Skip to main content
European Commission logo print header

Signs and States: Semiotics of the Modern State

Final Report Summary - SAS (Signs and States: Semiotics of the Modern State)

SAS has been set up to explore the transformation of the exercise of symbolic power through a semiology of the state. The main hypothesis is that, if the idea of a genesis of the modern state is now widely accepted, the understanding of the birth and development of state institutions and processes have been hindered by an excessive insistence on material elements and, as regards cultural developments, on the impact of political ideas and of propaganda, whilst general cultural evolutions, stimulated both by the economic growth and by the so-called Gregorian reform, have been neglected. This goes with a methodological hypothesis: the central issue is the evolution of the system of communication, a system in which both contents and medias have to be analysed at the level of language and signs. To test these hypothesis, we work with a comparative approach on a long-term scale (from the Gregorian Reform to the aftermath of the Council of Trent), and we have tried to balance theoretical and empirical approaches with the development of new digital tools to aid the application of appropriate methodologies for cultural studies. Theoretical and empirical approaches have been dealt with in three sets of conferences, which are in the course of publication in the collection Le pouvoir symbolique en Occident (v.1300-v.1640) by the Publications de la Sorbonne and the French School in Rome (four volumes already issued, plus one volume independently published by Viella). The conferences organized in Rome, in cooperation with the French School at Rome, are devoted to themes which are central to the project: they explore the problematic of the “vecteurs de l’idéel” as defined by the anthropologist Maurice Godelier (implicit legitimacy, truth, to conclude with a confrontation with social sciences). The Franco-Italian workshops are more orientated towards conceptual issues, rites, political languages, values, and space. The third set of conferences deals with comparative political themes which, if they may appear more traditional, are nonetheless directly linked to our approach: the relations between church and state, the relation between art and power, assemblies and the building of consensus, and finally the emergence of the constitutional idea in the West.
We have developed new digital tools for mediaeval cultural studies. The PALM/MEDITEXT project consists in a software platform (PALM) able to lemmatize medieval texts which have no orthographical norms in order to use efficiently the techniques of statistical lexicology and semantics, and a numerical library (MEDITEXT) which contains a corpus of medieval texts in French, Latin and English which are relevant to our main research: political texts, but not only these, since we are more interested in language as such than in political ideas as traditionally. However, any researcher can bring in his texts to use the lemmatization system, and he is free to leave the text in the library of to retain it (http://palm.huma-num.fr/PALM/) . The other project also combines the development of free software with PROSOP and the creation of a set of open access numerical data with STUDIUM, a bio-bibliographical dictionary devoted to the students and masters of the Paris schools and University from the origins of the schools to the beginning of the sixteenth century (http://lamop-vs3.univ-paris1.fr/studium/) which will contain up to 20 000 biographies (5425 are accessible and 9815 in preparation). However, PROSOP is an independent software which can be adapted to other set of data and to new ontologies. Another application to a prosopography of English authors in the fields of history and politics (1300-1600) can be accessed at (http://lamop-vs3.univ-paris1.fr/auteursAnglais) and preliminary studies have also been made for a third one, BIB, a DBF database on books in the possession of individual book-owners in England from 1200 to 1550.