Pauvreté, Culture et Ordre Social: Recueil d'articles (review)

Jean-Pierre Gutton is known to scholars of French history primarily on account of his doctoral thesis, La société et les pauvres. L'exemple de la généralité de Lyon (1534-1789). Setting his story within a broad panorama of French responses to poverty over two and a half centuries, he offered a vivid picture of the social dimension of poverty in Lyon and its surroundings drawn from institutional and judicial records. His account provided a corrective to Michel Foucault's influential interpretation of "the Great Confinement," demonstrating that the rationale and practice of confinement had sixteenth-century origins, and that it stirred up a vigorous reaction and critique. In fact, he treated a wide range of topics in over a dozen other books, including studies of domestic servants and hospital administrators, the history of adoption and of aging, and a Guide du chercheur en histoire de la protection sociale (fin du moyen age-1789).

This collection of articles does justice to the range and virtuosity of Gutton's contributions to historians' understanding of the Old Regime, ranging over religious, social, and cultural history and the often paradoxical twists and turns of the history of political and legal institutions. Selecting some thirty articles, Gutton's students represent this breadth of interest well, supplementing their selection with an exhaustive nine-page bibliography. They have divided the collection according to four themes: Poverty and Assistance, Church and Society, Social Structures and Administration, and Cultures. The articles reflect the four decades of Gutton's research and teaching in Lyon, often integrating the work of students he has mentored in his seminar. He fully acknowledges their contributions, adding a further level of interpretation and synthesis to their analyses of records culled from the abundance of local archives and libraries. Most of the articles deal with some aspect of the institutions and episodes that can be documented in the archives of Lyon and its broader region, but, as Frédéric Meyer notes in his informative introduction to the volume, these sources provide "a regional anchorage for a set of historical problems that are always national and European."

The balance between the local and the general varies. In some articles, like the widely cited article on ideas about the poor at the dawn of the seventeenth century, or the article published in the Bulletin de la Société française d'histoire des hôpitaux, "La mise en place du personnel soignant dans les hôpitaux français (XVII-XVIIIe siècles)," Gutton addresses broad secular trends while drawing on local sources. In others, as in the article "Un project de parlement à Lyon en 1732," or "la désunion des couples en Lyonnais et Beaujolais au XVIIe siècle," the challenge of documenting local particularity prevails. Even here, Gutton has his eye on local studies elsewhere and on broad questions of French and European history.

Gutton's lesser-known contributions to institutional and political history are well represented here. In one article he details the types of representation the city council of Lyon employed to defend its interests at Court, noting elusive details such as the role of the Chaunu family and its dual representation of the interests of the city and those of the governor's family. In another, he unearths evidence of the survival of assemblies and syndics well into the seventeenth century, hardly to be expected in a pays d'élection. In yet another, he traces the degree of administrative continuity between the offices of the royal intendants of the Old Regime and those of the departmental prefects that succeeded them.

Gutton's articles on poverty and assistance especially reward a close reading, as they reflect his keen sense of how institutional and social history overlap with religious history and a broader history of mentalités. A fine example is his article "L...