Peasant uprisings in seventeenth-century France, Russia and China; (Great revolutions series)

Mousnier, Roland

Allen And Unwin

Political and administrative institutions cannot be understood unless one knows who is operating them and for whose benefit they function. In the first volume of this history, Mousnier analyzes such institutions in light of the prevailing social, economic, and ideological structures and shows how they shaped life in 17th- and 18th-century France. He traces the changing role of monarchical government, showing how it emerged over two centuries and why it failed. In a society divided by hierarchical social groups, conflicts among lineages, communities, and districts became inevitable. Aristocratic disdain, ancestral attachment to privileges, and autonomous powers looked upon as rights, made civil unrest, dislocation, and anarchy endemic. Mousnier examines this contention between classes as they faced each other across the institutional barriers of education, religion, economic resources, technology, means of defense and communication, and territorial and family ties. He shows why a monarchical state was necessary to preserve order within this fragmented society. Though it was intent on ensuring the survival of French society and the public good, the Absolute Monarchy was unable to maintain security, equilibrium, and cooperation among rival social groups. Discussing the feeble technology at its disposal and its weak means of governing, Mousnier points to the causes that brought the state to the limits of its resources. His comprehensive analysis will greatly interest students of the ancien régime and comparativists in political science and sociology as well.

The Institutions of France Under the Absolute Monarchy, 1598-1789: Society and the State (Volume 1)

History

Europe

University of Chicago Press

Mousnier continues his massive and masterly history of France's transition from the Old Regime to the New. Mousnier's subject is the organization of the state, from the Council at the summit to the most humble clerks, guards, and attendants. He traces the gradual transformation of France from a judiciary state to a financial and executive bureaucracy, from a state and society based on hereditary statuses to one based on talents, personal capacities, and achievements, from the might of the sword to the power of the pen.

The Institutions of France Under the Absolute Monarchy, 1598-1789: The Organs of State and Society (Volume 2)

Americas

The assassination of Henry IV;: The tyrannicide problem and the consolidation of the French absolute monarchy in the early seventeenth century

Business & Money

Management & Leadership

Faber and Faber

The Assassination of Henry IV: The Tyrannicide Problem and the Consolidation of the French Absolute Monarchy in the Early Seventeenth Century

Charles Scribner`s Sons

Peasant Uprisings in Seventeenth-Century France, Russia and China (Routledge Library Editions: Political Protest)

Religion & Spirituality

Routledge

This book, first published in 1971, is a close analysis of some of the typical peasant uprisings of the seventeenth century. The goal of the movements in France and China was a return to an older and more traditional society, rather than a profound transformation of the social structure. In Russia, however, the peasants attempted to overturn the rigid order of a two-class structure and replace it with a more democratic society.

Les institutions de la France sous la monarchie absolue: 1598-1789 (Histoire des institutions) (French Edition)

Reference

Foreign Language Study & Reference

Presses universitaires de France

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