Old Regime France

This article scrutinizes the nineteenth-century legacy of the old regime’s commercial empire through the ambiguous case of the Monneron brothers. Having gained for- tune and recognition in Indian Ocean trade, the brothers sat as deputies in the National Assembly, but by the end of the 1790s their affairs and reputations had been destroyed. Their experiences reveal how the politics of commerce fundamentally changed during the Revolution. But the Monnerons also draw our attention to structural developments in French commercial imperialism that preceded and transcended the Revolution. They helped facilitate French investment in the Indian Ocean in the final decades of the old regime, a ‘spatial fix’ in merchant capital that was carried out in anticipation of crisis in the Atlantic, and that was consolidated around the turn of the century through the introduction of sugar cultivation in the Mascarene islands. By reading the biographies of the Monnerons alongside the life of their capital, this article attempts to acknowledge the undeniable ruptures of revolutionary politics without losing sight of broader developments in the global history of capitalism.

In a context of stark opposition between supporters and opponents to the wolf, the extent to which this particular predator is dangerous for humans is still an open question.
What lies beneath the negative perception of the wolf?
What should be the historian's contribution, based on historical sources and historical methods?
Thanks to a database of 4,700 cases of wolf attacks on human having occurred in France between 1580 and 1880, it is now possible to grasp the chronological evolution and spatial evolution of wolf related risks.
Undeniably real, though mostly belonging to a remote past, and statistically rare, though anthropologically intolerable, these attacks point to two opposite groups, predatory wolves occasionally preying on humans on one hand, rabid wolves striking indiscriminately a whole population on the other.
The attacks of the first kind occurred regularly in an unsafe environment, and gave rise to tales of "Ferocious Beasts" in times of dramatic crisis (1594-1600, 1691-1694, 1746-1750, 1764-1767, 1814-1819).
The second kind was spatially and chronologically less widespread, but sowed the seeds of mass hysteria, all the more persistent since the underlying sickness it forebode remained without a cure before the last third of the 20th century.
The conclusion between these two different realities gave Canis Lupus its negative aura, significantly dimmed recently however since it has entirely lost its material basis, at least in France.

This paper concerns a stock jobbing scandal involving the French Company of the Indies on the eve of the French Revolution. Speculative trading in the company’s shares on the Paris stock market triggered a credit crisis that brought down the king’s chief minister, Calonne, and ushered in the immediate chain of events that led to the collapse of the Old Regime and the beginning of the French Revolution. The episode witnessed the emergence of the modern French notion of “public credit” as a method of protecting the royal finances from the putatively corrupting influences of speculative capitalists. Two dynamics informed this broader development.  First, the enterprise of speculative finance was linked to the worst excesses of Old Regime privileges generally. Second, the crisis of 1785-1787 served to displace the traditional notion of “royal credit” as the asset that required
protection from the dangers of financial capitalism, making way for a more abstract, less personalized idea of public credit as an instrument and reflection of the financial power of the nation as a whole. That notion of public credit was, in principle, compatible with a monarchical form of government, but did not require a king to make it work.

On connaît généralement peu les Joly de Fleury, seigneurs de Fleury-Mérogis, Grigny, Bondoufle et Plessis-le-Comte. Pourtant, au XVIIIe siècle, cette famille occupa une des places les plus importantes : celle de procureur général au Parlement de Paris. Dans cette cour de justice, la plus ancienne et la première de France, le procureur général était le défenseur des droits du roi mais aussi le représentant de la loi, ce que l'on appellerait aujourd'hui le ministère public.

The article considers why in the French Wars of Religion (1562-1598), the crown found it found it extremely difficult to make peace between Protestants and Catholics. The article uses modern political-science models of peace-making to improve our understanding of why Henri IV (reigned 1589-1610) succeeded in pacifying France while his predecessors did not. Previous accounts have seen Henri IV’s success as a product of his great personal qualities, but his achievement has been overstated. In fact, over the first fifteen years of the wars, Catholics learned that Protestants could not be eradicated from the country, and became more willing to negotiate. Henri’s success was due more to structural changes brought about by his position, rather than his personal qualities. Specifically, Henri’s questionable legitimacy forced him to adopt policies of persuasion rather than coercion, while his predecessors were hindered by their position as mediators within a conflict between the Protestant forces and the Catholic League.

Figures like Voltaire and Rousseau are sometimes cited as examples of vegetarians in 18th century France. But were they?  Poverty and religious requirements certainly compelled some to follow a meatless diet, but was anyone who did so guided by a coherent philosophy or theory? This paper explores these questions.

Les Foires et Marchés du XVIIIe siècle,
Poitou, Aunis, Saintonge, Angoumois.

Editions : PUNA, Presses Universitaires de Nouvelle-Aquitaine, Geste Editions, 2019.
Recherches de thèse soutenue en décembre 2016.

Extrait du Chapitre II.
Les espaces forains dans l'Ancien régime : héritages, innovations et reconstitutions d'un univers multiple.
Reconstituer le champ de foire : réappropriation et adaptation d'un site.

This essay first explores two contexts that have transformed the way that the international history of the French Revolution has been written over the last thirty years and which have recently provoked so many historians to take a global turn in their research and teaching at the expense of strictly national historiography. First, political relations between France and the Anglo-American world in the 1980s made the older, regnant model of Franco-American sister revolutions, inherited from R. R. Palmer, less plausible; this development sent historians looking for other models that would make the Revolution seem more immediately relevant to students and readers. Second, transformations in the global economy since the 1970s have put globalization on the agenda in a particularly striking manner. These same forces have transformed the economies within academia in ways that have favored teaching and publishing global history. This essay closes with some reflections on the difference between critical and naively enthusiastic approaches to the subject of globalization, and some recommendations on paths for future research on the French Revolution.

To which social status can rural elites aspire under the Old Regime in the avant-garde sector of agricultural capitalism ? How did they evolve ? What was their role in the transformation of agriculture ? This work chooses as its field of study the large farms of Île-de-France, the sturdy buildings of which still dot the landscape today, tracking over more than four centuries a hundred or so farmers' « dynasties ». What comes to light is the surprising mobility of this social group, already settled in the Middle Ages and still around today.

This article examines the changing nature of fear in Enlightenment France. While the growing power of the absolutist state reduced many traditional sources of insecurity, fears of state power proliferated during the eighteenth century, prompting leading figures of the French Enlightenment to turn their attention to the problem of political fear: its sources, its effects, and the means for overcoming it. One of the unifying aspects of the Enlightenment was its commitment to reducing the burden of fear in human existence. From that standpoint, however, political fear posed a particular challenge since the objects on which it focused could not be dismissed as purely imaginary. Unlike such traditional religious terrors as hell, purgatory, and the Devil, police agents, police spies, and prisons really existed. And yet political fears too were mediated—and magnified—by collective imaginaries. The fear of imprisonment stands out as a key example of such a phenomenon. Best-selling prison memoirs published in the early 1780s sought to mobilize public opinion against lettres de cachet (administrative arrest warrants) by evoking the horrors of imprisonment, and especially its psychological torments: solitude, tedium, uncertainty about the future, and the looming threat of insanity. In these works, prisoners inhabit a separate self-contained world, helpless before the omnipotent will of their jailers, who rule over them like " oriental despots. " The wide dissemination of terrifying images of the prison contributed to building the public pressure for the abolition of lettres de cachet during the Revolution, but the enormous commercial success of the memoirs suggests that some readers found the depictions of life behind prison walls darkly fascinating as well as terrifying. Much the same could be said of readers' responses to the exposés of Revolutionary prisons published after Thermidor, the Gothic novels of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the fictional universe of the Marquis de Sade, all of which drew heavily on the carceral imaginary invented under the Old Regime. * I would like to thank Madeleine Dobie, Howard Brown, Andrew Curran, Carol Freedman, and Sophie Rosenfeld, as well as the anonymous readers for Modern Intellectual History, for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this essay. 339

The Bureau du Commerce allocated rights and rents to private entrepreneurs via a mix of hierarchical division of labor and peer-based collegial deliberation. This set-up reflected an attempt to maximize information and expertise, but also allowed for the recognition of private rights and social interests. The final decisions of the Bureau (for or against each demand), and the qualitative arguments brought forward during the procedure, are robust predictors of eventual decisions. We see this result as an indication that impersonal, rational and informed decision-making could be obtained even within a patrimonialist, rent-seeking State.

Cycle : Femmes déviantes, femmes criminelles face à leurs juges dans les anciens Pays-Bas et l'Europe du Nord-Ouest de la fin du Moyen Âge au premier XXe siècle
Arras – Université d'Artois – EA 4027 Vendredi 21 octobre 2016 Octobre 2016 pour la deuxième journée d'étude « Des maux et du sang : la violence des femmes »