A bold new study of politics and power in 17th-century France, this book argues that the French Crown extended its control over the provinces and laid the foundations for a centralized state by removing patronage power from the provincial governors and putting it instead in the hands of newly-created provincial power brokers--regional notables who cooperated with the Paris ministers in exchange for their patronage.

A bold new study of politics and power in 17th-century France, this book argues that the French Crown centralized its power nationally by changing the way it delegated its royal patronage in the provinces. During this period, the royal government of Paris gradually extended its sphere of control by taking power away from the powerful and potentially disloyal provincial governors and nobility and instead putting it in the hands of provincial power brokers--regional notables who cooperated with the Paris ministers in exchange for their patronage. The new alliances between the Crown's ministers and loyal provincial elites functioned as political machines on behalf of the Crown, leading to smoother regional-national cooperation and foreshadowing the bureaucratic state that was to follow.

A unique study in the culture of seventeenth-century French science, Patronage and Royal Science in Seventeenth-Century France focuses on the brief revolutionary period (1650–1680) that launched Europe's New Age of Academies. David S. Lux provides a lively account of one of the most intriguing scientific institutions in Louis XIV's France, the Academie de Physique de Caen, organized in 1662. Lux investigates why this promising institution with a talented membership and sympathetic private patrons foundered after it was provided royal support, finally to close its doors in 1672. Drawing upon hitherto unexploited archival materials, the author discovers the circumstances of one institution's failure, and develops a provocative new interpretation of the shift from privately funded to state-funded science in France during the second half of the seventeenth century. Lux provides a rare view of the everyday concerns of seventeenth-century science as it was practiced by those other than the immortals of the Scientific Revolution. Patronage and Royal Science in Seventeenth-Century France will interest sociologists of science and philosophers of science as well as historians, particularly those who work on early modern science and scientific institutions and French cultural history.

The seventeenth century witnessed profound reforms in the way French cities administered poor relief and charitable health care. New hospitals were built to confine the able bodied and existing hospitals sheltering the sick poor contracted new medical staff and shifted their focus towards offering more medical services. Whilst these moves have often been regarded as a coherent state led policy, recent scholarship has begun to question this assumption, and pick-up on more localised concerns, and resistance to centrally imposed policies. This book engages with these concerns, to investigate the links between charitable health care, poor relief, religion, national politics and urban social order in seventeenth-century France. In so doing it revises our understanding of the roles played in these issues by the crown and social elites, arguing that central government's social policy was conservative and largely reactive to pressure from local elites. It suggests that Louis XIV's policy regarding the reform of poor relief and the creation of General Hospitals in each town and city, as enshrined in the edict of 1662, was largely driven by the religious concerns of the kingdom's devout and the financial fears of the Parisian elites that their city hospitals were overburdened. Only after the Sun King's reign did central government begin to take a proactive role in administering poor relief and health care, utilizing urban charitable institutions to further its own political goals. By reintegrating the social aspirations of urban elites into the history of French poor relief, this book shows how the key role they played in the reform of hospitals, inspired by a mix of religious, economic and social motivations. It concludes that the state could be a reluctant participant in reform, until pressured into action by assisting elite groups pursuing their own goals.

This thematically organised text provides a compelling introduction and guide to the key problems and issues of this highly controversial century. Offering a genuinely comparative history, Thomas Munck adeptly balances Eastern and Southern Europe, Scandinavia, and the Ottoman Empire against the better-known history of France, the British Isles and Spain. Seventeenth-Century Europe - gives full prominence to the political context of the period, arguing that the Thirty Years War is vital to understanding the social and political developments of the early modern period - provides detailed coverage of the debates surrounding the 'general crisis', absolutism and the growth of the state, and the implications these had for townspeople, the peasantry and the poor - examines changes in economic orientation within Europe, as well as continuity and change in mental and cultural traditions at different social levels. Now fully revised, this second edition of a well-established and approachable synthesis features important new material on the Ottomans, Christian-Moslem contacts and on the role of women. The text has also been thoroughly updated to take account of recent research. This is a fully-revised edition of a well-established synthesis of the period from the Thirty Years War to the consolidation of absolute monarchy and the landowning society of the ancien régime. Thematically organised, the book covers all of Europe, from Britain and Scandinavia to Spain and Eastern Europe. Important new material has been added on the Ottomans, on Christian-Moslem contacts and on the role of women, and the text has been thoroughly updated to take account of recent research.

Monarchy, Aristocracy and the State in Europe 1300 - 1800 is an important survey of the relationship between monarchy and state in early modern European history. Spanning five centuries and covering England, France, Spain, Germany and Austria, this book considers the key themes in the formation of the modern state in Europe. The relationship of the nobility with the state is the key to understanding the development of modern government in Europe. In order to understand the way modern states were formed, this book focusses on the implications of the incessant and costly wars which European governments waged against each other, which indeed propelled the modern state into being. Monarchy, Aristocracy and the State in Europe 1300-1800 takes a fascinating thematic approach, providing a useful survey of the position and role of the nobility in the government of states in early modern Europe.

Following the stories of families who built their lives and fortunes across the Atlantic Ocean, Intimate Bonds explores how households anchored the French empire and shaped the meanings of race, slavery, and gender in the early modern period. As race-based slavery became entrenched in French laws, all household members in the French Atlantic world —regardless of their status, gender, or race—negotiated increasingly stratified legal understandings of race and gender. Through her focus on household relationships, Jennifer L. Palmer reveals how intimacy not only led to the seemingly immutable hierarchies of the plantation system but also caused these hierarchies to collapse even before the age of Atlantic revolutions. Placing families at the center of the French Atlantic world, Palmer uses the concept of intimacy to illustrate how race, gender, and the law intersected to form a new worldview. Through analysis of personal, mercantile, and legal relationships, Intimate Bonds demonstrates that even in an era of intensifying racial stratification, slave owners and slaves, whites and people of color, men and women all adapted creatively to growing barriers, thus challenging the emerging paradigm of the nuclear family. This engagingly written history reveals that personal choices and family strategies shaped larger cultural and legal shifts in the meanings of race, slavery, family, patriarchy, and colonialism itself.