Myth- and Monarch-Making: Claire de Duras’s Pensées de Louis XIV (1827)

Louis XIV is one of the most captivating figures in French history despite his myth sitting uneasily alongside a modern Republican France. Louis XIV’s rarely read memoirs provide unique insight into the monarch’s role, demonstrating the tension between God-given right and the day-to-day duties of being a king. Novelist Claire de Duras used the memoirs to compile Pensées de Louis XIV (1827), a collection of seventy selected quotations. This article shows how Duras attempts to reconcile past and present, maintaining the mythical aura of the monarch while also portraying Louis XIV as a figure that might appeal to a post-Revolutionary, post-Imperial society.

Custom, Law, and Monarchy

Ancien régime France did not have a unified law. Legal relations of the people were governed by a disorganized amalgam of norms, including provincial and local customs (coutumes), elements of Roman law and canon law that together formed jus commune, royal edicts and ordinances, and judicial decisions, all coexisting with little apparent internal coherence. The multiplicity of laws and the fragmentation of jurisdiction were the defining features of the monarchical era. A key subject in European legal history is the metamorphosis of popular customs into customary law, which covered a broad spectrum of what we call today private law. This book sets forth the evolution of law in late medieval and early modern France, from the thirteenth through the end of the eighteenth century, with particular emphasis on the royal campaigns to record and reform customs in the sixteenth century. The codification of customs in the name of the king solidified the legislative authority of the crown, the essential element of the absolute monarchy. Achievements of French legal humanism brought French custom and Roman law together to lay the foundation for the French law. The Civil Code of 1804 was the culmination of these centuries of work. Juristic, political, and constitutional approaches to the early modern state allow an understanding of French history in a continuum.

On the origins of the demographic transition: rethinking the European marriage pattern

Why did France experience the demographic transition first? This question remains one of the greatest puzzles of economics, demography, and economic history. The French pattern is hard to reconcile with elucidations of the process as found in other countries. The present analysis goes back to the roots of the process and offers novel ways of explaining why people started to control their fertility in France and how they did so. In this paper, I track the evolution of marriage patterns to a point before the premises of the demographic transition. I identify two distinct phases. Next, I rely on exploratory methods to classify French counties based on their discriminatory features. Five profiles emerge. I discuss these profiles through the lens of the French Revolution, one of the greatest events that ever occurred in French history, which irretrievably altered its society. In particular, the results show that the fertility transition was not as linear, but more complex than previous research had argued. They show the importance of accounting for cultural factors and for individuals’ predispositions to adapt more or less quickly to societal changes. Yet cultural factors are not all. They can help to explain the timing of the transition and the choice of methods used to control fertility, but modernity and gender equality are also needed to describe the mechanisms in play behind the process.

Historical Memory in the Process of Formation and Reproduction of Modern National Identity: the French Experience (Part 1)

The article is devoted to the study of the role of historical tradition and national memory in the formation of modern types of ethno-national identity and mechanisms of consolidation of citizens at the stage of formation of the French state of the modern type. In this regard, various versions of French history were analyzed by representatives of historical and historiographical schools, which still compete with each other for the status of creators of a generally accepted interpretation of important historical events. It was found that consistently patriotic motivation, which ensures the formation and realization of the innovative potential of the people and social activity of this creative core of the nation, aimed at overcoming any crisis challenges, is formed only on the basis of maximum meaningful synthesis of existing interpretations of French history. In particular, the effectiveness of memory policy is ensured by the fact that symbols, traditions and historical monuments that positively influence the dynamics of national-patriotic motivations and feelings are inevitably (and often, quite consciously) filled with qualitatively new meanings and values. The complete failure of neoliberal and left-wing radical critiques of Holism's theory and practice has been proved, the conservative elements of which, in particular the appeal to the heroic past, are not at all identical with medieval archaism and almost neo-Nazi political preferences. On the contrary, the typological similarity of Bonapartism and Hollism is due precisely to their ability to effectively oppose reactionary and revolutionary extremism, which is equally destructive to the nation-state. In this regard, the exceptional relevance of the use of historical memory to form their own traditionalist and authoritarian charisma (in their relationship) by the creator and first president of the Fifth Republic Charles de Gaulle in the process of his opposition to anti-national provocations of far-right and far-left.

Circulation and Transnational Memory

This final chapter examines the international scope of the Napoleonic war memoir genre. Widespread and often illegal practices of reprinting and translating veterans’ autobiographies ensured that narratives of the Peninsular War circulated extensively across borders throughout the nineteenth century, not only within Europe but also across the Atlantic, to both the United States and Latin America. Peninsular War memoirs became a transnational genre, crossing national and linguistic divides. This did not, however, result in a peaceful shared memory of the war. Instead, the reprinting and translation of memoirs was unequal, with Spanish accounts rarely reaching British and French audiences, and hostile, with foreign soldiers’ tales being severely edited and disputed by translators. This nationalistic reaction to the circulation of military memoirs laid the foundations for enduring grand narratives about what is in British history the Peninsular War, in French history the War in Spain, and in Spanish history the War of Independence.

Michel de L’Hospital : un legista al servizio della Monarchia

This article examines the policy conducted by Michel de L’Hospital, Chancellor in 1560. This policy aimed at restoring the unity of French corps mystique, divided between Protestantism and Catholicism. Inspired by French Humanism, his reform plan looked at Monarchy, as the synthesis of the social body and the interpreter of its unity. The struggle against autarchy and corruption of Parliament of Paris marked his policy. According to his reform’s goals, he introduced new juges-consuls for commercial disputes. Aware of modern values, he became the protagonist of one of the most important season in French history.