Le Pouvoir municipal de la fin du Moyen Age a 1789

Abstract

This collection of essays is the product of a two-day conference that took place in Rennes in February 2010, bringing together scholars working on municipal government in early modern France with the aim of recognising and exploring recent attention to the field. The organisers sought to cover a broad time-frame, from the emergence of municipal institutions at the end of the Middle Ages to the era of municipal reform on the eve of the French Revolution. Admittedly, most papers deal with the 17th and 18th centuries, with only a handful addressing the 16th century (Descimon, Tingle, Fargeix, Hamon) and just one, by Thierry Dutour, firmly situated before 1500. Yet in general the contributions are focused on a key goal of the meeting: to engage with the move from more localised studies to a comparative view of change over time and across regional, even national landscapes. In this sense, the focus on northern France and Brittany in particular—inspired in part by the location of the conference and in part by the progressive digitisation of important series in Rennes’ municipal archives—allows for a strong base line, with papers on Lyon, Paris, Dunkirk, Dijon, and the small towns and cities of Languedoc and the south-west providing a useful contrast. Even authors whose focus is a single location draw helpful historiographical comparisons. The decision to exclude rural municipalities allowed the contributors to focus on key questions such as changes in the policing (defined broadly) of the urban environment, the role of municipal authorities as intermediaries between the people and the state, and a more nuanced understanding of both the social structure of councils and their motivations than is often allowed by umbrella terms such as ‘corporatism’ and ‘oligarchy’.