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Conclusion Running from the inception of regular royal taxation in the sixteenth century to the French Revolution and beyond, the Procès des Tailles was a critical piece in the political puzzle of early modern Provence. To begin with, it was responsible for bringing into existence and defining the two groups, the corps de la noblesse and the corps of the province, whose struggle over noble tax exemption dominated Provençal politics until 1789. Although usually confined to the judicial sphere, their contest sometimes spilled over into the political realm. When this happened, as in 1639 with the replacement of the Estates by the General Assembly of Communities or in 1787 with the restoration of the Estates, the transformative effect on provincial institutions was dramatic. On a more modest scale, that of village politics, contestation over noble tax exemption exerted a profound, pervasive influence. Few, if any, communities in early modern Provence lacked a local procès des tailles of their own, pitting the owners of taxable land against the seigneur. In many communities, these trials persisted well beyond the formal end of noble fiscal privilege in 1789 and continued to color local politics in the nineteenth century. From these village trials to the great clashes before the royal council, from the struggles of the Noblesse and procureurs du pays over control of the provincial administration to petty sniping between lords and villagers in the rural communities, the Procès des Tailles influenced all levels of Provençal political life. Although it was a key aspect of the political history of early modern Provence, the significance of the Procès was not merely provincial. It also provides important insights into the judicial nature of absolutism. Foremost among these is the role of royal law in constructing categories of property, social groups, and, hence, material interests. The Procès illuminates this process. First, the law drew a line of demarcation between two types of physically indistinguishable kinds of property, the seigneurial and the ro263 264 Conclusion turier, and assigned to the first noble, tax-exempt status and to the second taillabilité. Although this distinction alone would probably have been sufficient to generate opposition between the owners of the two kinds of property , given the zero-sum fiscal dynamics of Provence engendered by royal fiscal policy and provincial taxation practices, it was reinforced by a series of further measures. The consolidation of the local trials over the nobility of land and their evocation to the Parlement of Paris in 1547 turned the diffuse opposition between the owners of the two types of property into a stark confrontation. To prepare for the trial, moreover, both sides were driven to hone their self-definition and establish collective institutions to enable them to pursue legal action to advance their judicially constituted material interests. These groups—the Noblesse (disparagingly, but accurately, labeled by its opponents an assemblage of fief-holding gentilshommes) and the Third Estate (scorned with equal accuracy by the seigneurs as mere administrators of taxable property in the twenty-three vigueries)—dominated the political life of the province for the next 250 years. Thus, the key collective actors of early modern Provence, their accession to political consciousness , and the conflicts that ensued derived neither from relations of production nor from an ambient cultural system of meaning. Rather they first emerged from a legal fiction—the definition of certain kinds of property— and gained increasing coherence and agency over the centuries as they were refracted through the judicial lens of absolutist fiscal policy. Law was not merely constitutive of property, social identity, and material interest. Under absolutism, it also provided the principal arena within which these judicially constituted groups clashed over their opposing interests and reached accommodation with one another. In recent years, historians have underlined the importance of law and legal institutions to political and public life in early modern France. David Bell and Sarah Hanley have emphasized their centrality to early modern French political culture.1 Michael Breen writes of the formation of a “legal public sphere” that “preceded and laid the foundations for the changes that took place in French political 1. David A. Bell, “The ‘Public Sphere,’ the State, and the World of Law in EighteenthCentury France,” French Historical Studies 17, no. 4 (Autumn 1992): 912–34, and Sarah Hanley, “The Pursuit of Legal Knowledge and the Genesis of Civil Society in Early Modern France,” in Historians and Ideologies: Essays in Honor of Donald R. Kelley, ed. Anthony T. Grafton and...

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