Details

Subject(s)

• Courts—France—Normandy—History [Browse]
• Justice, Administration of—France—History [Browse]
• Normandy (France)—Politics and government [Browse]

Series

• Changing perspectives on early modern Europe. [More in this series]
• Changing perspectives on early modern Europe, 1542-3905 [More in this series]

Summary note

In this richly detailed study of Normandy in the seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries, Zoë Schneider vividly brings to life the teeming world of the local courts, with their magistrates and jailers, townspeople and peasants. Together they contested that vital border where the private world of families and property collided with the public commonwealth. Schneider chronicles the transformation of local governance after the mid-seventeenth century, as judges and their courts became the face of public order in the countryside, opening a new chapter in the debate over absolutism, sovereignty, and the nature of the state in early modern France. Hidden deep in the countryside of France lay early modern Europe's largest bureaucracy: twenty- to thirty-thousand royal bailiwick and seigneurial courts that served more than eighty-five percent of the king's subjects. The crown courts and lords' courts were far more than arenas of litigation, in the modern sense. They had become the nexus of local governance by the middle of the seventeenth century, a rich breeding ground for men who controlled the villages, towns, and bailiwicks of France. Yet even as the centralizing state was reaching its zenith under Louis XIV, the king's largest permanent bureaucracy became increasingly alienated and cut adrift from the crown, many decades before the French Revolution. Zoë A. Schneider has taught at Georgetown University and with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

Notes

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 08 Oct 2015).

Bibliographic references

Includes bibliographical references (p. 285-314) and index.

Language note

English

Contents

• Rex and lex : the problem of legislative sovereignty
• Howling with the wolves
• Officers and gentlemen
• Law and lawyers in the "Empire of Custom"
• The red robe and the Black : common courts and the state
• Villagers and townspeople
• Uncivil acts
• Unruly governors : functions and dysfunctions of the common courts
• Glossary of legal terms.

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ISBN

• 1-283-01132-8
• 9786613011329
• 1-58046-744-X

OCLC

703156102

Doi

• 10.1515/9781580467445

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