Noble history was a weapon against clerks who read the law as royal will

Evidence

The history of right will therefore be a denunciation of betrayals, and of all the betrayals that were born of the betrayals. The goal of this history, whose very form is a challenge to the knowledge of the clerks and judges, is to make the prince see usurpations of which he is unaware and to restore to him a strength, and the memory of bonds, even though it was in his interest to forget them and to let them be forgotten. History will be the weapon of a nobility that has been betrayed and humiliated, and it will use it against the knowledge of the clerks, which always explains contemporary events in terms of contemporary events, power in terms of power, and the letter of the law in terms of the will of the king and vice versa. — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 3920

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the polemical/denunciatory function of noble historiography as distinct from juridical and administrative knowledge.
• XREF: Foucault’s counter-history of the nobility prefigures his later account of power/knowledge struggles; connects to the ruler’s-eye-view critique underlying later Orientalism readings. — connects to: Royal writs defined which disputes the King’s courts would hear — Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process: Basic Problems in…, 1458; Eighteenth-century lawyers drew attack from both classes and crown alike — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 515