Law, City, and King: Legal Culture, Municipal Politics, and State Formation in Early Modern Dijon (review)

Michael Breen’s successful synthesis of manuscript and printed sources with a thoughtful understanding of recent work in seventeenth-century French urban history has yielded the first really successful political-culture study known to this reviewer. The institutional, social, and political mentalities, the iconography, and political thought are each framed to create a unified perspective on the complexities of the civic life of Dijonnais barristers (avocats) in the Ancien Régime.

This civic life was built not only upon a sense of self, honor, and dignity, but also upon the primary social relations beyond the immediate family. It meant conforming to an ideal of Ciceronian service to one’s fellow Dijonnais through voting for city officials, commanding the militia, and holding office in the municipal government. All but a few Dijonnais avocats ended up either without offices or with largely honorific ones as the important decisions regarding nominations to offices and public works, health, and taxes were made in Versailles and executed by the intendant. This shift to administrative monarchy occurred along with an impulse for information-gathering and respect for statistics as never before practiced by city officials. While not a complete shift from an oral to a written culture, physical distance reinforced the latter.

Breen does not engage Robert Descimon’s contention that the Catholic League breathed in Paris new life into urban political institutions. The League was certainly strong in Dijon; but instead of assessing its influence, Breen presents a secular civic consciousness that not only sustains the mayoralty but also surmounts winemakers’ disorderliness and brawling. Threats from below seem to have been more easily contained than challenges to the city’s privileges from the local Parlement, the Bailliage court, and, later, the intendant. The incredibly litigious politics of Dijon gradually quieted down as avocats lost seats in the city government, and governors and intendants assumed greater powers.

The corporations to which the avocats belonged were more social than professional, reflecting their identity. These corporations lacked the power to fine or exclude a member for malfeasance. While some avocats were better off than others, social hierarchies remained quite vague. The avocats lost ground across the century, thus confirming the correlation between wealth and power found in other groups.

All the powers in Dijon, it seems, deferred to the governor, almost always a Condé, and his representatives. After 1660 the governor’s intervention to handpick electoral candidates increased. There seems to have been no contestation between the more administrative powers of the intendant, and the old, direct powers of a prince de Condé. Breen’s study confirms Theodore Rabb’s astute observations about the origins of social and political stability.

The triumphal arches with their classical sculptures and Latin inscriptions put up to welcome a governor are interpreted as expressing the dignity and pride of the ville des dieux. Breen is attentive to every symbol-laden detail, as well as to the Dijonnais’ eagerness to establish the antiquity and greatness of the city. The Fronde ruffled feathers when the Grand Condé ceased supporting Mazarin and Anne’s policies and became an “over-mighty subject” who was arrested. The duc d’Épernon’s arrival as governor permits Breen to discern the subtle mixture of rank and ties of fidelity to the Condés. How aware were the Dijonnais of the more general conflict? Nothing really seems to have happened at the level of city government, beyond a pause in the Dijonnais’ passion for lawsuits.

In the final two chapters, Breen elucidates the Dijonnais’ fundamental attitudes toward the political. He is profoundly right in pointing out how the principles of absolutist government would be expressed right along with a discourse about ancient privileges. Jurists carefully worked through customs; yet belief in their authority remained grounded on antiquity rather than on reasonableness. The intendants’ trumped-up claims to tax...