“Viles personnes”: the plebeian multitudes in Charles Loyseau’s Traité des ordres

Abstract

A jurist of a retiring temperament, Charles Loyseau (1566 - 1627) is nonetheless a familiar figure to the modern historian.1 His works have made lasting contributions to legal, political and social history.2 This article aims to shed new light on a neglected corner of his best known work: his Traite des ordres et simples dignitez (1610). My principal quarry here is Loyseau's brief but telling description of France's large plebeian population at the turn of the seventeenth century. The Traite des ordres is often regarded as the most detailed anatomy of France's population in the early 1600s.3 It is usually mined for what it tells us about the social elites of the Ancien Regime - yet it also discloses vital information on perceptions of the other end of the social scale.Loyseau and his views on the lowborn masses constitute a fundamental reference point in modern scholarship on working conditions, labour and industry in France before 1789.4 However, his methods of comparing various sorts of lowly workers have not been rigorously scrutinized. For Loyseau, even the viles personnes,5 society's very basest, could be ranked in a rudimentary sub-hierarchy which, to my knowledge, no one has yet analysed in detail. The purpose of this study, therefore, is to provide such an analysis, and thereby to unearth the subtle variations hitherto overlooked in Loyseau's attitudes towards the different strata of viles personnes he postulates. The viles personnes, I shall argue, occupy a far from insignificant place in the overarching social hierarchy put forward by Loyseau. Each kind of vile personne,we shall see, constitutes a stress point in his system of hierarchical exposition, undermining its conceptual underpinnings.Loyseau's Traite des ordres is the third of his three major treatises. It is a thorough attempt to classify and rank all types of individuals and groups found within each of the basic sociolegal structures of the Ancien Regime: the Church, the Nobility and the Third Estate. Loyseau is primarily concerned with the first two Estates, as he sets about identifying different gradations of dignity exhibited by the powerful (ecclesiastics and nobles). The Third Estate, a vast spectrum consisting of all of France's secular commoners, receives but one chapter. For Loyseau, the heterogeneous commoners of the Third Estate could be ranked, to an extent, according to the relative honneur and dignite of their professional activity - but only as far as merchants. What, then, of the four groups he identifies beneath them? Loyseau has little to say about cultivators, artisans, casual workmen and vagabonds, who together made up large swathes of France's population. At first, it would appear that these four groups constitute little more than a remnant substrate beneath the conceptual threshold of dignity he has established. And yet, these viles personnes were not to be omitted from his ranking enterprise, which required there to be a demonstrable Ordre en toutes choses.6 Cultivators, artisans, casual workmen and beggars could not simply be lumped together as one homogeneous mass. For Loyseau, all of these groups except beggars made meaningful (if mostly menial) contributions to society as a whole. Nevertheless, the task of evaluation proved far from straightforward. A close scrutiny of each group shows that Loyseau's text pulls curiously in different directions, sometimes towards a positive evaluation of plebeian workmanship, but rarely without reservations and suspicion. To be properly understood, these shifts in perspective require careful contextualization vis-a-vis the intellectual climate and tradition in which Loyseau was writing.7 As we shall see, his views were not entirely shared by other early seventeenth-century commentators.1. Viles personnes: initial considerationsBefore looking in detail at the four constituent groups of viles personnes identified by Loyseau, we should reflect on the category itself, its origins and its positioning in the overarching conceptual system that informs the Traite des ordres. …