Crown and Nobility in Early Modern France

Crown and Nobility in Early Modern France
Author: Donna Bohanan
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 185
Release: 2017-03-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 1350317357

This book analyses the evolving relationship between the French monarchy and the French nobility in the early modern period. New interpretations of the absolutist state in France have challenged the orthodox vision of the interaction between the crown and elite society. By focusing on the struggle of central government to control the periphery, Bohanan links the literature on collaboration, patronage and taxation with research on the social origins and structure of provincial nobilities. Three provinical examples, Provence, Dauphine and Brittany, illustrate the ways in which elites organised and mobilised by vertical ties (ties of dependency based on patronage) were co-opted or subverted by the crown. The monarchy's success in raising more money from these pays d'etats depended on its ability to juggle a set of different strategies, each conceived according to the particularity of the social, political and institutional context of the province. Bohanan shows that the strategies and expedients employed by the crown varied from province to province; conceived on an individual basis, they bear the signs of ad hoc responses rather than a gradnoise plan to centralise.

Crown and Nobility in Early Modern France

Crown and Nobility in Early Modern France
Author: Donna Bohanan
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2017-03-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 1403940347

This book analyses the evolving relationship between the French monarchy and the French nobility in the early modern period. New interpretations of the absolutist state in France have challenged the orthodox vision of the interaction between the crown and elite society. By focusing on the struggle of central government to control the periphery, Bohanan links the literature on collaboration, patronage and taxation with research on the social origins and structure of provincial nobilities. Three provinical examples, Provence, Dauphine and Brittany, illustrate the ways in which elites organised and mobilised by vertical ties (ties of dependency based on patronage) were co-opted or subverted by the crown. The monarchy's success in raising more money from these pays d'etats depended on its ability to juggle a set of different strategies, each conceived according to the particularity of the social, political and institutional context of the province. Bohanan shows that the strategies and expedients employed by the crown varied from province to province; conceived on an individual basis, they bear the signs of ad hoc responses rather than a gradnoise plan to centralise.

Status, Power, and Identity in Early Modern France

Status, Power, and Identity in Early Modern France
Author: Jonathan Dewald
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2015-06-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0271067462

In Status, Power, and Identity in Early Modern France, Jonathan Dewald explores European aristocratic society by looking closely at one of its most prominent families. The Rohan were rich, powerful, and respected, but Dewald shows that there were also weaknesses in their apparently secure position near the top of French society. Family finances were unstable, and competing interests among family members generated conflicts and scandals; political ambitions led to other troubles, partly because aristocrats like the Rohan intensely valued individual achievement, even if it came at the expense of the family’s needs. Dewald argues that aristocratic power in the Old Regime reflected ongoing processes of negotiation and refashioning, in which both men and women played important roles. So did figures from outside the family—government officials, middle-class intellectuals and businesspeople, and many others. Dewald describes how the Old Regime’s ruling class maintained its power and the obstacles it encountered in doing so.

Decadence, Radicalism, and the Early Modern French Nobility

Decadence, Radicalism, and the Early Modern French Nobility
Author: Chad Denton
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 181
Release: 2016-12-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1498537278

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.

The State in Early Modern France

The State in Early Modern France
Author: James B. Collins
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 324
Release: 1995-09-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521387248

A major new textbook examining the nature of the state and the monarchy in early modern France.

Nobility and patrimony in modern France

Nobility and patrimony in modern France
Author: Elizabeth C. Macknight
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 373
Release: 2018-03-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1526120534

This study of tangible and intangible cultural heritage explains the significance of nobles’ conservationist traditions for public engagement with the history of France. During the French Revolution nobles’ property was seized, destroyed, or sold off by the nation. State intervention during the nineteenth century meant historic monuments became protected under law in the public interest. The Journées du Patrimoine, created in 1984 by the French Ministry for Culture, became a Europe-wide calendar event in 1991. Each year millions of French and international visitors enter residences and museums to admire France’s aristocratic cultural heritage. Drawing on archival evidence from across the country, the book presents a compelling account of power, interest and emotion in family dynamics and nobles’ relations with rural and urban communities.

A History of France, 1460–1560

A History of France, 1460–1560
Author: David Potter
Publisher: Palgrave
Total Pages: 456
Release: 1995-04-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780312124809

A survey of French history from the reign of Louis XI to the outbreak of the Wars of Religion that isolates some of the controversial theories of the period: state building, nobility and clientage and the Reformation and discusses them with full attention to the regional diversity of France. It also introduces the reader to recent research on the court and government set in the context of the basic social and economic movements of the period. It is argued that the basic identity of France as a nation was reinforced under the aegis of monarchical legitimacy backed by the nobility and the church, setting the pattern for the rest of the Ancien Regime.

Noble Strategies in an Early Modern Small State

Noble Strategies in an Early Modern Small State
Author: Charles T. Lipp
Publisher: University Rochester Press
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2011
Genre: History
ISBN: 1580463967

Examining the societies of the hundreds of small states that made up most of Europe before the 19th century, this text takes as its focus the Duchy of Lorraine.

The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern European History, 1350-1750

The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern European History, 1350-1750
Author: Hamish M. Scott
Publisher: Oxford Handbooks
Total Pages: 769
Release: 2015
Genre: History
ISBN: 019959726X

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 knowledge, together with some suggestions as to how the field is developing. It aims both to interrogate the notion of "early modernity" itself and to survey early modern Europe as an established field of study. The overriding aim will be to establish that 'early modern' is not simply a chronological label but possesses a substantive integrity. Volume II is devoted to "Cultures and Power", opening with chapters on philosophy, science, art and architecture, music, and the Enlightenment. Subsequent sections examine 'Europe beyond Europe', with the transformation of contact with other continents during the first global age, and military and political developments, notably the expansion of state power.