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The Livre rouge has been considered a monument of the communal archives of Rheims since the nineteenth century. Often described as a “cartulary,” it is in fact a complex manuscript created at the end of the fourteenth century that contains very few charters. It instead contains a variety of administrative documents written between the thirteenth century and the beginning of the fifteenth century, covering a wide range of administrative actions and displaying just as many documentary innovations. The study of the documents, placed within their respective contexts of conflicts and/or institutionalization, shows the government’s learning process through writing. Old texts were given new uses, supplemented by new administrative texts with disparate and disordered registrations from the 1370s to 1417, resulting in an innovative process of “cartularization,” which relied on experimentation and tinkering. The memory of these written innovations and their complex process of elaboration, of which the Livre rouge of Rheims acts as the keeper, echoes and mirrors the process of self-invention of the urban government itself.