[ix] IN FEBRUARY 1602, A HUGUENOT WEAPONRY MAKER NAMED NOEL BILLOT stood before a panel of magistrates in a chamber of the Palais de Justice in Paris. A year earlier, the royal judge and prosecutor in Billot’s native town of Mâcon had convicted him of “using at various times in public places seditious language and discourse tending to scandal, against the edicts and rules of pacification.”1 Billot had been ordered to leave Mâcon within three days or risk being expelled by the authorities, but he appealed to the Chambre de l’Edit, a special law court affiliated with the Paris parlement which heard lawsuits involving French Calvinists, or Huguenots. The Paris judges rejected the sentence of banishment and formally rebuked Billot for his disruptive behavior, then ordered him to return home to Mâcon, “to live there and comport himself modestly according to the king’s edicts.”2
The case of Noel Billot illustrates many of the issues explored in the pages that follow. This book is about litigants like Billot and the legal disputes they brought before the Paris Chambre de l’Edit in seventeenth-century France. The chamber’s origins lay in the Wars of Religion of the later sixteenth century, when Huguenots feared the partisanship of the predominantly Catholic judiciary. In 1598, the Edict of Nantes declared an end to the warfare and provided a legal blueprint for future relations among Huguenots and Catholics in France. Its provisions reflected elements found in many previous edicts of pacification and offered an institutional guarantee of protection and privileges for the Huguenot minority: special law courts, composed of both Huguenot and Catholic magistrates, which would resolve disputes involving Huguenot litigants. Chambres mi-parties, so called because they included equal numbers of judges from both confessions, were [x] to be affiliated with the parlements of Grenoble, Bordeaux, Rouen, and Toulouse. A fourth court, christened the Chambre de l’Edit or “chamber of the edict,” would be established for the Parlement of Paris. The Paris Chambre de l’Edit functioned under this mandate until formally dissolved by royal edict in 1669.
This book analyzes the Chambre de l’Edit’s role in seventeenth-century France from several different perspectives. Because of its broad jurisdiction, the Chambre de l’Edit provides a unique avenue for examining the problems that Huguenots faced individually and collectively after 1598. The court’s records allow us to study the issues of religious conflict, coexistence, and toleration long associated with the Edict of Nantes and its aftermath, using previously unexplored source materials. The chamber’s work also reflects the monarchy’s efforts to restore peace and enhance its authority in the French state and society, a development often referred to as “absolutism.” Finally, the court’s activities provide valuable insight into competing concepts of community and identity in seventeenth-century France. The effort to define, establish, and maintain order amid political, social, religious, and cultural change—a significant theme in early modern French history—clearly emerges in the Chambre de l’Edit’s adjudication of legal disputes.
The chamber’s written orders and decisions (minutes d’arrêt) for criminal cases during the period 1600–1665 form the principal documentary basis of this study. For the first decade (1600–1610), every criminal case for each year was examined; thereafter, samples were taken from the records at five-year intervals up to 1665. This produced a collection of approximately 3,600 minutes d’arrêt, spanning the period immediately following the Edict of Nantes through the early years of Louis XIV’s personal reign. Though the Chambre de l’Edit judged civil as well as criminal matters, this study concentrates on the latter in order to focus on a central issue in the court’s work: its enforcement of the Edict of Nantes. Criminal cases offer the most fruitful area for exploring the problems associated with the edict’s mandate of peaceful coexistence among Huguenots and Catholics, for such cases usually involved behavior—verbal and physical violence, for example, or disputes about clandestine marriages and illegal burials—which directly challenged the law’s requirements. Since most of the Chambre de l’Edit’s cases were heard on appeal, one can also see how criminal offenses associated with the Edict of Nantes were dealt with by lesser courts, and how the chamber judges upheld, overturned, or modified the sentences and punishments decreed by local authorities.
The minutes d’arrêt present some frustrations for the historian eager to have a complete picture of the court’s work. In some cases, the documents give the technical details about the proceedings in a given lawsuit but are silent regarding the substance of the dispute. A single lawsuit may spawn a bewildering array of countersuits and related accusations; other cases continue across several months or [xi] years in the records, only to disappear without a final decision. Some litigants are clearly identified as members of “the so-called reformed faith” (la religion prétendue réformée), but in other cases it is unclear which of the parties is Huguenot and which is Catholic. Huguenots might very well sue each other, and litigants’ claims to the status and privileges of being Huguenot (and therefore entitled to judicial appeal before the Chambre de l’Edit) were sometimes challenged by their opponents. French royal judges exercised great latitude in deciding cases and specific references to judicial precedents are rare, so one must infer the reasons for the judges’ decisions from the available information. Moreover, the Paris Chambre de l’Edit’s members included only one Huguenot. Analysis of confessional divisions among the court’s judges is therefore more difficult than in the case of the provincial chambres mi-parties.3
Despite these problems, the Chambre de l’Edit’s records reveal valuable information about the people who appealed to the court and the kinds of complaints they brought forth. Litigants are usually identified in the minutes d’arrêt by name, title or profession, family affiliation, and place of residence or origin. This provides a view of the hundreds of men and women from all levels of French society (and sometimes from foreign countries) who appeared before the chamber magistrates. The court heard accusations of blasphemy and insult, illicit marriages and contested inheritances, street fights, murders, thefts, and forgeries, proving that the Chambre de l’Edit in fact exercised the broad criminal jurisdiction which the Edict of Nantes had accorded it on paper. During the reign of Henry IV and for much of the seventeenth century, the Chambre de l’Edit was thus actively involved in the complex task of implementing the Edict of Nantes’s provisions for religious coexistence and maintaining the peace among French subjects.
In interpreting the significance of the court’s activities, this study attempts to present the Paris Chambre de l’Edit as a legal institution in cultural context. This means seeing the chamber not only as a special law court for Huguenots and a part of the royal judiciary, but also as a powerful symbol of the Huguenots’ protected yet limited status in Catholic France. The meaning and importance of the court’s work cannot be measured solely in terms of how many cases it heard or what kinds [xii] of decisions it rendered, though that information is certainly essential to this study. As a symbol of the privileges guaranteed under the Edict of Nantes, the Chambre de l’Edit was vigorously defended by Huguenots from attacks by their Catholic opponents, with both sides appealing to the crown to protect or condemn the tribunal. What the court represented to Huguenots, Catholics, and the monarchy was perhaps as significant as its actual adjudication of legal disputes. The Chambre de l’Edit’s symbolic value and everyday activities were both directly related to contemporary concerns about religious difference, law, and identity.4
For many people in seventeenth-century France, religious pluralism remained a serious threat to social and political order, which the Edict of Nantes did not resolve. Although peaceful coexistence was mandated by law and actually occurred in some localities, many Catholics abhorred the Huguenots’ continued presence in France and looked to the Bourbon kings to combat the Calvinist heresy. At the same time, Huguenots tried to represent themselves to the monarchy as loyal, obedient subjects who did not disrupt society nearly as much as those Catholics who clamored for their destruction. Huguenots also relied upon a variety of institutions—consistories and synods, political assemblies, and deputies-general—to lead and preserve their communities. Yet they gradually lost their military garrisons, aristocratic leaders, legal privileges, and royal protection, a process that culminated in the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. The Huguenots’ failures thus seemed to assure the success of both “royal religion” and the Catholic Reformation in France.5
The Paris Chambre de l’Edit sheds new light on the Huguenots’ troubled history during this period. Litigants’ disputes with family members, neighbors, [xiii] and local authorities were often at the heart of the cases that the chamber magistrates heard; the court’s records thus offer a perspective on how royal judges sought to resolve such local and personal conflicts when they were appealed to a higher court. The Chambre de l’Edit’s work also illustrates how religious identity was closely entwined with secular laws and privileges. In order to justify their appeals to the Chambre de l’Edit, many litigants framed their complaints as infractions of the Edict of Nantes or other laws concerning the Huguenots; other litigants claimed the status of Huguenots as the basis of their appeals, regardless of the crime at issue. Such efforts suggest that one’s religious identity was not only a matter of belief and worship, but also was tied to the assertion of privileges that distinguished one confessional group from another. Most of all, the chamber’s activities highlight the central paradox of the Huguenots’ position in the French state. Appearing before the magistrates of the Paris Chambre de l’Edit, Huguenot litigants (and their opponents) could air grievances and protest mistreatment even as they submitted to the authority of royal justice. In short, they could simultaneously obey and challenge the law. Their disputes exemplified the Huguenots’ energetic but ambivalent struggle with French authorities, especially the monarchy and the judiciary.
While the Chambre de l’Edit’s work reflected the problems associated with religious pluralism in early modern France, it was also linked to issues concerning law and governance more generally during this period. In implementing the Edict of Nantes, the court carried out royal policies that were often prejudicial to the religious minority. This implies a linear, hierarchical connection between judges and litigants, king and subjects, Catholic majority and Huguenot minority: a straightforward relationship of domination by the rulers and submission (despite resistance) by the ruled.6 Yet the chamber functioned within a complex of beliefs and practices about law and governance that were anything but straightforward. The court was not simply an instrument for protecting or persecuting Huguenots, but rather an arena where many issues about Huguenots were contested, and where the results of such contests were varied and uncertain. In the largest sense, the Paris Chambre de l’Edit was involved in the task of defining, establishing, and maintaining social and political order in seventeenth-century France.
Law itself was an essential element of order in society and the state, though like religion it was problematic. Even laws promoted by kings and enforced by judges could become double-edged swords, generating disorder and conflict rather [xiv] than assuring peace and tranquility. A narrow judicial interpretation of the Edict of Nantes clearly helped to undermine the Huguenots’ position in France as early as the reign of Henry IV. Louis XIV’s formal revocation of that edict was preceded by a plethora of decrees that restricted the Huguenots’ ability to hold public offices, join professions, worship publicly, assemble or present grievances, and educate their children. During the seventeenth century, it became increasingly difficult for Huguenots to invoke the law effectively to protect themselves or maintain their cohesiveness as a community. Yet the Huguenots were not alone: royal edicts aimed at regulating many other groups in French society, including clerics, artisans, professionals of all kinds, women, poor persons, and vagabonds. By implementing laws that defined and condemned certain groups or behaviors as criminal, the monarchy and the magistracy often collaborated to punish individual offenders, enhance each other’s authority, and discipline society at large.
Such uses of the law, however, were not entirely one-sided, much less successful. Recent scholarship on law and crime in early modern Europe has tended to emphasize that law courts were not simply agents of centralizing states and their rulers. Rather, they were institutions used by all sorts of people to resolve disputes, regulate conduct, and advance or protect the interests of individuals, families, and communities. The records of both secular and ecclesiastical courts have revealed much about the contours of criminal behavior in early modern societies and about the distance that might exist between crimes defined in law and those that were actively prosecuted.7 Numerous studies have focused on individuals whose trials for heresy, clandestine marriage, prophecy, and fraud illuminate social attitudes and behaviors, as well as the judgments of learned magistrates.8 Crime and its prosecution represent a mirror image of the contemporary concern with law, discipline, and order, and both reflect that “struggle for stability” which characterized much of European culture generally in the seventeenth century.9
[xv] The Paris Chambre de l’Edit’s work illustrates this multifaceted role of law and legal institutions in the struggle for stability and order in France. The court’s criminal lawsuits show that French men and women were not merely subject to the law, but also willing to invoke the law’s protection when they believed themselves to be abused or wronged. Litigants appealed to courts, magistrates, and in theory to the king himself as the fount of justice in the realm, but they sometimes sought to delay, circumvent, or subvert royal justice. Small wonder that the legal system seemed to produce chaos and corruption instead of order and fairness, a perception which spurred criticisms ranging from literary lampoons to official attempts at legal reform, such as the Code Michaud of 1629 and the Ordonnance Criminelle of 1670. The Chambre de l’Edit was part of the larger problems associated with the administration of justice, but it also contributed to the role of law and legal institutions in helping to create a sense of national identity in early modern France.
The emergence of the nation-state has long been viewed as one of the most important features of early modern European history in general and of French history in particular. Historians have tended to emphasize the French monarchy’s successful subordination or co-optation of political and social elites that resulted in absolutism.10 The nature and meaning of French absolutism has generated a great deal of debate; for the purposes of this study, absolutism refers to the monarchy’s efforts to regulate political, social, economic, religious, and artistic activities by French men and women, as well as to theories which justified such regulation. The violent political and religious upheavals of the later sixteenth century spurred both the expansion of the central government’s power and the focusing of popular allegiance on the French crown. Far from disrupting the growth of royal authority, the Wars of Religion ultimately promoted reliance on the monarchy as the sole entity capable of unifying the disparate elements of the French state. In theory, the king possessed a combination of sacral and secular power which remained entwined well into the eighteenth century, and which no other French official or institution could claim. As defender of the Gallican church’s “liberties” and the kingdom’s fundamental laws (which included eliminating heresy), the king occupied a pivotal place in a complex web of political and religious beliefs and institutions. The early modern French state thus was built around the monarchy if not actually by the monarch. French kings and their representatives [xvi] sought to dominate almost every aspect of individual and corporate life: politics and lawmaking, work and trade, religious worship and education, the arts, literature, and language. The monarchy’s success in this endeavor is debatable, but the effort alone left an indelible mark upon the history of early modern France.
Some scholars have questioned the value of concepts such as “absolutism” and “state building,” especially as applied to France between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.11 According to these arguments, France remained a hierarchical corporate society whose medieval heritage of decentralized authority did not give way easily or inevitably to royal power during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Numerous groups and institutions—nobles, clerics, guilds, municipalities, and others—defended their traditional privileges and proved to be a real obstacle to the ambitions of Valois and Bourbon rulers. The revolts and rebellions that occurred throughout the period showed recurrent if not always successful challenges to royal authority at the local level. Contemporary political pamphlets indicated that theories about the king’s absolute power did not entirely efface competing strands of political theory which emphasized the king’s duties to those he governed, rather than their obligation to obey him.12 French kings and royal officials sought to uphold and extend the crown’s power, but they did not set out to construct the political abstraction known as the modern nation-state, of which they had no conception. Instead, royal authority increased due to a convergence of interests among governing elites, lay and clerical, aristocratic and bourgeois. Though not always harmonious, this alliance of interests tended to produce support for the French crown and its policies, producing that royal dominance of state and society which reached its height with the absolutism of Louis XIV.
Historians have also sought the origins of French nationalism amid such political developments. Without denying the formative influence of the French Revolution, some scholars have traced French national consciousness as far back as the medieval period, linking it to concepts of the French people, their monarchy, and their religious heritage in western Christianity as they emerged during [xvii] that era.13 Events such as the French victory in the Hundred Years’ War expanded and refined this inchoate mixture of cohesion and chosenness, strengthening the symbolic ties between crown and people. In the sixteenth century, the Wars of Religion helped forge a new sense of loyalty to the monarch as the arbiter of confessional differences in the realm.14 The revolution of 1789, which pitted those loyal to the new republic against both foreign armies and conspirators within France’s borders, thus appears as simply one in a series of key events that shaped French national identity before the nineteenth century. Other studies have shown how this identity grew out of long-term interactions between center and periphery: between the inhabitants of the Cerdagne or Finistère, for example, and officials who tried to govern those distant provinces from Paris.15 French laws of citizenship also helped to redefine national identity during the early modern period, while both religious missions and secular education revealed efforts to transform the French people into a unified citizenry through a common language.16 French national identity was clearly a cultural construct, something which was created collectively over time rather than imposed by a single ruler or institution, and which derived from a combination of geography, history, politics, language, and religion.
Scholarship about the medieval and early modern roots of national identity and controversy about absolutism have thus encouraged historians to redefine the formation of the early modern French nation-state as a gradual but powerful process. This process emerged from the ordinary day-to-day business of governing locally and regionally as well as from politics and diplomacy at the royal court; it often reshaped traditional elements and institutions of governance without dramatically [xviii] overturning or replacing them. This process also involved historical actors from the entire spectrum of French society who promoted, modified, or resisted absolutism according to their own lights. Far from being confined to the realm of political, legal, or institutional history, the cultural construction of national identity appears as yet another facet of that effort to establish (or restore) discipline and order in society noted above—an effort which both engaged and divided Catholics and Huguenots, laypersons and clerics, royal officials and ordinary folk.
The Paris Chambre de l’Edit stands at the intersection of these struggles concerning social order, royal authority, and religious difference, illustrating how a specific institution—in this case, a law court—could contribute to the cultural construction of national identity. By the seventeenth century, obedience to the monarchy and its laws was one of the key features of French national identity, and French kings sought to exact this obedience from Huguenots and Catholics alike. The Edict of Nantes did not make the two confessional groups equal to each other, but it did claim to make them equally subject to royal authority and justice. Mandated by law, religious pluralism helped generate lawsuits like those heard before the Chambre de l’Edit, which in turn heightened the debate about national identity and who possessed it. To Huguenots, their privileges as guaranteed by law and enforced by royal authority made them part of the nation. To many Catholics, those same privileges set the Huguenots apart and precluded their full participation in politics and society; only by conversion could Huguenots fully integrate themselves into the French body politic. Huguenots argued that neither their political loyalty nor their legitimate status in French society was compromised by religious difference. They professed their allegiance to the “imagined community” of the nation (led by the monarchy and dedicated to upholding Catholicism) while trying to maintain another “imagined community” of those who shared their religion.17 They continued to believe that obedience to the law would sustain their place in society and legitimate their membership in the nation.
The criminal lawsuits adjudicated by the Paris Chambre de l’Edit thus reveal dilemmas of identity—national and otherwise—in early modern France. Identity has been described as “the understanding of what, culturally, one is.”18 It is directly related to the things one shares or does not share with others: physical environment and property, social and economic activities, beliefs and standards of behavior. Past experiences and future goals shape identity, situating groups and individuals in what they perceive as their history. Since it involves both self-definition and the [xix] acceptance of one’s self-image by others, identity is rarely static or one-dimensional. A person’s or group’s identity may be imposed by others or asserted in resistance to such impositions, and collective identities can be challenged or fractured from within.19 Identity thus helps to connect individual and collective experience, and it has become part of the cultural history of early modern Europe through studies of the self, the family, social groups, and colonial societies, as well as appearing implicitly or explicitly in discussions of French nationalism and citizenship.20
Identity also connects the issues of religious difference, law, governance, and social order that inform this study of the Paris Chambre de l’Edit. The Huguenots’ identity—their self-definition and acceptance (or rejection) by others—provoked conflicts which laws concerning the Huguenots could neither prevent nor contain. Indeed, the laws themselves became important weapons in those conflicts. Appearing as plaintiffs and defendants before the court, Huguenots and Catholics often competed to present themselves as law-abiding French subjects, and to characterize each other as subversive or disobedient. The court’s adjudication of criminal lawsuits shows how the actions of judges, lawyers, and litigants contributed to an emerging sense of French national identity. The court’s work also reveals that the growing pretensions of royal authority developed in tandem with the demands of the king’s subjects, individually and collectively, for royal protection, mercy, and justice. Both submission and resistance thus contributed to the monarchy’s growing power and an emerging sense of national identity. The Huguenots’ experience suggests that it became increasingly difficult to claim an identity or membership in a community that did not acknowledge the king’s superior place in the polity, society, and culture—and that did not depend upon submission to the king’s laws. In the end, being Huguenot became not only illegal, but also incompatible with being French.
[xx] Understanding the Paris Chambre de l’Edit’s work in relation to religious difference, governance, social order, and the cultural creation of national identity accounts for this book’s purpose, structure, and conclusions. Chapter 1 considers the chamber’s role in the troubled history of the Huguenots and the law in seventeenth-century France, describing the court’s legal mandate as well as contemporary views of the court’s purpose and significance. Chapter 2 analyzes the court’s judges, litigants, and procedures. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 examine three categories of legal disputes brought before the court: lawsuits related to the Wars of Religion, in which the “memory” of the past was legally contested; cases related to the family and its key components (marriage, sexuality, and inheritance); and cases concerning local conflicts between Huguenots and Catholics over implementation of the Edict of Nantes’s terms. Each of these categories represents an important source of disorder that the chamber judges tried to address.
The Paris Chambre de l’Edit thus offers new insights into the political, legal, and cultural history of early modern France. The court’s minutes d’arrêt include heated debates about the difference between a war crime and a crime committed during wartime; families and communities divided or united by their legal disputes; and individuals who, in the face of misconduct by local officials, neighbors, relatives, or strangers, demanded that “force remain with the king and justice” (discussed in chap. 5). Legal procedure becomes a dynamic mode of interaction among the parties and the judges to whom they have appealed. The theme that permeates the court’s business is the effort to restore peace and maintain order among all who petitioned for justice, as well as to address the complaints of one specific group in French society, the Huguenots. Royal authority—indeed, authority of all kinds—had been fragmented by the factional and religious conflicts of the later sixteenth century. The desire to renew popular allegiance to the crown, to restore the efficacy and integrity of law throughout the kingdom, to mend the social fabric, and to address the ongoing tensions surrounding religious difference all gave a larger purpose to the court’s judgment of specific disputes. This study concludes that above all, the Paris Chambre de l’Edit dispensed royal justice to Huguenot and Catholic litigants. In doing so, the court insisted upon the petitioners’ individual and collective acknowledgment of royal authority, thus strengthening the monarchy’s claim to be an essential source of power and privilege, community and identity in early modern France.
1. Archives Nationales (hereafter A.N.) X2b 205, 5 February 1602: “Noel Billot, fourbisseur … attainct et convaincu d’avoir usé divers fois en public de pluseurs langages et discours seditieux et tendant à scandalle contre les edicts et reglemens de pacification.” (Punctuation and accents have been added for clarity in French quotations from these documents, but the original spelling has been preserved. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted.)
2. A.N. X2b 205, 5 February 1602: “[La cour] luy a permis et permet de se retirer en sa maison en ladite ville de Mascon pour y vivre et se comporter modestement suivant les edicts du Roy.”
3. Such issues have been examined in recent studies of the chambre mi-partie for Languedoc. See Raymond A. Mentzer, “Bipartisan Justice and the Pacification of Late Sixteenth-Century Languedoc,” in Regnum, Religio et Ratio: Essays Presented to Robert M. Kingdon, ed. Jerome Friedman (Kirksville, Mo.: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1987), 125–32; idem, “L’Edit de Nantes et la Chambre de Justice du Languedoc,” in Coexister dans l’intolérance: L’Edit de Nantes (1598), ed. Michel Grandjean and Bernard Roussel (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1998), 321–38; and Stéphane Capot, Justice et religion en Languedoc au temps de l’Edit de Nantes: La Chambre de l’Edit de Castres, 1579–1679 (Paris: Ecole des Chartes, 1998).
4. The following works have been especially helpful in thinking about “cultural context”: Lynn Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Roger Chartier, Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); William J. Bouwsma, A Usable Past: Essays in European Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Anne J. Cruz and Mary Elizabeth Perry, eds., Culture and Control in Counter-Reformation Spain (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992); Mack P. Holt, “Putting Religion Back into the Wars of Religion,” French Historical Studies 18 (1993): 524–51; and Michael Wolfe, ed., Changing Identities in Early Modern France (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997).
5. On the Huguenots’ history during the seventeenth century, see Elisabeth Labrousse, Une Foi, une loi, un roi? La révocation de l’Edit de Nantes (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1985); Janine Garrisson, L’Edit de Nantes et sa révocation: Histoire d’une intolérance (Paris: Seuil, 1985); Daniel Ligou, Le Protestantisme en France de 1598 à 1715 (Paris: S.E.D.E.S., 1968). On the concept of “royal religion” in early modern France, see Dale Van Kley, The Religious Origins of the French Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996); Jeffrey Merrick, The Desacralization of the French Monarchy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990); Michael Wolfe, The Conversion of Henri IV (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).
6. See James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); June Starr and Jane F. Collier, eds., History and Power in the Study of Law: New Directions in Legal Anthropology (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989).
7. John Bossy, ed., Disputes and Settlements: Law and Human Relations in the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); André Abbiateci et al., Crimes et criminalité en France sous l’ancien régime, XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles (Paris: A. Colin, 1971); V. A. C. Gatrell et al., eds., Crime and the Law: The Social History of Crime in Western Europe since 1500 (London: Europa Publications, 1980); Michael Weisser, Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Europe (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1979).
8. Examples include Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983); Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980); Gene A. Brucker, Giovanni and Lusanna: Love and Marriage in Renaissance Florence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); and Richard L. Kagan, Lucrecia’s Dreams: Politics and Prophecy in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
9. Theodore K. Rabb, The Struggle for Stability in Early Modern Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975).
10. Richard Bonney, “Absolutism: What’s in a Name?” French History 1 (1986): 93–117; David Parker, The Making of French Absolutism (London: Edward Arnold, 1983); Nannerl O. Keohane, Philosophy and the State in France: The Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); Keith Cameron, ed., From Valois to Bourbon: Dynasty, State and Society in Early Modern France (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1989).
11. For a brief summary of the debate, see James B. Collins, The State in Early Modern France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1–27.
12. See William Beik, Urban Protest in Seventeenth-Century France: The Culture of Retribution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); A. Lloyd Moote, The Revolt of the Judges: The Parlement of Paris and the Fronde, 1643–1652 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971); Sharon Kettering, Judicial Politics and Urban Revolt in Seventeenth-Century France: The Parlement of Aix, 1629–1659 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). On pamphlet literature, see Jeffrey Sawyer, Printed Poison: Pamphlet Propaganda, Faction Politics, and the Public Sphere in Early Seventeeth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Christian Jouhaud, Mazarinades: La Fronde des mots (Paris: Aubier, 1985); Joseph Klaits, Printed Propaganda under Louis XIV (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976).
13. Joseph Strayer, “France: The Holy Land, the Chosen People and the Most Christian King,” in Action and Conviction in Early Modern Europe, ed. Theodore K. Rabb and Jerrold E. Seigel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 3–16; Colette Beaune, The Birth of an Ideology: Myths and Symbols of Nation in Late Medieval France, trans. Susan Huston (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
14. Christopher Allmand, The Hundred Years’ War: England and France at War, c. 1300–c. 1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), esp. 136–50; Myriam Yardeni, La Conscience nationale en France pendant les guerres de religion, 1550–1590 (Louvain: Nauwelaerts, 1971).
15. Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Caroline Ford, Creating the Nation in Provincial France: Religion and Identity in Brittany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
16. Charlotte Wells, Law and Citizenship in Early Modern France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); Peter Sahlins, “Fictions of a Catholic France: The Naturalization of Foreigners, 1685–1787,” Representations 47 (1994): 85–110; David A. Bell, “Lingua Populi, Lingua Dei: Language, Religion and the Origins of French Revolutionary Nationalism,” American Historical Review 100 (1995): 1403–37; Douglas Johnson, “The Making of the French Nation,” in The National Question in Europe in Historical Context, ed. Roy Porter and Mikulás Teich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 35–62.
17. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2d ed. (London: Verso, 1991).
18. Anthony Pagden and Nicolas Canny, “From Identity to Independence,” in Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800, ed. Anthony Pagden and Nicolas Canny (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 270.
19. See Jon Butler, The Huguenots in America: A Refugee People in New World Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983); Stephen J. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); the essays in Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, ed. Pagden and Canny, and in Changing Identities in Early Modern France, ed. Wolfe.
20. See especially Natalie Zemon Davis, “Boundaries and the Sense of Self in Sixteenth-Century France,” in Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality and the Self in Western Thought, ed. Thomas C. Heller et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 53–63; Davis, “Ghosts, Kin and Progeny: Some Features of Family Life in Early Modern France,” Daedalus 106, no. 2 (1977): 87–114; Jonathan Dewald, Aristocratic Experience and the Origins of Modern Culture: France, 1570–1715 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); Daniel Gordon, Citizens without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670–1789 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). The “microhistories” listed in note 11 also concern issues of individual and collective identity to some degree; on nationalism and citizenship, see notes 16 through 19 above.