Early Modern France

Abstract

France is the largest, most populous, and richest country in Europe. Beginning in the Middle Ages, the monarchy tried to build a powerful state by multiplying its agents and reducing the autonomy of the provinces. Therefore, historians have usually focused their attention upon this cultural, social, and political homogenization. This long-term approach still dominates the historiography and literature in the field. More recently, however, scholars have also highlighted the forms of resistance to this centripetal force, the resilience of regional identities, and the peculiarities of local compromises. Although France belatedly began to establish colonies in the Atlantic world during the 17th century, they were not regarded as critical for the history of the colonial metropolis until the 18th century. Nevertheless, the French were not strangers to Atlantic trade. People and goods had been circulating there for a long time, reflecting a tendency to geographical mobility and revealing France’s economic dynamism. Thus, though this article favors the 17th and 18th centuries, it focuses on French social structures rather than on political events.