Cities And Social Change In Early Modern France

The major changes experienced by France's cities over the period from the end of the middle ages to the eve of the Revolution are explored by six French and North American historians.

The major changes experienced by France's cities over the period from the end of the middle ages to the eve of the Revolution are explored by six French and North American historians.

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.

A pioneering text which covers the urban society of early modern Europe as a whole. Challenges the usual emphasis on regional diversity by stressing the extent to which cities across Europe shared a common urban civilization whose major features remained remarkably constant throughout the period. After outlining the physical, political, religious, economic and demographic parameters of urban life, the author vividly depicts the everyday routines of city life and shows how pitifully vulnerable city-dwellers were to disasters, epidemics, warfare and internal strife.

The image of the debauched French aristocrat of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is one that still has power over the international public imagination, from the unending fascination with the Marquis de Sade to the successes of the film Ridicule. Drawing on memoirs, letters, popular songs and pamphlets, and political treatises, The Enlightened and Depraved: Decadence, Radicalism, and the Early Modern French Nobility traces the origins of this powerful stereotype from between the reign of Louis XIV and the Terror of the French Revolution. The decadent and enlightened noble of early modern France, the libertine, was born in a push to transform the nobility from a warrior caste into an intelligentsia. Education itself had become a power through which the privileged could set themselves free from old social and religious restraints. However, by the late eighteenth century, the libertine noble was already falling under attack by changing attitudes toward gender, an emphasis on economic utility over courtly service, and ironically the very revolutionary forces that the enlightened nobility of the court and Paris helped awaken. In the end, the libertine nobility would not survive the French Revolution, but the basic idea of knowledge as a liberating force would endure in modernity, divorced from a single class.

From 1575 to 1730, the citizens of the Alsatian Imperial city of Colmar were divided between Protestant and Catholic communities, plagued by chronic warfare, and ultimately subjugated by the kingdom of France. Drawing on a rich collection of serial archival sources, Wallace reconstructs the collective biography of 6,700 civic officials, merchants, artisans, and agricultural workers in order to examine the local impact of confessionalization in a religiously mixed town, the effect of warfare on the economic interdependence of town and country, and the tensions between French absolutism and traditional civic political culture. Economic historians, scholars of the Reformation, and students of French and German history will find many valuable insights in this multifaceted analysis.

As Catholic Reform penetrated and was institutionalized in Early Modern France, legal codes reached further than before into realms of moral behavior. James Farr reveals how Burgundy's dominant, elite legal community attempted to impose new laws and regulations to recover a social order they believed had been destroyed in the upheavals of the sixteenth century.

The first major work in English to give a pan-European perspective on the changing role of small towns from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century.