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The Birth of Absolutism
Yves-Marie Berce's THE BIRTH OF ABSOLUTISM offers a refreshingly original approach to the history of France between the Edict of Nantes and the personal rule of Louis XIV, a period dominated by the names of two cardinals - Richelieu and Mazarin. Berce brings to the task not only familiarity with the sources and with French historiography, but also a thorough knowledge of the large body of English and American research on seventeenth-century France. This has enabled him to escape the diminishing perspective of the older French school, the 'grand history told from Paris' which reduced the course of events to an account of the inevitable triumph of the 'Royal state'. Berce emphasises the degree to which the French Crown remained beset by an aristocratic faction only too ready to avail itself of royal minorities, religious dissent or provincial grievances in the pursuit of its own ambitions.
Popular protest in late-medieval Europe
The documents in this stimulating volume span from 1245 to 1424 but focus on the 'contagion of rebellion' from 1355 to 1382 that followed in the wake of the plague. They comprise a diversity of sources and cover a variety of forms of popular protest in different social, political and economic settings. Their authors range across a wide political and intellectual horizon and include revolutionaries, the artistocracy, merchants and representatives from the church. They tell gripping and often gruesome stories of personal and collective violence, anguish, anger, terror, bravery, and foolishness. Of over 200 documents presented here, most have been translated into English for the first time, providing students and scholars with a new opportunity to compare social movements across Europe over two centuries, allowing a re-evaluation of pre-industrial revolts, the Black Death and its consequences for political culture and action. This book will be essential reading for those seeking to better understand popular attitudes and protest in medieval Europe.
Factional Struggles
This title is available in Open Access thanks to the support of Université de Genève. Factional Struggles explores the dynamics of conflicts among ruling elites within cities, dynastic courts, rural areas and regional noble lineages during the early modern period. Building on case studies from France, Italy, the Empire and the Swiss Confederation, the essays collected by Mathieu Caesar in this volume highlight how factions were formed and how they shaped political society from the late Middle Ages. The authors have especially focused on how political and religious ideologies contributed to the formation of partisanship, the role of propaganda, and the significance and strategies of factional leaders. The volume shows how factions, despite the generally negative view of them held by theologians and jurists, were in practice accepted and used as political tools.
Crime, Justice and Public Order in Old Regime France
This title, first published in 1984, is a case study of crime and criminal justice in rural, southwestern France in the last century of the Old Regime. Based on extensive research in criminal court records, often the only documentary evidence of the poor and illiterate, the study is a valuable addition both to our knowledge of Old Regime society and to our understanding of its judicial institutions. Rural, Old Regime France seethed with violence. Assault, homicide, and a violence of speech occurred frequently at all levels of society. The author’s finding that royal fiscal and judicial officials were recurring targets of this violence additionally contributes to our understanding of the revolutionary events ending the Old Regime. This system, providing in principle for judicial torture and corporal and capital punishments for relatively minor crimes, has long epitomized much that was wrong with pre-revolutionary France. But the law in principle is not the law in practice, and the author finds that both local and appeals courts seldom decreed such measures. This book will be of interest to students of history and criminology.
Louis Sébastien Mercier
French playwright, novelist, activist, and journalist Louis Sébastien Mercier (1740–1814) passionately captured scenes of social injustice in pre-Revolutionary Paris in his prolific oeuvre but today remains an understudied writer. In this penetrating study—the first in English devoted to Mercier in decades—Michael Mulryan explores his unpublished writings and urban chronicles, Tableau de Paris (1781–88) and Le Nouveau Paris (1798), in which he identified the city as a microcosm of national societal problems, detailed the conditions of the laboring poor, encouraged educational reform, and confronted universal social ills. Mercier’s rich writings speak powerfully to the sociopolitical problems that continue to afflict us as political leaders manipulate public debate and encourage absolutist thinking, deepening social divides. An outcast for his polemical views during his lifetime, Mercier has been called the founder of modern urban discourse, and his work a precursor to investigative journalism. This sensitive study returns him to his rightful place among Enlightenment thinkers.
The Limits of Absolutism in ancien régime France
This selection of articles is organized around three broad themes: the nature of the governing system in France (’Absolutism’); the political crisis of the mid-17th-century (the ’Fronde’); and the development of royal finance. The author first considers the growth of the French state in its ideological and institutional aspects, then the opposition such developments provoked, much centred on the figure of Cardinal Mazarin. In the last section particular attention is given to fiscal history, including a comparison of mid-18th-century France with the other states of Europe. Professor Bonney would argue that the ’fiscal imperative’, the increased requirements posed by the costs of war, and the long-term consequences of fiscal growth may be seen as one of the decisive factors in the development of the modern state.
Communities of Grain
"As an extended essay on an important theme of comparative history, this is an impressive book. . . . By highlighting the irreducible particularities of rural communities in the past, Magagna has written a book deeply informed by historical consciousness as well as contemporary social theory."--Journal of Social History
The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern European History, 1350-1750
This Handbook re-examines the concept of early modern history in a European and global context. The term 'early modern' has been familiar, especially in Anglophone scholarship, for four decades and is securely established in teaching, research, and scholarly publishing. More recently, however, the unity implied in the notion has fragmented, while the usefulness and even the validity of the term, and the historical periodisation which it incorporates, have been questioned. The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern European History, 1350-1750 provides an account of the development of the subject during the past half-century, but primarily offers an integrated and comprehensive survey of present know...
Peasants without the Party
Exploring one of the most dynamic and contested regions of the world, this series includes works on political, economic, cultural, and social changes in modern and contemporary Asia and the Pacific. The leading specialist on China's twentieth century peasant resistance reexamines, in bold and original ways, the question: Was the Chinese peasantry a revolutionary force? Where most scholarly attention has focused on Communist-led peasant movements, Bianco's story is one of peasant thought and action largely unmediated by modern political parties. This volume pays particular attention to the first half of the twentieth century when peasant-based conflict, ranging from tax and food protests to secret society conflicts, opium struggles, inter-communal conflicts, and tenant protests over rent, was central to nationwide revolutionary processes.
