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.

The dual themes of this volume are the characteristics of patronage relationships and their political uses in early modern France. The first essays provide an overview of the scholarly literature and suggest that the obligatory reciprocity of the patron-client exchange was a defining characteristic. The third and fourth essays compare patronage relationships with kinship and friendship, while the following two focus on the patronage role of noblewomen. Professor Kettering then looks at the role of brokerage in state formation in early modern France, comparing this with other early modern societies. In the final section she explores the role of patronage in the religious wars of the late 16th century and in the civil war of the Fronde a half century later, and the ways in which it was affected by the changing lifestyles of the great nobles during the late 17th century.

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.

Patrons of the Old Faith is the first full-length study on the Catholic nobility in the Dutch Republic. Based on a detailed prosopographical analysis and through the examination of their marriage strategies, interaction with Protestants, religiosity and contributions to the Holland Mission, Jaap Geraerts shows how the behaviour of the Catholic nobility was highly distinctive and differed from their co-religionists and Protestant peers as it was influenced by a specific set of noble and Catholic values. Due to the synthesis of their noble and confessional identities, the Dutch Catholic nobility in Utrecht and Guelders acted as patrons of their faith and were instrumental for the survival of Catholicism in the Dutch Republic.