Conquista et fiction juridique Nouvel éclairage sur le requerimiento

This study offers a new interpretation of the “legal monster” which was the requerimiento or demand for submission read by Spanish conquerors to American Indian populations after having disembarked – and this as early as 1514. This document is studied in the light of two legal traditions : juridical fiction and irrefragable presumption, which distances reality from communicability. These two mechanisms underline the ambivalences and perversity of ethnocentric reflection.