords quarreled in subsequent centuries, Coulaines was rarely if ever invoked.

Apsner begins by contextualizing the Treaty of Coulaines in the events of the early 840s, in the difficult period after the death of Louis the Pious. The Burgundian count Warin is treated in some depth as an example of the sort of noble who participated in the discussions at Coulaines, including his status as a lay abbot and his role in the 841 Battle of Fontenoy between Louis’s sons. Apsner then goes on to discuss the terminology of consensus, with extended discussions of royal Capitularia both before and after Coulaines, with their frequent use of the phrase consensus fidelium. Next, he devotes himself in the heart of the book to a broad-ranging discussion of how the social compact ideals expressed at Coulaines were picked up in the following generation (even if without explicit reference to the treaty), in letters, in synods, and, perhaps most interesting of all, in the Liber revelationum of Audradus of Sens. This little-known work might indeed have merited a much more thorough analysis. After discussing the influence which the same need for consensus expressed at Coulaines had on coronation rituals and on the agreement reached at Quierzy in 877, Apsner finishes with echoes of Coulaines in subsequent centuries.

The author is careful and thorough in what he has set out to accomplish. One wishes however that he could have reproduced the text of the Treaty of Coulaines for convenient reference, since he spends so much time analyzing it closely. It also would have been good if he could have incorporated the scholarship that appeared between 2000, when he completed his dissertation, and 2006, when the book was published. The Carolingian era has been a fruitful one for scholars in this decade, especially for those publishing in English or French, yet the bibliography contains essentially nothing from after 1999, with extremely few exceptions. (And he tends to rely quite heavily on works first published in the early twentieth century.) He is repeatedly drawn into discussions of the origins of constitutional government and even into the question of whether the king or the nobility can be seen as representing the people, much more than is helpful. The book should be of interest to historians of political theory, and perhaps even more so to political scientists interested in the historical antecedents of modern constitutional thought. But its contribution to a broader understanding of events in the ninth century remains small.