A Social and Cultural History of Early Modern France, and: Family, Gender, and Law in Early Modern France (review)

At first glance the titles of these two books might suggest a significant overlap in coverage. Not only was the family the basic social unit in early modern society, but some of the best social and cultural history of early modern France over the last two or three decades has been written on gender, women, and the family. In fact, there is very little overlap, not because the more general book of Beik has little to say about gender, women, and the family, but because of the two very different approaches of the authors in question. Indeed, the two books complement each other very nicely, as the book by Beik provides a very sound foundation as well as historical context for understanding the significance of the more narrowly focused essays in the volume edited by Desan and Merrick.

Bill Beik's volume is the kind of book that every doctoral student who ever took a comprehensive exam on early modern France wishes they had. As the author states in the introduction, the purpose of the book is "to explain how the social system operated in the period of royal rule" ca. 1400 to 1789 (xiv). The culture in the title is meant in the anthropological sense of behaviors, beliefs, and social practices. Thus, the book is essentially a primer in how the social system of the Old Regime worked from within and what kinds of meanings contemporaries constructed from the inner workings of this society. As such, Beik tends to view early modern society as a system, shaped, though not determined, by cultural habits, power relationships, economic forces, etc. Beik makes it clear from the outset that the book does not explicitly examine the institutions of the state or politics in early modern France. There are plenty of other books that do that: Gaston Zeller, Roger Doucet, Roland Mousnier, etc. He begins by analyzing the rural countryside and the seigneurial system that governed it, and here he stresses two of the most significant changes of the period in the way seigneurial power evolved. First, seigneurs abandoned seignuerial claims that were either not worth collecting or otherwise brought in little revenue and exchanged them for those that were potentially more valuable. "In the course of three centuries," Beik notes, "the seigneurie had evolved from a personally ruled mini-state to an investment portfolio." (40) A good example is the vineyards of Bordeaux, where by 1789 most of the larger estates had been purchased by parlementaire families and other urban elites, investments that created the great châteaux that still dominate this wine region today. The second major change in the seigneurie in the period was the increasing intervention of the crown, both to regulate and eliminate seigneurial abuses, as well as to maintain standards of justice.

What didn't change, however, was the dependence peasants still had on their seigneurs. Moreover, landed estates, as they had always done, still remained the foundation of fortune and power for French elites. In short, the nobility continued to dominate French society right up to the Revolution. But the nature of that domination, Beik notes, did change dramatically from the fifteenth to the late eighteenth century. Nobles transformed themselves from an elite that dominated agricultural production and military warfare to an elite that functioned as landlords, who relied more on rent collection than the forced labor of serfdom, and who succeeded more from marriage negotiations with newly enriched elite families and collaboration with the royal administration than from the prowess of their martial skills.

Beik then shifts his focus to urban life in the period, and this leads to an analysis of, among other things, new nobles, venality of office, and the church...