Choice Review

Jones offers an exemplary comparative micro history examining six villages: Allan, Chatelaudren, Neuviller-sur-Moselle, Roquelaure, Saint-Alban, and Villepreux. His insightful work is based on primary sources; it focuses on the lives and experiences of the villagers and how they responded to political, social, religious, and economic events from 1760 to 1820. The primary theme that permeates these six decades is bureaucratization during the ancien regime, revolutionary, and Napoleonic eras. Seigneurialism was intrinsic in all six villages but eroded to revolutionary pressures for a "new civil order." Village elites ("judges, clerks, attorneys, notaries, etc.") became a bureaucratic and economic force. There was a reform movement from 1787 to 1790 to institute representative government and remedy village grievances by eliminating exemptions for clerics, nobles, etc. By 1792, revolutionary problems existed with the "incomplete abolition of seigneuralism and tax disillusionment." With Napoleon, political power was concentrated with the merger of bureaucratization and centralization. On church-state relationships, villagers reacted to the clerical oath of 1791 and to the implementation of anticlerical and dechristianization movements. Villagers also exerted pressure to liberate the rural economy and land reform with the selling of ecclesiastical and emigre property. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. Graduate students and faculty. C. A. Gliozzo Michigan State University