Ancien Regime France Research Articles

Free riding in the monastery: Club goods, the cistercian order and agricultural investment in Ancien Regime France

How can transaction costs prevent effective monitoring of members in an organization? In this paper I test for a relationship between the cost of monitoring and free riding behavior within a religious organization by using a historical case study: the Cistercian Order in Ancien Regime France. Individuals were required to follow strict behavioral guidelines in order to maintain membership in the monastic order. Two monitoring devices emerged to identify free-riders: (1) an annual visit by the head of a ’supervising’ monastery and (2) attendance at an annual General Chapter meeting. Using digitized maps of transportation networks in eighteenth century France, I estimate travel costs as a proxy for monitoring costs. As a proxy for free-riding behavior in a monastic order, I use the value of agricultural investment since monks were discouraged from engaging in market-orientated behavior such as investment. After matching each property with its owner’s costs, I find that where monitoring costs are higher, monasteries engage in more free riding behavior. The results hold after controlling for characteristics of the monasteries, potential issues of sample selection and bias from major houses.

İNSAN HAKLARI VE ŞİDDET İKİLEMİNDE FRANSIZ İHTİLALİ; EYLÜL KATLİAMI ÖRNEĞİ

The strict hierarchical structure among the political, social and economic classes that constituted the 18th century French society, led to the formation of a revolutionary movement with profound political, social and economic consequences in 1789. The first years of the revolution passed with the developments that greatly transformed the “ancien regime France”. There were the concepts of “freedom, equality and brotherhood” which expressed the desires of the nation, at the basis of the steps taken. As a matter of fact, people's natural rights are guaranteed with the Declaration of Human and Citizen Rights based on these concepts; at least it was hoped. But as with many beliefs and principals, contradictory situations between doctrine and action were not delayed to arise in the French Revolution. In a short period of time, no freedom in practice began to be tolerated. Brotherhood was replaced by angry massacres. Governments, on the other hand, did not hesitate to use the massacres carried out by the crowds as a scary layout tool. In this way, the massacre areas became the places of official punishment. One of these massacres took place in September 1792. At that time, Paris was threatened with the invasion of the Austro-Prussian armies in which France was at war. The people of Paris were terrified with the danger of invasion on one side and the thought that thousands of enemies in prison would flee and kill their innocent families. In this spirit, armed groups of the public entered the Paris prisons and began to systematically slaughter the prisoners. When the violence ended, half of the prisoners in the nine prisons were killed.

Free Riding in the Monastery: Club Goods, the Cistercian Order and Agricultural Investment in Ancien Regime France

How can transaction costs prevent effective monitoring of members in an organization? In this paper I test for a relationship between the cost of monitoring and free riding behavior within a religious organization by using a historical case study: the Cistercian Order in Ancien Regime France. The advantage of using the Cistercian Order comes from the two monitoring devices used to discourage market-orientated behavior: (1) an annual visit by the head of a ’supervising’ monastery and, (2) attendance at an annual General Chapter meeting at Citeaux. Since the transaction costs for both monitoring devices are likely correlated with transportation costs, I use newly digitized maps of transportation networks in eighteenth century France and the locations of Cistercian monasteries to derive monitoring costs for each trip. I then use a new data set of agricultural properties confiscated at the beginning of the French Revolution and sold at auction to create a proxy for free riding behavior by the monks – the value of agricultural investment. After matching each property with its owner’s costs, I find that where monitoring costs are higher, monasteries engage in more free riding behavior. The results hold after controlling for characteristics of the monasteries, potential issues of sample selection and bias from major houses.

The Burgundy Circle's plans to undermine Louis XIV's “absolute” state through polysynody and the high nobility

Louis the duc de Bourgogne (1686 – 1712), grandson of Louis XIV, was briefly Dauphin of France before his premature death from measles. Advised by a group of noted former tutors and members of the court, Bourgogne’s Circle devised a range of plans to reform the French state under his future rule. Opposing the centralising model of sovereignty pursued by Louis XIV, the Circle intended to expand government, decentralise power into the provinces, reform an ailing economy, and resurrect the fortunes of a high-aristocracy believed to have been excluded from meaningful government. The Circle’s conviction that Louis XIV had circumvented the ancient nobility by tyrannical (‘absolutist’) means challenges revisionist interpretations of absolutism in ancien regime France. This article will therefore test revisionist claims that ‘absolutism’ did not exist in France, by assessing the contemporary opinion of the Circle’s key members. In so doing, it will reveal the divergent reform agendas of its members and contest previous historiographical notions that depict the group as possessing a cohesive ideology.

The Republican Court and the Historiography of a Women’s Domain in the Public Sphere

One of the more useful recent developments in feminist historiography has been the turn away from the simple binarism of public/ private in discussions of the social activities of early modem women in western cultures. In particular Dena Goodman's work on the salons of ancien regime France has recovered the public work of women in the private institutions of sociability that operated in distinction to court and state.1Goodman's understanding of the public sphere is Habermasian in that it understands the public to have been a highly ramified ideal, entailing the antique concept of publicum as the depersonalized authority of state, the idea of public as a discursive space in which the vox populi can speak in distinction to the dictates of the state, and as an array of private institutions-clubs, coffeehouses, tea tables, salons-that constituted an autonomous region of political and cultural power. Women operated differently in light of the different forms of public in which they participated. One could make a quick and crude distinction: Women of the court in the absolutist public sphere exerted influence through secrecy, intrigue, and deception; one might say they were feminized and privatized. The salonnieres, in contrast, molded public opinion by sponsoring and participating in a liberty of conversation; they were publicizers of philosophy and maimers.What does Goodman's renovation of the understanding of women's public roles in France have to do with the historiography of the early republic? It permits us to question the all-powerful dominion of the domesticity thesis in the historiography of women.2The domesticity thesis holds that republican ideology entirely constrained woman's work within the world of the private household. Goodman's work permits us to imagine for early America a fully formed woman's domain in the public sphere, an arena of expression where domesticity does not restrict communication, or republican ideology limit women's roles to virtuous daughter, wife, and mother. She gives us as an alternative to the practice of the salon. The great salons were superintended by women who set mies for conversation, enforcing politeness by wit and quashing incivility with charm. The salonnieres promoted a colloquy between persons of state, savants, artists, and women of taste. The company was exclusive, but not so much in tenus of class or nationality as in terms of talent and conversational skill. The conversation of the salon became the crucible in which the ideas of politicians and philosophers were tried.Let us imagine for early America a space where femmes savantes might speak freely about politics with politicians, art with artists, gentility with gentlemen, and even the theory and practice of domesticity if they so chose. It should have the cosmopolitanism of the French salon-with its +heterosociability-yet there should be something more, an interest in forming a civil sorority found in certain British women's circles. We can visualize a domain of private society that, while permitting mixed conversation, also enabled women to project public concerns-to reform manners, cultivate taste, and critique culture. For the sake of argument, let us also conceive that this domain, or community, is organized so that it can project its views throughout the continent, say by means of a network of subsidiaiy provincial salons. Or let us be more concrete: Let us imagine Abigail Adams not in the meditative solitude of her household in Braintree, but at the center of a metropolitan company of men and especially women of learning, sensibility, and taste. And let us imagine this company actively publicizing an ideal of civility.Such an institution did exist during the final decade of the eighteenth century in America. It was called the Republican Court. Until the rise of the progressive historians early in this century, the Republican Court and its doings were matters of common knowledge among literate Americans. …

Transgressing Boundaries: Worldly Conversation, Politeness and Sociability in Ancien Regime France, 1660-1789

Transgressing Boundaries: Worldly Conversation, Politeness and Sociability in Ancien Regime France, 1660-1789

Transgressing Boundaries: Worldly Conversation, Politeness and Sociability in Ancien Regime France, 1660-1789

Transgressing Boundaries: Worldly Conversation, Politeness and Sociability in Ancien Regime France, 1660-1789

‘Le centre de toutes choses’: Constructing and managing centralization on the Isle de France

In their recent book The colonial machine, James McClellan III and François Regourd detail how ancien regime France’s government marshalled science in the service of colonial expansion. By focusing on the local and long distance struggles to make the Isle de France (present day Mauritius) a globally significant centre during the long eighteenth century, this essay suggests an alternative to McClellan and Regourd’s geography of metropolitan centre and colonial periphery, as well as their claim that the investigation of nature was tied to colonial expansion by state centralization. Rather than view centralization as a double process whereby a metropolitan state is able to dominate increasingly peripheral territory by concentrating power and the means of its production and management under state authority, this essay argues that centralization occurred in numerous places and involved the organization, pursuit and management of various sorts of accumulation, with geographically extensive consequences. The goal is to present centralization as historically open and multi-centred, inviting examination of both its local dynamics and long-distance entanglements from various perspectives, which in turn reveals the multi-centred dynamics of empire building and governance, including the organization and pursuit of natural inquiry.

Artists and amateurs: etching in 18th-century France

Over the course of the 18th century a great number of artists, ranging from established painters and sculptors to amateurs, experimented with etching, an accessible form of printmaking akin to drawing. In a period when artists strained to navigate the highly regulated Academie Royale and the increasingly discordant public spheres of the marketplace and the Salon, etching afforded them stylistic freedom and allowed them to produce exquisite works of art in a spirit of collaboration and experimentation. Featuring works by Watteau, Boucher, Fragonard, Hubert Robert, and many others, Artists and Amateurs embarks on a fresh exploration of how etching flourished in ancien regime France, shedding new light on artistic practice and patronage at that time. Treating such topics as technique and practice, experimentation, and the crucial role of the amateur, it establishes the unique place of etching in the shifting social terrain of 18th-century Paris, and explores an artistic context in which conventional hierarchies of genre and medium were breached to brilliant effect.

Idolatry and Sculpture in Ancien Regime France

Many texts and visual images produced in France from the later seventeenth century through the mid-eighteenth displayed a concern with idolatry. Literary figures from La Fontaine to Voltaire, ecclesiastics including Bossuet and Jurieu, and antiquarians and theorists of art such as Charles Perrault, La Font de Saint-Yenne and Antoine Le Mierre also associated the worship of false gods with sculpture. Bound up with interest in ancient and non- European mores and forms of worship, the idolatry-sculpture linkage also fed into contemporary political and religious debates. Huguenots, Jansenists, and philosophes utilized the connection to assist in promoting their views. Several public political and religious monuments appear to have been created partly in reaction to their charges.

The Origins of Modern Gender in French Theory and Practice: Complicating the Picture

Carla Hesse. The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. xvi + 256 pp. Clare Haru Crowston. Fabricating Women: The Seamstresses of Old Regime France, 1675-1791. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. xviii + 508 pp. Read individually, each of these books makes an original and important intervention into the history of modern Western gender relations, particularly in France. Each offers revisions of commonly argued theses about the nature of patriarchy in Ancien Regime France, about the construction of gender in the process of state formation, about women and work, and about the place of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution in the construction of modern gender. Crowston and Hesse individually present impressive scholarship and persuasive revisionist arguments regarding this history. Read together, their books demonstrate the continually increasing sophistication of scholarship and argumentation on the history of women and gender, as well as the persistence of very different readings of that history and how it fits (or does not fit) into historical narratives of long standing. In particular, these two scholars draw somewhat different pictures of the gender order of early modern France and then about the impact of the Enlightenment and the Revolution on women and gender. Both authors embed their arguments in the historiography of women and gender in Europe, although they begin from critical, indeed tendentious, characterizations of that historiography. They ironically summarize their predecessors with quite differing emphases. Hesse frames her book as a response to a historiographic tradition that sees the Ancien Regime as "benign" with respect to women, especially when compared to the rigid gender polarization and exclusions associated with post-Enlightenment modernity. She agrees with the temporality that assigns a special place in the evolution of modern gender relations to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment era and the Revolution, but argues a more liberal interpretation of those historical moments. Emergent Republicanism, influenced by some Enlightenment theory, may indeed have placed limitations on women's moral and political autonomy. But the practices of the literary marketplace, as reformed in the Revolutionary era, opened new possibilities [End Page 226] for women. In contrast with many other feminist readings of this history, Hesse asserts her view that "women were initially excluded from active citizenship not because citizenship was conceived of as inherently masculine, but because women were not perceived to be either capable of self-governance or of reasoning about general rather than particular interests" (xiv). Her book focuses on gender struggles, to be sure; it nevertheless highlights a particular set of French women who despite limitations "used the cultural resources of modern commercial society to . . . (stake) a successful claim for themselves as modern individuals in the public world" (xv). Crowston's alternative but similarly tendentious view of previous historiography emphasizes instead arguments that point to the "patriarchalism" of the Ancien Regime and the combined power of the guilds and the early modern state to suppress female autonomy. Crowston is interested in the theoretical reframing of gender that occurred in the Enlightenment and Revolutionary eras, but she argues that some important innovations in the construction of modern gender in France (in particular the naturalization of a prevailing gender division of labor) can be located beginning with the late-seventeenth-century creation in Paris of the guild of seamstresses, who are the focus of her study. Her focus on these seamstresses undermines many common assumptions about women's history: about the place of women in the guild system and the public sphere in the Ancien Regime, about the relationship between women workers and the state, and about the origins of the modern association between gender and fashion and self-fashioning. In Crowston's history, the seamstresses of Ancien Regime France emerge as relatively powerful and autonomous figures whose work, civic, and gender identities drew upon many sources, but were institutionalized in important ways because of the existence and practices...

Women and the Sociable Contract in Les Liaisons dangereuses

In his 'Notes sur Les Liaisons dangereuses', Charles Baudelaire remarked that Choderlos de Laclos's masterpiece was first and foremost a novel about 'terrible' sociability: the novel, he claimed, was a 'livre essentiellement fran9ais. Livre de sociabilite, terrible, mais sous Ie badin et Ie convenable. Livre de sociabilite' .1 As he acknowledged the eighteenthcentury myth of French sociability and simultaneously recognized the existence of an intimate, yet perverse, connection between the corruption of social mores and the classical rules of bienseance, Baudelaire struck right at the heart of Laclos' s masterpiece. The Liaisons dangereuses can, in fact, be read as a meditation on the sociable contract that regulated life and interpersonal relations in ancien regime France. 2 The novel explores the repressive tendencies of early modern conviviality, underscoring in particular the risks involved in the silencing ofthe socially undesirable. By precluding the expression of the unacceptable or unconventional, the laws of sociability seem to have masked, and therefore protected and sometimes even enhanced, precisely those ideas and practices which they were meant to exclude. As Laclos's novel shows all too well, 'Ie badin et Ie convenable' could serve to produce something in excess of friendly words and mannerly fashions: something unnamable, but indisputably 'terrible'. The novel describes the perverse machinations of two extraordinary libertines, the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, who manipulate friends and acquaintances for their personal pleasure and satisfaction. With a seemingly 'Olympian mastery of reality,' this Machiavellian couple scripts its victims' lives, ultimately seducing and ruining two innocent young lovers Cecile Volanges and the chevalier Danceny as well as a virtuous wife, the Presidente de Tourvel. 3 An elaborate testimonial to 'Ie plaisir de tromper', the Liaisons dangereuses can thus be read as a meditation on the highly mannered, and often deceptive, nature of social relations in eighteenth-century France. The novel deconstructs the early modern behavioural discourse of sociability, suggesting that its hoilow conventions simply screen the passions and 'haine [que tous ont] dans Ie coeur' (p. 257). Laclos shows politeness to be nothing more than an ideological construct elaborated by a male power-structure bent on hiding its natural propensity to violence.

Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Regime, 1647-1785 (review)

Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Régime, 1647-1785. By Downing A. Thomas. (Cambridge Studies in Opera.) Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. [vii, 411 p. ISBN 0-521-80188-5. $70.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index.

Profits and Privileges: Forest and Commercial Interests in Ancien Regime France

Historians have long debated the extent to which the French economy was stifled by regulations and government interference during the eighteenth century. Prominent manufacturing industries like textiles, glass and paper have offered various scholars the opportunity to elaborate and test their theories. This article turns instead to an area of high priority for the ancien régime state: the supply of timber, especially for construction purposes in the naval dockyards. Using evidence about aspects of commercial timber trading in the south‐west, this work highlights the role of government contractors who stood at the intersection of public policy and private profits. In doing so, it argues that ‘public choice’ explanations – predicated on the dysfunctional nature of ancien régime policy‐making, which relied on the award of exclusive (and monopolistic) economic privileges – pay insufficient attention to the limited extent of official knowledge. They also overlook the multiple motivations of eighteenth‐century entrepreneurs.

La morale du musée : 1789-1830

French art museums are born, against the european tradition of the so-called "enlightened despotism", in a revolutionary moment: they obey to democratic and republican inspirations. The jacobin-centralized control of their scientific and patriotic standards profoundly marked the general characteristics of their exhibitions during the first half of the nineteenth century. Their goals are of educating people, promoting patriotism, modernizing spirits, etc. but, simultaneously, they are accused of promoting iconoclasm and destructing the true culture of collectors of Ancien regime France.

Shorter note. Class and State in Ancien Regime France. The Road to Modernity?. David Parker

Shorter note. Class and State in Ancien Regime France. The Road to Modernity?. David Parker

Daniel Hickey, Local hospitals in ancien regime France: rationalization, resistance, renewal, 1530–1789, Montreal and London, McGill-Queen's University Press, 1997, pp. xxv, 275, illus., £28.00 (hardback 0-7735-1540-2).

Daniel Hickey, Local hospitals in ancien regime France: rationalization, resistance, renewal, 1530–1789, Montreal and London, McGill-Queen's University Press, 1997, pp. xxv, 275, illus., £28.00 (hardback 0-7735-1540-2).

Local Hospitals in Ancien Regime France: Rationalization, Resistance Renewal, 1530-1789

Local Hospitals in Ancien Regime France: Rationalization, Resistance Renewal, 1530-1789

Local Hospitals in Ancien Regime France: Rationalization, Resistance, Renewal, 1530-1789 (review)

Local Hospitals in Ancien Regime France: Rationalization, Resistance, Renewal, 1530-1789 (review)

Venality: The Sale of Offices in Eighteenth-Century France

In ancien regime France almost all posts of public responsibility had to be bought or inherited. Rather than tax their richer subjects directly, French kings preferred to sell them privileged public offices, which further payments allowed them to sell or bequeath at will. By the eighteenth century there were 70,000 venal offices, comprising the entire judiciary, most of the legal profession, officers in the army, and a wide range of other professions - from financiers handling the king's revenues down to auctioneers and even wigmakers. Though now yielding diminishing returns to the king, offices were more in demand than ever for the privileges and prestige, profit and power, that they conferred; and although it was widely accepted that selling public authority was undesirable, nobody imagined that those who had invested in offices could ever be bought out. The Revolution brought an unexpected opportunity to do so, but the legacy of venality has marked French institutions down to our day. William Doyle, one of the foremost historians of early modern Europe, has written the first comprehensive history of the last century of venality. He traces the evolution and dissolution of a system which was fundamental to the workings of state and society in France for over three centuries.