French Monarchy Research Articles

The Divisions of French Catholicism, 1629–1645: ‘The Parting of the Ways.’ by Anthony D. Wright

the exotic lands in which Westerners seek a refuge have already lost their innocence due to colonial expansion. Equally problematic is his attitude toward religion . He scoffs at the institutions of organized religion, yet he displays a sincere admiration for Jesus Christ. He makes of the crucifixion of Jesus a symbol of his own sufferings and frustrations. In his Tahitian paintings he often includes a statue of a native deity to indicate the presence of mysterious unseen forces in the world. These forces are sometimes associated with female figures who appear to embody a kind of eternal feminine. As with all aspects of Gauguin’s art, one has a sense of deeper meanings that remain indefinable and ultimately beyond the spectator’s intellectual reach. The essays in this volume also reveal the literary dimension of Gauguin’s inspiration . For one thing, his search for liberation through escape from modernity into the exotic was either inspired by or parallel to similar aspirations written about by Gérard de Nerval and Pierre Loti. Gauguin himself became a role model for younger writers and artists, such as his admirer and early biographer Victor Segalen (see Charles Forsdick’s essay). It is also enlightening to discover that Gauguin was a writer as well as a pictorial artist. In journals, periodicals, and autobiographical texts, like Noa Noa, he explored answers to the same problems in life and revealed the multifaceted nature of his personality just as he does in his paintings, carvings, and ceramics. Another literary preoccupation is the importance he accords to titles for his works. In the later ones, they are frequently bilingual, in both Tahitian and French. He chose them to make the viewer feel that major questions about life and human destiny are being addressed therein. Sometimes the words spill over onto the surface of the painting, becoming iconic. University of Denver (CO) James P. Gilroy WRIGHT, ANTHONY D. The Divisions of French Catholicism, 1629–1645: ‘The Parting of the Ways.’ Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. ISBN 978-1-4094-2084-2. Pp. 216. $124.95. French political and religious maneuvers form the basis of this well-researched and carefully-documented volume. The author, noted for his scholarship on the Catholic Counter-Reformation, the Papacy, and the Society of Jesus, has traced the roots of division among French Catholics to well before the posthumous publication of Jansenius’s Augustinus in 1641. The book contains two sections, the historical and religious context before 1629, and the actual fragmentation between 1629 and 1645. Beginning with the devastating Wars of Religion throughout the second half of the sixteenth century, Wright addresses the controversial accession of Henri IV to the throne of France. This chaotic situation, coupled with the refusal of the French monarchy to accept the Tridentine decrees (1545–63) until 1615, set the stage for further conflict both within the Church and between Church and State. Differing interpretations of reform surfaced, notably by Bérulle, founder of the French Oratorians, and Richelieu, already making his ascent into power. Added to this, the banished Jesuits returned to France and to the field of education, thus entering into rivalry with the Oratorians. Meanwhile, all parties courted the favor of the monarchy, while seeking prestigious individual positions. During this time the dévots, or Catholics dedicated to internal church reform, and favorable to Rome, assumed an important role. The question of ecclesiastical Reviews 1187 discipline often outweighed doctrinal preoccupations, and provoked conflicts with the monarchy. Marriage issues, reception of the sacraments of Penance and the Eucharist, and the role of secular clergy as opposed to religious orders achieved paramount importance. French foreign policies also blurred the religious sphere. The marriage of the Catholic Henrietta Maria, daughter of Henri IV, to the Protestant Charles I of England forged a brief temporary alliance. Richelieu’s hostility to the Catholic Hapsburgs in Spain and Austria evoked strong opposition from many dévots. During all of these conflicts, the papacy played a changing role, as national interests began to outweigh religious concerns, especially with the evolution of French Gallicanism. The year 1629 marked a watershed on the French scene. It witnessed the death of Bérulle, increasingly at odds with Richelieu...

War and Seduction in Cybele’s Garden: Contextualizing theBallet des Polonais*

AbstractThis article examines theBallet des Polonais(1573), a magnificent festival given by Catherine de Médicis on the occasion of the election of her son, Henri de Valois, the future Henri III of France, to the throne of Poland. It argues that the invention of spectacle, as described in the official Latin account by the poet and humanist Jean Dorat, is much more relevant to the political situation of the time than scholars have previously recognized. Placed in an immediate historical, literary, and visual context, the text of theBalletmakes allusions to contemporary topics, including the military glory of Henri de Valois and the imperial destiny of the French monarchy. The elaborate web of references to books 5 and 9 of theAeneidand to Catullus 64 displays the primary role of Catherine de Médicis, who is lauded for overcoming her maternal sorrow at Henri’s departure for the sake of promoting the Valois Empire.

A godly Fronde? Jansenism and the mid-seventeenth-century crisis of the French monarchy

A godly Fronde? Jansenism and the mid-seventeenth-century crisis of the French monarchy

Montesquieu and the ‘French’ Model of Separation of Powers

Constitutional scholarship has put much emphasis on Montesquieu’s principle of separation of powers as developed in the chapter of ‘The Spirit of Laws’ on the English constitution (XI, 6). It has also been quite common to mix up this model of separation of powers with elements taken from other sections of Montesquieu’s masterpiece. The starting point of this paper is that there is an alternative second model of separation powers based on the French monarchy of intermediate powers, which is also an instantiation of limited government. From this premise, the paper’s aim is to carve out a second version of the principle of separation of powers by focusing on the different role and nature of judicial power in the English and French models. It turns out that the French version of the separation of powers is not based on a strict separation, since it bestows on the higher judicial intermediate bodies both judicial and legislative functions. This also leads to a kind of constitutionalism that is ‘in between’ ancient and modern, as it is exemplified by Montesquieu’s take on the functioning of the Parliaments. As it is typical of his political thought, he sees this intermediate power as representative of traditional and conservative social forces but, at the same time, in virtue of its social status, as an institution which strengthens, by opposing it, the monarch’s legislative rationality and legally constrains political action.

Between crown and commerce: Marseille and the early modern Mediterranean

Between Crown and Commerce examines the relationship between French royal statecraft, mercantilism, and civic republicanism in the context of the globalizing economy of the early modern Mediterranean world. This is the story of how the French Crown and local institutions accommodated one another as they sought to forge acceptable political and commercial relationships with one another for the common goal of economic prosperity. Junko Therese Takeda tells this tale through the particular experience of Marseille, a port the monarchy saw as key to commercial expansion in the Mediterranean. At first, Marseille's commercial and political elites were strongly opposed to the Crown's encroaching influence. Rather than dismiss their concerns, the monarchy cleverly co-opted their civic traditions, practices, and institutions to convince the city's elite of their important role in Levantine commerce. Chief among such traditions were local ideas of citizenship and civic virtue. As the city's stature throughout the Mediterranean grew, however, so too did the dangers of commercial expansion as exemplified by the arrival of the bubonic plague. Marseille's citizens reevaluated citizenship and merchant virtue during the epidemic, while the French monarchy's use of the crisis as an opportunity to further extend its power reanimated republican vocabulary. Between Crown and Commerce deftly combines a political and intellectual history of state-building, mercantilism, and republicanism with a cultural history of medical crisis. In doing so, the book highlights the conjoined history of broad transnational processes and local political change.

Book Review: Revolutionary Commerce: Globalization and the French Monarchy

Book Review: Revolutionary Commerce: Globalization and the French Monarchy

Revolutionary commerce: globalization and the French monarchy - By Paul Cheney

The Economic History ReviewVolume 64, Issue 2 p. 695-696 Revolutionary commerce: globalization and the French monarchy – By Paul Cheney WILLIAM DOYLE, WILLIAM DOYLE University of BristolSearch for more papers by this author WILLIAM DOYLE, WILLIAM DOYLE University of BristolSearch for more papers by this author First published: 12 April 2011 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0289.2010.00578_21.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Volume64, Issue2May 2011Pages 695-696 RelatedInformation

Schisme impérial, schisme pontifical

During the thirteenth century, French chroniclers progressively lost sight of the Empire and blamed its constitutional subtleties (i.e. its elective kingship) for its most lamentable tendencies toward disorder and civil war. Surprisingly, their successors of the first half of the fourteenth century paid more attention to German history, and changed their mind when dealing with imperial splits : French monarchy had meanwhile experienced a quasi-electoral crisis and was eager to find support against Edward III in what was to become the Hundred Years War.

Revolutionary commerce: globalization and the French monarchy

Combining the intellectual history of the Enlightenment, Atlantic history, and the history of the French Revolution, Paul Cheney explores the political economy of globalization in eighteenth-century France. The discovery of the New World and the rise of Europe's Atlantic economy brought unprecedented wealth. It also reordered the political balance among European states and threatened age-old social hierarchies within them. In this charged context, the French developed a science of commerce that aimed to benefit from this new wealth while containing its revolutionary effects. Montesquieu became a towering authority among reformist economic and political thinkers by developing a politics of fusion intended to reconcile France's aristocratic society and monarchical state with the needs and risks of international commerce. The Seven Years' War proved the weakness of this model, and after this watershed reforms that could guarantee shared prosperity at home and in the colonies remained elusive. Once the Revolution broke out in 1789, the contradictions that attended the growth of France's Atlantic economy helped to bring down the constitutional monarchy. Drawing upon the writings of philosophes, diplomats, consuls of commerce, and merchants, Cheney rewrites the history of political economy in the Enlightenment era and provides a new interpretation of the relationship between capitalism and the French Revolution.

Robert Darnton . The Devil in the Holy Water or the Art of Slander from Louis XIV to Napoleon . (Material Texts.) Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press . 2010 . Pp. viii, 534. $34.95.

Skillfully researched, cunningly organized, and brilliantly written, this may well be Robert Darnton's best book to date. Readers of his earlier work will recognize familiar elements: thematically, it offers us Grub Street, starving literary hacks, police spies, the market in prohibited books, and pornography twinned with politics; methodologically, it scours the archives, draws on book history, nods to anthropology, and tells a great story. But Darnton hones in here on a particularly vivid genre of underground writing that proliferated dramatically in the last decades of the Old Regime and was vigorously reworked during the French Revolution: the slanderous anonymous publications, or libels, that emanated from the colony of French writers in London (“a hundred leagues from the Bastille and under the sign of liberty,” as more than one title page proclaimed). Mixing denunciations of despotism with revelations of personal immorality and corruption, he argues, this literature fabricated the mythology of “a satanic fairyland” in which the high and mighty of the French monarchy indulged their “pursuit of lust and power” (p. 6).

NOTAS SOBRE ALGUMAS CONCEPÇÕES POLÍTICAS E A FRANÇA DOS ÚLTIMOS CAPETOS: AS AMBIGÜIDADES E AS ORIGENS MEDIEVAIS DA MONARQUIA TEOCRÁTICA FRANCESA

Our text intends to approach some of the ambiguities and pertinent subjects to the invigoration of the French Monarchy and the assembly of its teocratics basis, close to some of the political conceptions from the time of the capetingian sovereigns The present article doesn't possess innovative intentions. It seeks, essentially, to explain some of the many problems generated by that intrincate subject and that are dispersed for the historiography. Thus, our objective is just that of presenting suggestions, to suggest problems and, simultaneously, to agglutinate some of the many pertinent elements to that theme, that is to say: a reference point, of departure; a systematization, that presents a fast, even so rigorous synthesis of some items of the theme in subject. Key-words: Medieval France; policy; regnum.

Knowledge, Protection, Conservation and Management in the Marine Domain: The Example of the Mainland French Coast~!2009-08-19~!2010-01-18~!2010-04-06~!

France is geographically located in a central maritime position within the European Union (EU). Consequently, the experience gained and the solutions proposed in France may be of interest within a much wider geographical and institutional framework. The EU directives and regulations and the international treaties and conventions bind it. Among the 'tools' for environmental protection and management of the environment, we must point out: the Conservatory of Coastal Areas and Lakeshores, the 'Littoral' Law of 1 March 1986, the international conventions and European Directives (birds and habitats), the Inventory of the Flora and Fauna in Natural Marine Zones of Ecological Interest (ZNIEFF-Mer), the Mediterranean Blue Plan, the Barcelona Convention. More specially, we would enhance the practical interest, in the frame of the France's Strategic Action Plan for the marine environment, of the ZNIEFFs-Mer, the LITEAU (Littoral Eau) Program of the Ministry of the Environment, the French Marine Protected Areas Agency (MPAA). They are likely to lead to the protection of the littoral marine environment and beyond in the EEZ (Exclusive Economic Zone), along with a reasoned sustainable management of this environment. Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM) is the method that has the best chance of success. In addition, the international scientific community has developed the concept of ecosystem-based management of marine resources, integrating a distinct human component into this 'eco-socio-system'. The role and the authority of the European Environment Agency must be increased in order to strengthen the cooperative links between the scientists in European countries. 2 of marine territory in EEZ (Exclusive Economic Zone), is present in all the oceans of the world, except the Arctic. The country's marine territories cover more than 10% of the world's coral reefs. It plays a very important role in accumulating knowledge about the world's natural heritage and marine resources, as well as knowledge about their exploitation, protection and conservation and thus the sustainable management of the sea. But, it is only recently, at the beginning of 1970s, that France, strongly rooted in the land, has begun reaching out decisively towards the sea. The successive administrations of not only the former French monarchies but also the country's first Republics, particularly after Napoleon's great sea defeats at the beginning of the 19th century, attempted to protect the country's terrestrial borders and develop the richness of its agriculture. The French Navy, maritime transport and fishing would develop over the course of time but without any true national environmental protection policy.

Glory without power? Montesquieu's trip to Holland in 1729 and his vision of the Dutch fiscal-military state

This paper aims at setting Montesquieu's 1729 sojourn in the Dutch Republic within its specific Dutch context whilst reconsidering the impact this short period may have exerted on his work. Based on a wide variety of Dutch, English and French sources, the article offers a study of Montesquieu's Dutch networks and contacts, a comparative Franco-Dutch approach to taxation and fiscal policy and an insight into the history of the stadholderate under William IV. The main argument made in the paper is two-fold: first, that the Dutch Republic was a mirror Montesquieu held up to the French monarchy, allowing him to put a number of ideas of government to the test; secondly that, owing to the fluctuating nature of Dutch political events between 1729 and 1748, the Dutch model remained somewhat elusive in Montesquieu's broader understanding of the paradigm of republican regimes.

The Diffusion of Revolution: ‘1848’ in Europe and Latin America

AbstractWhat accounts for the spread of political protest and contention across countries? Analyzing the wildfire of attempted revolutions in 1848, the present article assesses four causal mechanisms for explaining diffusion, namely external pressure from a great power (such as revolutionary France after 1789); the promotion of new norms and values—such as liberalism and democracy—by more advanced countries; rational learning from successful contention in other nations; or boundedly rational, potentially distorted inferences from select foreign experiences. The patterns in which revolutionary contention spread and eyewitness reports from all sides of the ensuing conflicts suggest that bounded rationality played a crucial role: cognitive heuristics that deviate from fully rational procedures drew attention to some experiences but not others and induced both challengers and defenders of the established order to draw rash conclusions from these experiences, particularly the French monarchy's fall in February 1848. My study also shows, however, that other factors made important contributions, for instance by preparing the ground for the wave of regime contention.

The Faces of Judith: Nationhood and Patronage in La Judit of Guillaume Salluste Du Bartas

In the Avertissement au lecteur of his poem La Judit, the Huguenot poet Guillaume Salluste Du Bartas states that he chose to write about the biblical figure Judith because he was asked to do so by Jeanne d'Albret, ayant este commande, il y a environ quatorze ans, par feu tres illustre et tres vertueus Princesse Jane, royne de Navarre, de rediger l'histoire de Judit en forme d'un poeme epique ... (1) At the same time that he wrote an epic poem for his patroness, Du Bartas wrote for her subjects in the sovereign territories she controlled in southwest France. (2) Threatened by Catholic forces from Spain and northern France, Jeanne's Huguenot subjects were in need of strong leadership, both spiritual and military. It does not seem unreasonable that, at a moment of crisis in the mid-1560's, Jeanne asked for an epic poem about Judith to serve as a guide. (3) Judith's story legitimizes the actions of an isolated group of Elect in their fight against an invading imperial power. In the context of its production, Du Bartas' poem invited readers to link the patroness and the heroine Judith and to link her people and the inhabitants of Judith's village Bethulia. For Jeanne d'Albret and her subjects, La Judit thus carried a message of solidarity and rebellion. Jeanne d'Albret died in 1572 and a new queen of Navarre, Marguerite de Valois, succeeded her. Du Bartas responded to these events by proclaiming Marguerite the patroness of La Judit: Fille du grand HENRY, et compagne pudique D'un autre grand HENRY, o MARGUERITE unique, Qui decores la France, oy ce vers qui ne dit RIEN, si non ton beau los sous le nom de Judit. (J 1.5-8) (4) Such a move can easily be explained as opportunism on the part of the poet, but to dismiss the difference in patronesses too quickly would be to miss the complexities of the poem's second incarnation. The shift from Jeanne to Marguerite was not merely an exchange of one prominent noblewoman for another. The two women belonged to different sides of the religious and political controversies of the sixteenth century: Jeanne was an outspoken and at times militant Protestant, and Marguerite, whose marriage to Jeanne's son Henri had set the scene for the Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre, was firmly Catholic. Furthermore, whereas Jeanne d'Albret often found herself at odds with her Valois cousins ruling the north, Marguerite was the sister of the king of France and supported the interests of the French monarchy. For Du Bartas, a Protestant born in Jeanne d'Albret's territories, offering Marguerite de Valois a poem whose subject was originally conceived by her mother-in-law required a reconfiguration. (5) Interestingly enough, these changes rarely occur within the poem itself. (6) Although the poet made numerous revisions to the text between the first and second editions, his main concern seems to have been improving the language in the newer edition; few of the revisions grant a new meaning or message to the earlier edition. Instead, the re-orientation of the poem takes place on the level of the paratext. Within a letter addressed to Marguerite and in the second version of his Avertissement au lecteur, Du Bartas manages to present his potentially divisive poem as a welcome gift that unifies north and south, Catholic and Protestant. In the course of this essay, I will examine La Judit in its original context and above all the political implications it held for Queen Jeanne d'Albret and for the adherents of the Reformed Church in southwest France. As a Protestant version of a classical epic commanded in the 1560s, La Judit was an expression of Jeanne d'Albret's political power and an iteration of the nation served by it, reinforcing the legitimacy of the Protestant cause in the face of the imperial (and Catholic) other. I will consider how Du Bartas edited his text for Marguerite de Valois by dissociating the new patroness from the more political content of the poem, adapting the poem's message to promote a peaceful coexistence for all of the citizens under Marguerite's influence. …

Philosophie et Politique chez Andrew Michael Ramsay * Les Voyages de Cyrus avec un Discours sur la Mythologie * Les Principes philosophiques de la religion naturelle et revelee devoiles selon le mode geometrique

The life and works of the chevalier Andrew Michael Ramsay are an unusual way into the political and intellectual pre-occupations of early eighteenth-century Europe. He was, it could be said, Scotland's Vico, even if his own blend of scriptural history and conjectural history did not quite match the Neapolitan's imaginative and analytical flair. Ramsay was a Jacobite who, from his arrival in 1709 until his death in 1743, lived most of his adult life in France. There, he became an admirer and disciple of François de Salignac de la Mothe Fénelon, archbishop of Cambrai until his death in 1715 and, along with Bossuet and Malebranche, one of the triad of great political theologians of the last years of the reign of Louis XIV. Later, Ramsay became a member of the famous Entresol club and, later still, played a leading part in a grandiose but failed attempt to turn freemasonry into something like the official ideology of a reformed French monarchy. His first published work, a Philosophical Essay on Civil Government, appeared in 1721. It was followed in 1723 by Fénelon's authorized biography, and, in 1727 (in both English and French), by one of the early eighteenth century's most wide-ranging discussions of moral and political reform, The Travels of Cyrus, a work modelled explicitly on Fénelon's own, even more successful, Adventures of Young Telemachus, whose full, posthumous version, had been edited by Ramsay himself.

Arbitration in early-modern France (16th-18th cent.): A difficult position between the King-legislator's 'voluntarist' policy and a reactionary Judiciary

AbstractThe early-modern French monarchy incorporated arbitration within its system of judicial rationalisation. Faced with the constraints of the Ordinance on the Reform of Justice Administration, the sovereign regional courts (Parlements) multiplied the formal requirements imposed on arbitration proceedings so as to better control it. As a result, its field of application was reduced. In spite of the monarchy's efforts to rehabilitate arbitration, it was largely abandoned by litigants, who preferred to resort to settlement by agreement, which they perceived as a both less restricting and more effective substitute for ending their disputes.

La royauté des premiers Capétiens : « Un mélange de misère et de grandeur » ?

The monarchy of the early Capetians is commonly regarded as weak. Reduced to the royal domain, their power was often less than that of princes. But this gloomy picture is being revised by French medievalists. Re-evaluation seems all the more justified if the Capetian monarchy is compared to that of the Eastern Frankish kingdom, the future Germany. The Ottonians were also limited to central areas and saw themselves confronted by powerful princes, such as the Dukes of Bavaria and Swabia. It was only Henri II who, after the year 1,000, achieved royal authority over the whole regnum. The Salians followed his example. But this policy was opposed by the nobility. The German monarchy lost its power of integration and went into crisis during the last years of Henri III. On the other hand, the policy of the early Capetians, who did not break the princes’ power, was promising. Against this background, the idea of a pitiful French monarchy is no longer as well-founded.

Black like us

When, in 1724, the French monarchy promulgated its Code Noir for the parcel of the empire that was called Louisiana, the first article of the rules applying to “the state and condition of the slaves” referred not to slaves. Rather, it decrees that: “all Jews who may have established their religion there” should expect to be expelled within three months of the decree. 1 Though the Jews were never in fact evicted, this article signaled the start of a pattern. The fate of Jews and blacks in the New World was entwined, and perhaps the French crown could not be blamed for getting these two minorities confused. It could even be credited for being prescient. For these two groups have been so entangled that some twentieth-century Jews in the United States would imagine themselves black, and would blur the lines of race and ethnicity that bigotry had hoped to keep distinct. Two major structural differences have nevertheless divided blacks and Jews throughout the history of the United States. White racism has been far more pervasive and vicious than antisemitism has been. The hostility to African-Americans has been integral to the national experience in a way that makes bigotry against Jewish Americans seem inconsequential. Moreover, blacks have been economically disadvantaged in ways that Jews never were. Both of these signs of asymmetry go a long way toward vindicating the assertion of Nathan Zuckerman, in Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, that the two minorities have been “the most unalike of America’s historic undesirables.” 2 The advantages accruing to Jewish immigrants and their progeny have rightly been underscored in recent scholarship, which has noted the contrast with those who were cursed by confinement on the wrong side of the color line. Perhaps the most influential such study has been the historian Michael Rogin’s Blackface, White Noise (1996). In the first third of the twentieth century, the author argued, black culture was frequently plundered, imitated, and distorted—and Jews seemed to be in the forefront of those who inherited the The author wishes to thank Cheryl Lynn Greenberg for an astute critique of this essay, and Alan Cecil Petigny for organizing a panel at the 2007 conference of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, at which a brief version of this paper was presented.

Une histoire de l'identite: France, 1715-1815.

Vincent Denis has produced an engaging and highly topical history of identification in early modern France. After all, the issue of passports, visas and the sans-papiers remains at the centre of an ongoing and highly controversial debate in the European Union about measures to reduce Europe's swelling number of illegal immigrants. In a sense, Denis has laid out the historical background to the discussion by tracing the growth of personal identification systems from the death of Louis XIV to the fall of Napoleon. It turns out that France has been dealing with the problem of sans-papiers for around 300 years, though the ‘foreign’ population under surveillance has changed considerably. The story that Denis tells is that French monarchy, the First Republic and the First Empire all became increasingly concerned with identifying and tracking individuals on French soil. Focusing on archives in Besançon, Bordeaux, Clermont-Ferrand and Paris, Denis uncovers an abundance of material on the multiplicity of forms of identification used in the eighteenth century: passports, merchant papers, identification cards, military cards, certificats de vie et moeurs and aveux for the poor, begging certificates, livrets for journeyman artisans, billets de santé for persons of sound health who survived pandemics, cartes civiques, cartes de sûreté and certificats de civisme during the Revolution and civic registry books for travellers or individuals who relocated to new cities. Taken as a whole, Denis argues, these multiple forms of identification reveal a new found, secular concern for individuating members of society and monitoring their travels and whereabouts. Denis terms this process ‘savoir de l’Etat’. This impulse to track and identify even extended to the morgue, where Denis shows that police investigators employed new tactics to identify anonymous corpses. He also argues that the numbering of houses in Paris from the 1760s onward (i.e. addresses) created another level of identification by associating individuals with particular buildings.