According to Alexis de Tocqueville’s influential work on the Old Regime and the French Revolution, royal centralisation had so weakened the feudal power of the nobles that their remaining privileges became glaringly intolerable to commoners. This book challenges the theory by showing that when Louis XVI convened assemblies of landowners in the late 1770s and 1780s to discuss policies needed to resolve the budgetary crisis, he faced widespread opposition from lords and office holders. These elites regarded the assemblies as a challenge to their hereditary power over commoners. The king’s government comprised seigneurial jurisdictions and venal offices. Lordships and offices upheld inequality on behalf of the nobility and bred the discontent motivating the people to make the French Revolution.

Following a trail of bodies from world to world, Anti-Corruption Commission investigator Ellie Reece continues to try and track down the mysterious, nameless Faceless Men. Ellie’s investigation leads her to tracking down the survivors of the fallen Dé Oesté family from Iredi to the Ghio Biworld—an immense stellar-scale megastructure that is home to billions of people descended from gengineered human ancestors. The continuing attacks from the Faceless Men and their One Fang Skull Gang have opened rifts within the largest criminal organizations. Opportunistic subordinates have taken to challenging the rightful successors, defying traditions and unwritten laws that had ensured stability for decades. The power plays begin, and cracks appear. The Faceless Men seize upon the divisions. Fallen gangsters scheme with one another as they try to hunt down one of the most dangerous assassins of the One Fang Skull Gang. They are in turn hunted. Drawn into the underworld conflict, Ellie uncovers the suspected financial backer of the One Fang Skull Gang. Thinking this alleged backer might know the identities of the gang’s dual leaders, she heads for the world of Beremacia at the edge of the starless Scorpii Void. On Beremacia, the investigation reveals more interested parties who have become involved and now have complicated matters. Chased across Beremacia and diverted by those who have an ulterior interest in the outcome of the underworld war, Ellie is eventually led to Voidline Station deep inside the empty Scorpii Void. Here she is forced to contend with information brokers, who all have their own agendas. Inevitably, the fractured leaders of the underworld finally decide to settle their disputes permanently.

From virtue to venality examines the problem of corruption in British urban society and politics between 1930 and 1995. It is not a conventional study of the politics of local government since it seeks to place corruption in urban societies in a wider cultural context. The accounts of corruption in Glasgow – a British Chicago – as well as the major corruption scandals of John Poulson and T. Dan Smith show how Labour-controlled towns and cities were especially vulnerable to corrupt dealings. By contrast the case of Dame Shirley Porter in the City of Westminster in the late 1980s reveals that Conservative-controlled councils were also vulnerable since in London the stakes of the political struggle were especially intense. This book will be of special interest to students of history and politics and those who are concerned about the growth of corruption in British political culture.

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 eighteenthcentury 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 theking, 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 Revolutionbrought 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 threecenturies.

Including Professor salmon's pioneering and authoritative analyses as well as particular studies of french revolts.