Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- Glossary of French terms
- Introduction
- 1 The Breton economy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
- 2 Elements of Breton society
- 3 Institutional structures of political control – financial and judicial organization
- 4 The Estates of Brittany and the Crown, 1532–1626
- 5 The Estates of Brittany and the Crown, 1626–1675
- 6 The burden of Breton taxation
- 7 The problem of order
- Conclusion
- Appendix
- Bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN EARLY MODERN HISTORY
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- Glossary of French terms
- Introduction
- 1 The Breton economy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
- 2 Elements of Breton society
- 3 Institutional structures of political control – financial and judicial organization
- 4 The Estates of Brittany and the Crown, 1532–1626
- 5 The Estates of Brittany and the Crown, 1626–1675
- 6 The burden of Breton taxation
- 7 The problem of order
- Conclusion
- Appendix
- Bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN EARLY MODERN HISTORY
Summary
The spring of 1675 was a time of turmoil in western France, with public discontent rising rapidly against the battery of new taxes enacted to pay for the war with the United Provinces. In early April the rumor spread to Brittany that rioters in Bordeaux had conducted an auto-da-fé, using his wares to incinerate the chief traitant of the new stamped paper tax. The forces of order everywhere stood on edge. The First President of the Parlement, Florent d'Argouges, wrote to the mayor and aldermen of Nantes that “authority must always be preserved.” Mindful of the constant conflicts between the municipality and the seneschal of Nantes, he reminded them that “service is better carried out when the main officers are united.”
D'Argouges presents us with the primary policy goal of the early modern French state, the preservation of order, and with its necessary enabling condition, unity among the ruling elites. In this new world, the focus of divine benediction shifted from the hierarchical social order itself to a combination of the sovereign state and the newly moral individual. The king himself was the first such individual, giving law binding on all his subjects, although not on himself. How hard it must have been to maintain the necessary unity when the order around which elites had to rally lacked clear definition. The old social, economic, and political hierarchy, which was still an organic reality in France, was that of the society of estates. The new hierarchies were economic (the society of classes) and political (the sovereign state). The structure of inquiry about such a society must examine both hierarchies to show how they formed a new order based, above all, on the defense of property.
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- Classes, Estates and Order in Early-Modern Brittany , pp. 1 - 29Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994
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