Qu'est-ce qu'un etranger? Frontieres et identifications a Strasbourg (1681-1789). By Hanna Sonkajarvi

Abstract

In this well-researched monograph, Hanna Sonkajärvi explores the multiple implications of being identified as a ‘foreigner’ in Strasbourg during the period from the city's attachment to France to the French Revolution. Recent studies of foreigners in ancien régime France, particularly Peter Sahlins's Unnaturally French: Foreign Citizens in the Old Regime and After (Ithaca, 2004), Sonkajärvi asserts, have concentrated too heavily on the legal distinction between subjects of the king (régnicoles) and non-subjects (aubains), while neglecting the issue of how these categories were applied in specific local contexts. Although the multi-confessional border city of Strasbourg, which retained the municipal institutions and high degree of local autonomy it had enjoyed as a Free Imperial City, should not be understood as representative of France as a whole, it offers a particularly rich and complex setting in which to examine the practical application of these legal categories of ‘foreigner’ on a local level. Drawing on a wide range of archival evidence, Sonkajärvi demonstrates that local definitions of foreignness not only co-existed with but could even take precedence over the official categories of the crown. In day-to-day practice, moreover, distinctions of wealth, language, trade and religion could prove equally decisive. Certain individuals and groups managed to negotiate this system to their advantage, exploiting a bewildering array of privileges, legal loopholes and discrepancies between state and local categories in order to be dispensed of certain taxes or duties, to gain access to positions of authority, to practise a particular trade or to extend their residence in the city.