The first of two volumes centred around the two great courts of eighteenth-century Paris.

This book is the first of two volumes centered around the two great courts of Paris, the Châtelet and Parlement, and their criminal defendants in the eighteenth century. Richard Andrews refutes the "black legend" of Revolutionary propaganda and its modern historical successors, which hold that the Old Regime courts were cruel and arbitrary. The author places the courts of Old Regime Paris in the context of French society and the state, and examines the practices and doctrines of punishment, along with the jurisprudence of moral and criminal behavior. By reconstructing the general system of royal criminal justice, Andrews explores the political system connected to it: the formation, authority and ethos of the magistracy and its relation to the monarchy, the Church, the aristocracy, the bourgeois and the plebians.

The Royal Financial Administration and the Prosecution of Crime in France, 1670–1789 explores the French monarchy’s role in financing criminal prosecutions in the royal courts of the realm—the payment of criminal frais de justice in the vocabulary of the ancien régime—between 1670 and 1789 (that is, from the codification of criminal judicial procedure in the early period of Louis XIV’s personal rule to the outbreak of the French Revolution). The subject brings together three areas of scholarly inquiry—criminal justice, royal administration, and the management of the crown’s finances. A central goal of the study is to provide factual information and interpretive insights on each of these topics and to explain the relationship of each to the others over a long time period. The book contributes to existing scholarship in four ways. First, although each of the major dimensions of the inquiry—the operation of the criminal justice system, the conduct of the royal administration, and the management of the monarchy’s finances—has a large and increasingly sophisticated historical literature, this is the first study to combine them in a systematic way. Second, the long time period covered in the book not only enables the historian to distinguish gradual from rapid change, but it also allows the reader to view how the system functioned in different historical contexts. Third, the study is based on archival sources throughout France. This comprehensive approach permits the identification of elements of a common experience without sacrificing attention to important aspects of regional diversity. Finally, with respect to the sources themselves, the range is broad, encompassing regulatory acts and decisions of the king’s councils; administrative correspondence at the central, regional, and in some cases local levels; financial accounts and related papers; and court records from the major appellate courts and from several lower courts as well. An appendix of 33 tables lists figures of annual expenditure and other pertinent financial operations for each of the major financial districts of the kingdom.

For some historians and biographers, Maximilien Robespierre (1758-94) was a great revolutionary martyr who succeeded in leading the French Republic to safety in the face of overwhelming military odds. For many others, he was the first modern dictator, a fanatic who instigated the murderous Reign of Terror in 1793-94. This masterful biography combines new research into Robespierre's dramatic life with a deep understanding of society and the politics of the French Revolution to arrive at a fresh understanding of the man, his passions, and his tragic shortcomings. Peter McPhee gives special attention to Robespierre's formative years and the development of an iron will in a frail boy conceived outside wedlock and on the margins of polite provincial society. Exploring how these experiences formed the young lawyer who arrived in Versailles in 1789, the author discovers not the cold, obsessive Robespierre of legend, but a man of passion with close but platonic friendships with women. Soon immersed in revolutionary conflict, he suffered increasingly lengthy periods of nervous collapse correlating with moments of political crisis, yet Robespierre was tragically unable to step away from the crushing burdens of leadership. Did his ruthless, uncompromising exercise of power reflect a descent into madness in his final year of life? McPhee reevaluates the ideology and reality of "the Terror," what Robespierre intended, and whether it represented an abandonment or a reversal of his early liberalism and sense of justice.

"The case became a cause celebre across France, an obsession among everyone from the peasantry to the courts, from the Comedie-Francaise to Louis XIV himself. It was finally left to a brilliant young jurist, Henri-Francois d'Aguesseau, to separate fact from fiction and set France on a path to a new and enlightened view of justice."--BOOK JACKET.

Recent revisionist history has questioned the degree of social change attributable to the French Revolution. In Balancing the Scales of Justice, Anthony Crubaugh tests this claim by examining the effects of revolutionary changes in local justice on the inhabitants of one region in rural France. Crubaugh illuminates two poorly understood institutions in eighteenth-century France: seigneurial justice and the revolutionary justice of the peace. He finds that justice was typically slow and expensive in the lords&’ courts, thus making it difficult for rural inhabitants to benefit from official channels of justice. By contrast, revolutionary reforms gave people the opportunity to submit quarrels to trusted and elected justices of the peace who adjudicated disputes quickly and inexpensively. By juxtaposing seigneurial justice in the ancien r&égime with the institution of the justice of the peace after 1789, Crubaugh highlights how revolutionary changes in the system of dispute resolution profoundly affected members of rural French society and their relations with the French state. Over time rural dwellers came to accept the primacy of the state in resolving disputes, and the state thereby partially achieved its long-standing goal of penetrating rural areas.

The French Revolution brought momentous political, social, and cultural change. Life in Revolutionary France asks how these changes affected everyday lives, in urban and rural areas, and on an international scale. An international cast of distinguished academics and emerging scholars present new research on how people experienced and survived the revolutionary decade, with a particular focus on individual and collective agency as discovered through the archival record, material culture, and the history of emotions. It combines innovative work with student-friendly essays to offer fresh perspectives on topics such as: * Political identities and activism * Gender, race, and sexuality * Transatlantic responses to war and revolution * Local and workplace surveillance and transparency * Prison communities and culture * Food, health, and radical medicine * Revolutionary childhoods With an easy-to-navigate, three-part structure, illustrations and primary source excerpts, Life in Revolutionary France is the essential text for approaching the experiences of those who lived through one of the most turbulent times in world history.