The Crusades Room in the Palace of Versailles is part of the museum dedicated to "all the glories of France", desired by King Louis-Philippe and opened in 1843. • WIKIMEDIACOMMONS The Crusades have long been, since the Middle Ages in fact, as much an object of history as of memory. With increased topicality in recent years, the subject irrigates ideological discourse, generates debates and controversies on the Internet, and leads to diversions and recoveries beyond scholarly circles. Reflecting the tensions that run through our time, the crusades arouse the interest of a wide audience. As proof, the considerable mass of scholarly studies, popular works, fiction that appears each year. The crusade is therefore one of those themes that no longer belongs only to the academic world, while being a field of research that has been thoroughly renewed in recent decades. Drawing up an exhaustive list of scientific production on the Crusades is impossible, we will limit ourselves here to offering the reader a few milestones in French. As soon as we approach the modern writing of the history of the Crusades, the History of the Crusades and the Frankish Kingdom of Jerusalem , published between 1934 and 1936 by René Grousset, seems essential. However, it is one of the last avatars of a historiographical movement, which began in the previous century, making the Crusades an enterprise that heralded the colonial expansion of France in the 19 th century and a justification of its presence in the Levant, from the 1920s. Several times reissued since 1991, this classic is a precious scholarly sum as much as the witness of a dated vision of the Crusades. Viewpoint changes After 1945, in a context of breathlessness of European colonialism, the crusades were no longer an object of fascination, rather a source of denigration. A History of the Crusades , published between 1951 and 1954 by Steven Runciman, then broke with the traditional narrative by reassessing Near Eastern cultures and taking into account Byzantine and Muslim sources and points of view. Translated into French only in 2006, the work is still part of the general reference stories. From the 1970s, the work of Jonathan Riley-Smith marked a turning point by broadening the notion of crusade beyond expeditions to the Middle East and by associating it with the Reconquista Christianity in Spain and Portugal, the fight against the Cathar and Hussite heresies, the Christianization of the Baltic countries and even the wars against the Ottomans in the 17th century. century. This approach is found in The Crusades , published in 1987 (French translation in 1990), and in his Atlas of the Crusades (1996). The mentalities and ideologies linked to the crusades are now better known. The works of Jean Richard (The Spirit of the Crusade , 1969), by Jean Flori (The First Crusade. The Christian West against Islam , 1992; Peter the Hermit and the First Crusade , 1999; The Holy War. The formation of the idea of crusade in the Christian West , 2001) or Emmanuel Sivan (Islam and the Crusade , 1968) shed light on these aspects. Expanding Sources As for the question of the installation of the Latins in the Middle East and the relations between Crusaders and Muslims, it was the subject of founding studies in France, from the years 1940-1950, by Claude Cahen and Jean Richard, then , from the 1970s, by Michel Balard. Books Orient and Occident at the time of the crusades de Cahen (1983) and Crusades and the Latin East (XI th -XIV e century) de Balard (2001) offer syntheses accessible to the general public. In line with the work of Cahen, historians of the Islamic world have also taken up the question, such as Françoise Micheau and Anne-Marie Eddé. More recently, the work of Abbès Zouache has opened up the prospect of a "shared" history of the crusade. Thus, in Armies and battles in Syria (491/1098-569/1174). Comparative analysis of Latin and Arabic medieval chronicles (2008), he insists on the diffusion of cultures of war in medieval societies. Today, research on the economic, political, cultural and social aspects of the crusade is based on very diverse sources, and not only on texts, and involves various specialties, including archaeology, numismatics , literature or even law, which have made it possible to considerably renew knowledge and understanding of this major phenomenon in the history of the Middle Ages.
