The State in Early Modern France

The State in Early Modern France PDF Author: James B. Collins
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521387248
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
This major new textbook addresses fundamental questions about the nature of the state in early modern Europe through an analysis of the most important continental state, France. Professor Collins abandons the traditional formulation of the absolute monarchy, and presents in its place a state that evolved to meet the needs of the French elites. Collins offers a detailed analysis of French society, to provide the broader context for the development of the French state. The model that emerges from his synthesis is one that relied more on persuasion and congruity of influence than on arbitrary authority, and Collins argues that fundamental changes in French society made the monarchical, ministerial state a dangerous anachronism by the 1750s, leading to political impasse by the second half of the eighteenth century. Collins offers a fundamental reinterpretation of the state relevant to historians and students of political thought.

The State in Early Modern France

The State in Early Modern France PDF Author: James B. Collins
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521387248
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Get Book Here

Book Description
This major new textbook addresses fundamental questions about the nature of the state in early modern Europe through an analysis of the most important continental state, France. Professor Collins abandons the traditional formulation of the absolute monarchy, and presents in its place a state that evolved to meet the needs of the French elites. Collins offers a detailed analysis of French society, to provide the broader context for the development of the French state. The model that emerges from his synthesis is one that relied more on persuasion and congruity of influence than on arbitrary authority, and Collins argues that fundamental changes in French society made the monarchical, ministerial state a dangerous anachronism by the 1750s, leading to political impasse by the second half of the eighteenth century. Collins offers a fundamental reinterpretation of the state relevant to historians and students of political thought.

Licensing Loyalty

Licensing Loyalty PDF Author: Jane McLeod
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271037687
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
"Explores the evolution of the idea that the rise of print culture was a threat to the royal government of eighteenth-century France. Argues that French printers did much to foster this view as they negotiated a place in the expanding bureaucratic apparatus of the state"--Provided by publisher.

A Social and Cultural History of Early Modern France

A Social and Cultural History of Early Modern France PDF Author: William Beik
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521883091
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 403

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Book Description
A magisterial history of French society between the end of the middle ages and the Revolution by one of the world's leading authorities on early modern France. Using colorful examples and incorporating the latest scholarship, William Beik conveys the distinctiveness of early modern society and identifies the cultural practices that defined the lives of people at all levels of society. Painting a vivid picture of the realities of everyday life, he reveals how society functioned and how the different classes interacted. In addition to chapters on nobles, peasants, city people, and the court, the book sheds new light on the Catholic church, the army, popular protest, the culture of violence, gendered relations, and sociability. This is a major new work that restores the ancien régime as a key epoch in its own right and not simply as the prelude to the coming Revolution.

Fiscal Crises, Liberty, and Representative Government 1450-1789

Fiscal Crises, Liberty, and Representative Government 1450-1789 PDF Author: Philip T. Hoffman
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804741927
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
These essays focus on the growth of representative institutions and the mechanics of European state finance from the end of the Middle Ages to the French Revolution.

Religion and Royal Justice in Early Modern France

Religion and Royal Justice in Early Modern France PDF Author: Diane C. Margolf
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 027109091X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Diane Margolf looks at the Paris Chambre de l’Edit in this well-researched study about the special royal law court that adjudicated disputes between French Huguenots and the Catholics. Using archival records of the court’s criminal cases, Margolf analyzes the connections to three major issues in early modern French and European history: religious conflict and coexistence, the growing claims of the French crown to define and maintain order, and competing concepts of community and identity in the French state and society. Based on previously unexplored archival materials, Margolf examines the court through a cultural lens and offers portraits of ordinary men and women who were litigants before the court, and the magistrates who heard their cases.

Society and Culture in Early Modern France

Society and Culture in Early Modern France PDF Author: Natalie Zemon Davis
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804709729
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
These essays, three of them previously unpublished, explore the competing claims of innovation and tradition among the lower orders in sixteenth-century France. The result is a wide-ranging view of the lives and values of men and women (artisans, tradesmen, the poor) who, because they left little or nothing in writing, have hitherto had little attention from scholars. The first three essays consider the social, vocational, and sexual context of the Protestant Reformation, its consequences for urban women, and the new attitudes toward poverty shared by Catholic humanists and Protestants alike in sixteenth-century Lyon. The next three essays describe the links between festive play and youth groups, domestic dissent, and political criticism in town and country, the festive reversal of sex roles and political order, and the ritualistic and dramatic structure of religious riots. The final two essays discuss the impact of printing on the quasi-literate, and the collecting of common proverbs and medical folklore by learned students of the "people" during the Ancien Régime. The book includes eight pages of illustrations.

Music, Discipline, and Arms in Early Modern France

Music, Discipline, and Arms in Early Modern France PDF Author: Kate van Orden
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022676799X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
In this groundbreaking new study, Kate van Orden examines noble education in the arts to show how music contributed to cultural and social transformation in early modern French society. She constructs a fresh account of music's importance in promoting the absolutism that the French monarchy would fully embrace under Louis XIV, uncovering many hitherto unpublished ballets and royal ceremonial performances. The great pressure on French noblemen to take up the life of the warrior gave rise to bellicose art forms such as sword dances and equestrian ballets. Far from being construed as effeminizing, such combinations of music and the martial arts were at once refined and masculine-a perfect way to display military prowess. The incursion of music into riding schools and infantry drills contributed materially to disciplinary order, enabling the larger and more effective armies of the seventeenth century. This book is a history of the development of these musical spheres and how they brought forth new cultural priorities of civility, military discipline, and political harmony. Music, Discipline, and Arms in Early Modern France effectively illustrates the seminal role music played in mediating between the cultural spheres of letters and arms.

Blood and Violence in Early Modern France

Blood and Violence in Early Modern France PDF Author: Stuart Carroll
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191516147
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
The rise of civilized conduct and behaviour has long been seen as one of the major factors in the transformation from medieval to modern society. Thinkers and historians alike argue that violence progressively declined as men learned to control their emotions. The feud is a phenomenon associated with backward societies, and in the West duelling codified behaviour and channelled aggression into ritualised combats that satisfied honour without the shedding of blood. French manners and codes of civility laid the foundations of civilized Western values. But as this original work of archival research shows we continue to romanticize violence in the era of the swashbuckling swordsman. In France, thousands of men died in duels in which the rules of the game were regularly flouted. Many duels were in fact mini-battles and must be seen not as a replacement of the blood feud, but as a continuation of vengeance-taking in a much bloodier form. This book outlines the nature of feuding in France and its intensification in the wake of the Protestant Reformation, civil war and dynastic weakness, and considers the solutions proposed by thinkers from Montaigne to Hobbes. The creation of the largest standing army in Europe since the Romans was one such solution, but the militarization of society, a model adopted throughout Europe, reveals the darker side of the civilizing process.

Changing Identities in Early Modern France

Changing Identities in Early Modern France PDF Author: Michael Wolfe
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822319139
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 428

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Book Description
After examining the interplay between competing ideologies and public institutions, from the monarchy to the Parlement of Paris to the aristocratic household, the volume explores the dynamics of deviance and dissent, particularly in regard to women's roles in religious reform movements and such sensationalized phenomena as the witch hunts and infanticide trials.

Bastards

Bastards PDF Author: Matthew Gerber
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019975537X
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
Children born out of wedlock were commonly stigmatized as "bastards" in early modern France. Deprived of inheritance, they were said to have neither kin nor kind, neither family nor nation. Why was this the case? Gentler alternatives to "bastard" existed in early modern French discourse, and many natural parents voluntarily recognized and cared for their extramarital offspring.Drawing upon a wide array of archival and published sources, Matthew Gerber has reconstructed numerous disputes over the rights and disabilities of children born out of wedlock in order to illuminate the changing legal condition and practical treatment of extramarital offspring over a period of two and half centuries. Gerber's study reveals that the exclusion of children born out of wedlock from the family was perpetually debated. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France, royal law courts intensified their stigmatization of extramarital offspring even as they usurped jurisdiction over marriage from ecclesiastic courts. Mindful of preserving elite lineages and dynastic succession of power, reform-minded jurists sought to exclude illegitimate children more thoroughly from the household. Adopting a strict moral tone, they referred to illegitimate children as "bastards" in an attempt to underscore their supposed degeneracy. Hostility toward extramarital offspring culminated in 1697 with the levying of a tax on illegitimate offspring. Contempt was never unanimous, however, and in the absence of a unified body of French law, law courts became vital sites for a highly contested cultural construction of family. Lawyers pleading on behalf of extramarital offspring typically referred to them as "natural children." French magistrates grew more receptive to this sympathetic discourse in the eighteenth century, partly in response to soaring rates of child abandonment. As costs of "foundling" care increasingly strained the resources of local communities and the state, some French elites began to publicly advocate a destigmatization of extramarital offspring while valorizing foundlings as "children of the state." By the time the Code Civil (1804) finally established a uniform body of French family law, the concept of bastardy had become largely archaic.With a cast of characters ranging from royal bastards to foundlings, Bastards explores the relationship between social and political change in the early modern era, offering new insight into the changing nature of early modern French law and its evolving contribution to the historical construction of both the family and the state.