Between Crown and Community: Politics and Civic Culture in Sixteenth-Century Poitiers (review)

This thoroughly-researched book is rooted both in two generations of studies on French urban history and in Hilary Bernstein's mastery of the archives and sources for the history of Poitiers. Her evidence points "to the variability of French political realities and elasticity of political definitions" (67). She demonstrates the multiplicity of forms and structures by which France was governed and within which Poitiers "constituted an extreme case of one model of civic government developing during the sixteenth century" (70). Important aspects of the model consist in a self-image among the town's elites of three centuries of continuous loyalty to the Valois kings.

Three "guiding ideas or arguments" shape the book: first, the point-of-view of municipal government as a "unique sphere of activity" (12); second, the degree to which institutional social culture was in tandem or tension with civic polity as officially conducted by a narrow urban elite; third, the monarchy's role in preserving or weakening the stability of local public life. Case studies and municipal archives guide Bernstein to conclusions that sometimes strengthen, but more frequently bring into question, generalizations about French towns in the long sixteenth century. Part 1 explores the relative continuity among the practices and assumptions that united the population of the city and enabled the hotel de ville to govern. Part 2 looks at how the structures of local government weathered the crises of the Wars of Religion.

This study of Poitiers, a town of between 15,000 and 20,000, focuses on the self-perpetuating "Mois et Cents," the corps de ville that consisted of a hundred men who met monthly and annually elected from its membership twenty-four échevins and a mayor. The majority of its members came from the royal sénéchaussée court, the university, and, after 1552, the presidal court. Few mercantile families belonged, and no one from the craft guilds. The "Mois et Cents" and its hotel de ville represented a community conceived of as one mystical body whose leaders are seen to make use of the Roman-canonical theory of "Quod omnes tanget ab omnibus tractari et approbari debet" to enable lesser corporations and the twenty-seven parishes within the town to offer counsel. Many in the university would know "Quod omnes tanget" could serve to limit claims against property and privileges, as they would also know that arguments from "necessity" and for the common good or "chose publique" could triumph over it. Whether in debates among the elite or objections brought by guildsmen or parishes, the town shared a political language that emphasized unity with the king, order in the city, and consensus in governing. As Bernstein writes of the guilds, "[t]o obtain what they wanted, the craftsmen needed to frame their desires in ways that would meet with municipal approval" (50). Bernstein offers specific mini-studies on the local working of politics: on political language and decision making, on the politicsof opening the Clain River to navigation, and on meeting the threat posed to Poitiers's institutions by Henry II's 1547 edict forbidding municipal offices to royal office holders. The greatest threat to traditional practices came with the Wars of Religion and the topic of Bernstein's mini-studies in part 2.

The elite subscribed to a historical narrative of the benefits derived from obedience and royal favor. It began with the Virgin's intervention to save the city's keys from the English in 1200, but it continued to chronicle the special exchanges between the city and the Valois monarchy. Bernstein reviews other littleused alternative narratives that were available — including a Renaissance one highlighting the Gallo-Roman past and the town's connections with Hercules or Clovis. In the failure of the Huguenot siege of 1569, Bernstein finds, "a notable event in the town's history . . . [where] religious belief...