Since the 1980s the traditional picture of the reign of Louis XIV as the embodiment of early modern “absolutism” has been transformed. In place of centralized authority triumphing over localism and aristocratic privilege, we are offered the picture of a conservative regime upholding established provincial and corporate elites and buying acquiescence through compromise and collaboration. Yet two questions linger in what seems a wholesale renversement of historical assumptions about the Sun King's government: key studies that have contributed to this revisionism have been based on analysis of the pays d'états, those powerful, outlying provinces whose quasi-autonomy and privileges had usually been respected by the French crown; the arguments for collaboration work well in the first decades of the reign, but from the later 1680s Louis XIV's government, driven by warfare on an unprecedented scale, embarked on a series of fiscal policies that attacked elite privilege and autonomy. Darryl Dee's new book addresses both these questions. Franche-Comté, conquered by French arms in 1674, was far removed from the privileged status of a pays d'état such as Languedoc. The process of integrating Franche-Comté and its elites into the monarchy required much more deliberate policy initiatives from the center, and these were imposed from the 1670s through to the end of the reign. Dee demonstrates that in this context, for a territory under military occupation and with no presumptions that its privileges were non-negotiable, Louis's government had teeth and was not afraid to show them to local elites who misinterpreted concessions for weakness. The magistrates of Besançon, hitherto elected by popular suffrage, believed that they could bargain with their new ruler for the preservation of municipal autonomy. In 1676 that body was suppressed without formality, and a new civic government established on the pattern of other lesser cities in Franche-Comté, with limited powers and a narrowly oligarchic membership. The king's council, through the intendant, decided that a body whose members were accountable to the citizens would never prove an effective agent of royal government, while as an additional precaution the range of the activities of the remodeled magistracy was reduced and shared with a bailliage court. Yet at the same time, Besançon, stripped of its privileges, was elevated to the status of provincial capital, hitherto held by Dôle, a change marked by the transfer of the supreme law court, the parlement, to Besançon. These concessions, indicative of a stick and carrot approach by royal government that Dee delineates throughout very effectively, came at a price: Besançon was to pay 300,000 livres over three years in return for its parlement. This was the start of what was to be a progressive, though uneven, escalation in the fiscal demands placed on the territory.