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This chapter lays out the framework of the book. It discusses the demographics of the working families that are examined, and provides some background on the cities of Lyon and Nantes in which they lived. It projects the arguments of the book and their relationship to existing scholarship in terms of the historiographies of working families, of litigation, of law, of state, of market and of family violence.

The impact of the Declaration of December 15, 1738 is presented in this chapter. It was discussed that when masters neglected to complete the required formalities, such as registration of their slaves with the nearest clerk of the Admiralty, the slaves would be confiscated au profit du roi and returned as slaves to the colonies. The Parlement of Paris and the Admiralty Court of France refused to confiscate slaves. However, the case of Catherine Morgan, who was brought to Nantes by her master in 1746, shows how the courts of Brittany enforced the Declaration of 1738. The Admiralty Court of France never recognized the validity of either the Edict of October 1716 or the Declaration of December 15, 1738, because they had not been registered by the Parlement of Paris. As a result, they relied on the maxim that any slave who entered the French soil was free.

This study of Nantes is about the impact of the religious wars on the exercise and understanding of authority in the city, principally that of the municipal government. This chapter explores the city context of events, including the motives for Nantes' participation in the religious wars and for its revolt against the crown in 1589, also exploring why the Catholic League rebellion lasted longer here than in any other town. This is not a simple narrative of Nantes' experiences of the religious wars. The central focus is on authority, its theoretical construction, its institutional embodiment, its reception and negotiation, and changes within these over time. During the religious wars, the understanding and exercise of many different levels of authority came under close scrutiny by contemporaries, and the nature and legitimacy of authority were questioned. This book offers a study of city governance in a period of pressure and change, and also examines the changing relationship of the city government and the royal state.

This chapter discusses the city of Nantes and its people in the mid-sixteenth century. The streets and quays of Nantes were populated by a rich variety of people. In the mid-century, it was the largest city of the province of Brittany, with a population of about 20,000, and, like all early modern towns, it had a sharply pyramidal wealth structure. Relations between city, province and crown, and between individuals, were understood in terms of law and contract; there were mutual obligations between different authorities and social groups. There was a strong moral and religious dimension to royal, civic and household authority, mediated through the theology and culture of the Catholic Church. The rise of Protestantism challenged the fundamental cultural premises upon which civic culture was based. More importantly, the sectarian and military conflicts unleashed from 1560 both threatened the effective authority of crown and city agents and called into question the relationship between the two.

The theory and practice of urban authority and governance were deeply affected, while the relationship between the city and the crown was strained. In this chapter, the process and significance of the growth of Protestantism in Nantes are assessed, and the repercussions of the movement for political and religious life in the city are also discussed. The emergence of Protestantism in Nantes had a profound and immediate impact on attitudes to the authority of city institutions and on practical governance in the town, even though the movement was relatively small compared with those in other cities. In these circumstances, the city authorities had great practical difficulties in maintaining order and effectively exercising their authority. Further, undermining practical governance was the corrosive impact of Protestantism on the ideological props to authority in the city. Contemporary authors emphasised the religious and cultural threat posed by heresy to the influence and institutions of the Roman church.

The authorities in Nantes watched helplessly as France was engulfed in civil war. The outcome of war was not only a new decisiveness by the crown and the city's elites to assert their authority separately, but also in concert, to restore order to religious and secular affairs. The 1560s and early 1570s were a period of new initiatives in crown–city relations, for the more efficient administration of the kingdom, a result of the crisis of the early civil wars. This process of declining confidence, followed by the repositioning of authority within the city of Nantes, is the subject of this chapter. While royal authority was fissured by the military crisis, its administration in Nantes held firm. At the local level, day-to-day order and respect for royal authority were maintained.

Religious policy, taxation and war created tensions within this polity, but the new town council was determinedly loyal to the king. But these ultimately failed because the king was unable to impose either a religious settlement or peace on the kingdom, or to find sufficient revenue to allow for taxation reform. There were serious disputes between the king and the city in that decade over taxation and the creation of royal offices, but crown authority and its power to act were not challenged. The war that broke out on the southern marches of Brittany in the mid-1580s caused the king's authority to be eroded in the province. Governors took over royal fiscal and administrative authority, while Nantes' municipality was forced, through military and economic emergency, to govern on its own, with less resort to the crown for advice.

This chapter discusses the forging of Catholic confessional identity, of religious and military strife, its relationship with indigenous spiritual revival and Tridentine reform, and its impact upon the political culture of Nantes during the mid-sixteenth century, by which time Catholic spirituality was undergoing change. Historians such as A. Galpern have argued that belief and participation in traditional rituals declined in this period. In a study of the Champagne region, Galpern argues for a decrease in religiosity in the 1540s and 1550s, shown by changing styles of religious art, which became less emotionally intense; changes in poor relief, with the rise of centralised municipal institutions; a drive against beggars and indiscriminate almsgiving; and declining confraternity membership. It is also suggested that there was increasing alienation of certain social groups from collective piety, in particular, a distancing of elites from popular groups, a product of increasing hierarchy in towns, growing oligarchy in city government, and differentiation in guilds between masters and journeymen.

This chapter explores the aims of the Nantais in their rebellion, and the relationship between the city and Mercoeur, also revealing the reason it took so long for Nantes to submit to Henry IV. Nantes played a central role in the Bretons' rebellion against the crown. In Charles Laronze's view, the League was above all else an urban movement, where the Breton towns fought in defence of their commercial interests, political privileges and religious beliefs. From 1589 onwards, Nantes became Mercoeur's ‘capital’, the site of the League's provincial administration, with a parlement and Chambre des Comptes. The city wanted to become the capital of Brittany, to regain the parlement lost to Rennes in 1560, and to dominate provincial administration and politics.

Throughout the religious wars, the stability of urban governance in Nantes was striking. This arose from the shared nature of authority, which was widely disseminated among many different groups in the city. Urban government was not simply a system of regulation imposed from above. While participation in the municipality itself was the preserve of the wealthy elite, this was a relatively open group. Further, all householders could take part in the general assemblies of the city, as witnesses to communal decision making, giving a wide sense of involvement in urban affairs. The day-to-day administration of the city's hospitals was largely in the hands of men of the middling sort. The bourgeois militia was another important vehicle through which authority was disseminated downwards through the community.

This chapter focuses on the education of René Jean-Marie Galles, son of Eugène and Adèle Galles. Adèle Galles was René’s teacher. She made René work hard, especially on his grammar and writing, and followed a schedule “rigorously,” but she also stressed “self-education” with plenty of free time for adventure. This chapter first describes René’s life at Pont-Sal before discussing his admission to the École polytechnique and to the Collège royale de Nantes. It then considers the role played by Adèle in René’s success, along with the Galles family’s response to the July Revolution. It also examines René’s turbulent years of study for the École examinations and how he integrated his families’ joys and traumas into his focused existence.

This chapter examines the challenges arising from the shift of political ideology caused by religious divisions. By 1600, many religious groups claimed discrimination and unequal treatment under the law. The Catholics regrouped under a Bourbon monarchy and the Protestants threatened to obey a new leadership. These French wars of religion ended with the Edict of Nantes. Some historians, however, claim that the French Catholic regions accepted Henri IV only because of his conversion to Catholicism, his coronation, and the papal absolution given. This also left the Protestants with little option except to support Henri IV. This settlement with the Catholics and Henri IV's marriage to a Catholic and papal subject strengthened the new Bourbon Monarchy in France.

This chapter examines French Protestant churches and the country's population amidst conflicts between religion and state in the early seventeenth century. In the controversies between Catholic and Protestant propagandists, the Protestants had been clearly at a disadvantage since France was decidedly moving toward a stronger Catholic identity. Then, the Edict of Nantes gave the Huguenot Protestants more rights, making Catholics despise the edict. In 1629, both sides had agreed to a general settlement upon the signing of the Peace of Ales. This was a treaty for general pacification, while the edict, in a different format, was really a document for the future calling for religious unity.

This chapter deals with events after the Edict of Nantes. In 1640, “Augustinnus” written by Cornelius Jansen was published, stirring different groups in French society. The idea of Jansenism had become entrenched in society and defied authority. Whether politically or religiously motivated, this defiance had been due to past and current antagonisms in ecclesiological and political ideologies. In 1657, Jansenism spread to a wider circle beyond that of academics and clerics, resulting in a new cooperation between the papacy and the monarchy to contain such spread. Rome had totally condemned Jansenism though the French monarchy took a little longer to follow the same. In the early 1700s, however, Jansenism would resurface in a different guise and historical context.

An examination of the semantic field of the term ‘oubliance’ in 16th-century France that contextualizes the 1598 Edict of Nantes’s call to erase memories of the wars of Religion in France. André de Nesmond’s 1600 parlementary address on amnesty reveals the complexity of cultural discourses surrounding memory and forgetting in the period, and introduces tragedy and tragic affect as key points of reference for the politics and the historiography of the civil wars.

Explores the reasons why this remote, mountainous region converted so thoroughly to Protestantism in the sixteenth century. It argues that there were many causes, including the earlier conversion of the major trading cities of Nîmes and Montpellier, the weakness of the local Church, the influence of converted notables, and regional antagonisms. It also notes the conversion of women, arguing that they converted for as many different reasons as did men. It notes that the region remained steadfast in its confession even as Protestantism declined elsewhere, then charts the events leading up to the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 and the aborted rebellion against that action in 1683. It notes that years of pressure, the conversion of some notables to Catholicism, and the decision of the monarchy to use military force led to failure, forcing Protestantism back into the confines of family life, where women played a major role.