Philippe JOSERAND

Published in Medieval and Early Modern Iberian Peninsula Cultural History

Keywords: France, Historiography, Memory, Myth, Templar Order, XIIth-XXIth Centuries.

A comprehensive scholarly study of the Templars in France has not been published yet. Yet their order, from the outset, was closely linked to the French present space: most brethren were born there, and the langue d’oïl rapidly stood as the official tongue of the institution. For two centuries, the Templars used the Capetian kingdom as the main operations base to act in the Latin East and to sustain their singular vocation merging prayer and warfare into the same religious move. After the trial which opened in 1307 on King Philip the Fair’s initiative, the Templar order, although suppressed, did not entirely disappear from the French landscape: some buildings remained and, even more, a myth took shape, from which an historiography gradually emerged. This scientific movement strengthened from the end of the twentieth century and it now allows to shed new light on the French Templar presence, and to question the generally accepted ideas in order to better understand a medieval reality, which is still fascinating, but often strangely evoked.