Policing and Urban Society in Eighteenth-Century Paris , ed. Pascal Bastien

Critics of the Ancien Régime before and after 1789 implied that the French monarchy operated like a relentless steamroller with reckless and ruthless drivers at the wheel. After decades of extensive and intensive archival research, we know that the Bourbons did not actually manage to flatten the patchwork hexagon assembled over many centuries into a thoroughly centralised state. Absolutism, after all, never meant that the Crown could do whatever it liked, not in principle let alone in practice. The king was expected to govern justly, in accordance with tradition, with public welfare in mind, and to preserve the accumulated privileges that defined the status of subjects throughout the kingdom. Provinces, cities, clergy, nobility, magistrates, guilds and countless other corporate bodies defended their customary immunities and resisted efforts to expand royal jurisdiction and increase royal revenues. The monarchy’s interventions and innovations provoked many conflicts over fiscal, religious and political issues in the course of the eighteenth century. At the same time, ministers, intendants and other royal agents not only argued but also collaborated and negotiated with the Gallican church and its bishops, regional estates and parlements, municipal governments and urban elites.