ABSTRACT
Literature on violence, duels and conflict in the French nobility of the seventeenth century has concentrated on the middle and lower ranks of the nobility. In seventeenth-century French texts, mediation is called 'accommodement' or 'raccommodement', with the two terms being used synonymously. The chapter suggests that there is a difference between raccommodements of persons who had been linked by bonds of sympathy before the conflict and raccommodements between people who had not been friends, but were strangers or enemies who were at loggerheads with each other. Raccommodement offered a possibility of reconciliation where the adversaries risked nothing: one of the two might refuse reconciliation, but this did not offer him a means to humiliate the other by rejecting his signs of goodwill. As high-ranking mediators often initiated the raccommodement, refusing to be reconciled with one's adversary could turn into an affront against the mediator, who might be one's patron or sovereign.
