Saint-Malo et les guerres maritimes du Ponant durant l’Affaire d’Écosse (1512-1560). Une singulière absence

L’histoire de Saint-Malo comporte quelques zones d’ombre, en particulier pour la première moitié du xvie siècle. La Bretagne, d’abord comme duché souverain associé et plus tard comme province, faisant partie intégrante du Royaume, est à cette époque totalement et directement engagée sur ses côtes et même sur son sol dans des conflits internationaux sporadiques opposant les forces navales et terrestres françaises à celles des Anglais, Écossais, Espagnols et Flamands. Au contraire de Nantes, Penmarc’h, Brest, Le Conquet et d’autres ports de moindre envergure, Saint-Malo ne paraît pas prendre part aux concentrations massives de navires et de troupes qui s’organisent en Bretagne comme en Normandie, pas plus qu’elle ne semble fournir des forces navales pour la défense des côtes et la protection de convois, ou être engagée de façon intensive dans les guerres navales. Ce fait est curieux si l’on considère l’histoire ultérieure de la ville et nous amène à questionner le potentiel économique et maritime de Saint-Malo pendant cette période, ainsi que l’origine de son pouvoir économique.The history of Saint Malo still has many blind spots, particularly the one that covers the first half of the 16th century. Brittany, as a sovereign associate duchy and then as a province of the kingdom, was at that time totally and directly engaged on its coasts and even on its soil in a sporadic international conflict opposing the French, English, Scottish, Spanish and Flemish naval and land forces. Contrary to Nantes, Penmarc’h, Brest, Le Conquet and many much smaller ports, Saint Malo seems neither to have taken part in the numerous and often massive ship and troop concentrations that took place in Brittany as well as in Normandy, nor to have supplied the naval forces in charge of the defence of the coasts and the protection of the convoys, nor to have engaged intensively in this naval war. The fact is intriguing considering the future history of the town and leads us to question its economic and maritime capacities during this period and the origin of its economic power

Droit de la guerre et droits des prisonniers de guerre au xvie siècle : le cas de la Ligue en Bretagne (1589-1598)

Excepté celui de quelques personnes d’importance, le sort des combattants faits prisonniers après les batailles et les redditions de places au cours des guerres du xvie siècle a peu retenu l’attention des historiens. Ils sont aussi les oubliés des chroniques et des Mémoires du temps. La collecte d’informations éparses permet cependant de s’interroger plus particulièrement sur le sort des soldats du commun tombés aux mains de l’ennemi durant la Ligue en Bretagne. Plus coûteux à entretenir que leur rançon ne pouvait rapporter, étaient-ils relâchés ou exterminés ? Selon quels critères ? Durant ce conflit, aucun codex réglant le droit général des combattants ou définissant la « bonne prise » ne semble régir le sort de ces prisonniers. Malgré tout, ils n’étaient pas toujours soumis à l’arbitraire. À partir de plusieurs cas particuliers, on peut discerner quelques principes comportementaux tenant lieu d’un droit de la guerre qui tarde encore à être formalisé.Except for some high profile cases, the fate of the warriors captured after the battles and the city surrenders during the wars of the sixteenth century has received little attention from historians. They were also been forgotten by the chronicles and the memoirs of the time. Collecting scattered information, however, provides an opportunity to reflect specifically on the fate of common soldiers who had fallen into the hands of the enemy during the Wars of the Catholic League in Brittany. As their ransom would have been lower than the cost of keeping them, were they freed or exterminated? What criteria were applied? During that conflict, there was no legal framework regulating the definition of a “bonne prise” or the rights and fate of those soldiers. Nevertheless, they were not always subjected to an arbitrary treatment. The analysis of several particular cases allows us to identify some behavioural principles used as the rights of the war though these had not yet been formalised

Droit de la guerre et droits des prisonniers de guerre au xvie siècle : le cas de la Ligue en Bretagne (1589-1598)

Excepté celui de quelques personnes d’importance, le sort des combattants faits prisonniers après les batailles et les redditions de places au cours des guerres du xvie siècle a peu retenu l’attention des historiens. Ils sont aussi les oubliés des chroniques et des Mémoires du temps. La collecte d’informations éparses permet cependant de s’interroger plus particulièrement sur le sort des soldats du commun tombés aux mains de l’ennemi durant la Ligue en Bretagne. Plus coûteux à entretenir que leur rançon ne pouvait rapporter, étaient-ils relâchés ou exterminés ? Selon quels critères ? Durant ce conflit, aucun codex réglant le droit général des combattants ou définissant la « bonne prise » ne semble régir le sort de ces prisonniers. Malgré tout, ils n’étaient pas toujours soumis à l’arbitraire. À partir de plusieurs cas particuliers, on peut discerner quelques principes comportementaux tenant lieu d’un droit de la guerre qui tarde encore à être formalisé.Except for some high profile cases, the fate of the warriors captured after the battles and the city surrenders during the wars of the sixteenth century has received little attention from historians. They were also been forgotten by the chronicles and the memoirs of the time. Collecting scattered information, however, provides an opportunity to reflect specifically on the fate of common soldiers who had fallen into the hands of the enemy during the Wars of the Catholic League in Brittany. As their ransom would have been lower than the cost of keeping them, were they freed or exterminated? What criteria were applied? During that conflict, there was no legal framework regulating the definition of a “bonne prise” or the rights and fate of those soldiers. Nevertheless, they were not always subjected to an arbitrary treatment. The analysis of several particular cases allows us to identify some behavioural principles used as the rights of the war though these had not yet been formalised

Confinement-Induced Transition between Wavelike Collective Cell Migration Modes

International audienceThe structural and functional organization of biological tissues relies on the intricate interplay between chemical and mechanical signaling. Whereas the role of constant and transient mechanical perturbations is generally accepted, several studies recently highlighted the existence of longrange mechanical excitations (i.e., waves) at the supracellular level. Here, we confine epithelial cell mono-layers to quasi-one dimensional geometries, to force the establishment of tissue-level waves of well-defined wavelength and period. Numerical simulations based on a self-propelled Voronoi model reproduce the observed waves and exhibit a phase transition between a global and a multi-nodal wave, controlled by the confinement size. We conrm experimentally the existence of such a phasetransition, and show that wavelength and period are independent of the confinement length. Together, these results demonstrate the intrinsic origin of tissue oscillations, which could provide cells with a mechanism to accurately measure distances at the supracellular level

Transdimensional inference of archeomagnetic intensity change

One of the main goals of archeomagnetism is to document the secular changes of Earth's magnetic field by laboratory analysis of the magnetization carried by archeological artefacts. Typical techniques for creating a time-dependent model assume a prescribed temporal discretisation which, when coupled with sparse data coverage, require strong regularisation generally applied over the entire time series in order to ensure smoothness. Such techniques make it difficult to characterise uncertainty and frequency content, and robustly detect rapid changes. Key to proper modelling (and physical understanding) is a method that places a minimum level of regularisation on any fit to the data. Here we apply a transdimensional Bayesian technique based on piecewise linear interpolation to sparse archeointensity datasets, in which the temporal complexity of the model is not set a priori, but is self-selected by the data. The method produces two key outputs: (i) a posterior distribution of intensity as a function of time, a useful tool for archeomagnetic dating, whose statistics are smooth but formally unregularised; (ii) by including the data ages in the model of unknown parameters, the method also produces posterior age statistics of each individual contributing datum. We test the technique using synthetic datasets and confirm agreement of our method with an integrated likelihood approach. We then apply the method to three archeomagnetic datasets all reduced to a single location: one temporally well-sampled within 700km from Paris (here referred to as Paris700), one that is temporally sparse centred on Hawaii, and a third (from Lübeck, Germany and Paris700) that has additional ordering constraints on age from stratification. Compared with other methods, our average posterior distributions largely agree, however our credible intervals appear to much better reflect the uncertainty during periods of sparse data coverage. Because each ensemble member of the posterior distribution is piecewise linear, we only fit oscillations when required by the data. As an example, we show that an oscillatory signal, associated with temporally-localised intensity maxima reported for a sparse Hawaiian dataset, is not required by the data. However, we do recover the previously reported oscillation of period 260 yrs for the Paris700 dataset and compute the probability distribution of the period of oscillation. We further demonstrate that such an oscillation is unresolved when accounting for age uncertainty by using a fixed age and with an artificially inflated error budget on intensity

Measurement of W Polarisation at LEP

The three different helicity states of W bosons produced in the reaction e+ e- -> W+ W- -> l nu q q~ at LEP are studied using leptonic and hadronic W decays. Data at centre-of-mass energies \sqrt s = 183-209 GeV are used to measure the polarisation of W bosons, and its dependence on the W boson production angle. The fraction of longitudinally polarised W bosons is measured to be 0.218 \pm 0.027 \pm 0.016 where the first uncertainty is statistical and the second systematic, in agreement with the Standard Model expectation

Measurement of the Lifetime of the Tau Lepton

The tau lepton lifetime is measured with the L3 detector at LEP using the complete data taken at centre-of-mass energies around the Z pole resulting in tau_tau = 293.2 +/- 2.0 (stat) +/- 1.5 (syst) fs. The comparison of this result with the muon lifetime supports lepton universality of the weak charged current at the level of six per mille. Assuming lepton universality, the value of the strong coupling constant, alpha_s is found to be alpha_s(m_tau^2) = 0.319 +/- 0.015(exp.) +/- 0.014 (theory)

Search for Anomalous Couplings in the Higgs Sector at LEP

Anomalous couplings of the Higgs boson are searched for through the processes e^+ e^- -> H gamma, e^+ e^- -> e^+ e^- H and e^+ e^- -> HZ. The mass range 70 GeV < m_H < 190 GeV is explored using 602 pb^-1 of integrated luminosity collected with the L3 detector at LEP at centre-of-mass energies sqrt(s)=189-209 GeV. The Higgs decay channels H -> ffbar, H -> gamma gamma, H -> Z\gamma and H -> WW^(*) are considered and no evidence is found for anomalous Higgs production or decay. Limits on the anomalous couplings d, db, Delta(g1z), Delta(kappa_gamma) and xi^2 are derived as well as limits on the H -> gamma gamma and H -> Z gamma decay rates

Measurement of W Polarisation at LEP

The three different helicity states of W bosons produced in the reaction e+ e- -> W+ W- -> l nu q q~ at LEP are studied using leptonic and hadronic W decays. Data at centre-of-mass energies \sqrt s = 183-209 GeV are used to measure the polarisation of W bosons, and its dependence on the W boson production angle. The fraction of longitudinally polarised W bosons is measured to be 0.218 \pm 0.027 \pm 0.016 where the first uncertainty is statistical and the second systematic, in agreement with the Standard Model expectation