Gayle K. Brunelle

Urban Europe, 1500-1700

Examining the nature and diversity of urban life during the 16th and 17th centuries, a period of considerable economic, political and social change, this text stresses the extent to which towns remained distinct from their rural hinterlands. Its wide embrace gives it the character of a history of Europe, viewed from the urban perspective. In achieving the integration of different experiences into the broader discussion, it manages to retain an acute sense of the importance and development of regional diversity. In assessing the contribution of urban centres in western Europe to long-term change, the focus is primarily on life inside the town. Each chapter considers the framework of urban life - such as the economy, government, elites, social organization, the environment - and the tensions that arose from demographic growth, prosperity or adversity and the growing presence of external pressures. Responses to poverty and threats to social order are paid particular attention. While this study attempts to convey a sense of the parameters and diversity of life in an urban environment during the period, it also provides an insight into the ways in which existing structures of government and institutional organization attempted and often failed, to come to terms with new problems.

The New World merchants of Rouen, 1559-1630

This book is the study of 144 merchants in Rouen who invested in trade or shipping to the Americas in the sixty years before Cardinal Richelieu began to regulate their activities for the benefit of church and state. Rouen, during the time studied in this book, was the largest French seaport and in direct connection and competition with various Dutch and English ports. The author focuses on how the French merchants and their investments and how their economic fortunes affected their rise and fall in French society.

Contractual Kin: Servants and Their Mistresses in Sixteenth-Century Nantes

Female servants and their mistresses in Nantes often disputed the terms of service and wages of the mostly oral contracts between them. These quarrels sometimes ended up in the court of the municipal aldermen, whose records reveal the opposing conceptualization of female service the opponents advocated. Mistresses viewed their servants as dependents, not quite kin, but wholly under their authority at least for the period specified in the contract. Servants perceived themselves as wage laborers with the right to renegotiate, or renege on, contracts when a more advantageous offer presented itself. Municipal officials, caught between their desire to enforce contracts and the need to avoid exploitation of domestic labor in order to ensure a plentiful migration of servants into Nantes, sided with servants surprisingly often. Servant women in Nantes, therefore, enjoyed a higher level of agency than did women serving in Italian cities where high numbers of slaves and indentured refugees distorted the market for, and attitudes toward, female domestics.

Ambassadors and Administrators: The Role of Clerics in Early French Colonies in Guiana

Of all of France’s early modern colonial ventures, the least studied and most obscure are the French efforts to establish settlements, missions, and plantations in Guiana. Still, the seventeenth-century French colonies in Guiana had much in common with the sixteenth-century French efforts to colonize Florida and Brazil, and their trajectories were every bit as dramatic and their outcomes equally dismal. Although not sponsored as Huguenot refuges in the New World from Catholic oppression in the Old, and thus not burdened with the fierce competition between Protestant and Catholic colonists that plagued the sixteenth-century ventures, the Guiana colonies were also prey to deep internal divisions over piety and morality, and even more over power and the purpose of the colony. Were they primarily missions to the Native peoples, plantations, or commercial ventures focused on locating sources of precious metals or establishing plantations? This paper examines the role of clerics in the genesis, financing, trajectories, and collapse of the earliest French colonies in Guiana, in particular two colonies founded about ten years apart, in 1643 and 1652. I will the argue that whereas historians have often assumed that missionaries and evangelizing were often little more than an encumbrance to early colonial ventures, useful mostly for raising funds in France, in reality clerics played a central role in shaping chartered colonial companies and the colonies they founded, for good and for ill.

The Assassination of the Sieur de Royville and the Debacle of the Compagnie de l’Amerique Equinoxial, 1651–1654

Abstract The Compagnie de l’Amerique was a joint-stock company based in Paris and created in 1652 for the purpose of establishing a French colony at Cayenne in what is today French Guiana. The Compagnie de l’Amerique was founded under the sponsorship of a theologian from the Sorbonne, the Abbé Marivault, the Sieur le Roux de Royville from Normandy, and several important officers and robe nobles in Paris, including the Secretary of the Marine, La Boulaye, and Jean-Jacques Dolu, grand audiencier at the court and Intendant of New France in 1620 under whom Champlain was a lieutenant-general. The company sponsored 800 colonists, men and women, with the intention of establishing a viable plantation colony. On the surface, the colony seemed to be better funded than previous French colonization efforts in Guiana, but Marivault drowned while trying to board the ship in the harbor at Honfleur — perhaps a bad omen. The colony began to disintegrate even prior to landing at Cayenne. During the crossing from France, Le Roux de Royville was murdered and his body thrown overboard. Unfortunately, that episode was just the beginning of the tensions and conflict that become rife within the colony, as well as between the settlers and the native Galibí. When it became known that the Compagnie de l’Amerique did not, in fact, have royal backing, the Compagnie went bankrupt and the colony disintegrated. Two lawsuits were filed: one by Royville’s family and the other by Nicolas Papin, one of the investors. This paper is based on the deposition of Charles Fremin, accused of the murder of Royville, and on the story of the murder as recounted by Jacque de Laon, Sieur d’Aigremont, an eyewitness and probably one of the conspirators. It tells the story of the assassination and its impact on the subsequent self-destruction of the colony and the bankruptcy of the company. It also analyzes the causes of the crime and extent to which its roots lay in the methods in which French colonial expeditions were organized and financed.

`Murder in the Metro': Masking and Unmasking Laetitia Toureaux in 1930s France

Toureaux, an attractive twenty-nine-year-old woman wearing a striking green suit, a white hat and gloves, left a bal musette named L’Ermitage in the Paris suburb of Charentonneau and walked briskly towards a bus stop. Approximately twenty-four minutes later, she entered the Porte de Charenton metro station and made her way across a quay crowded with holiday-makers fresh from the nearby Parc de Vincennes. She took a seat in an empty firstclass car while the other passengers crammed into the second-class cars. At promptly 6:27 p.m., the train left. When it arrived forty-five seconds later at the Porte Dorée station, the doors of the car opened on a shocking sight: a French military dentist and his companion entered the car and found Toureaux slumped in her seat, bleeding profusely, a nine-inch dagger buried to its hilt in her neck. She died before she reached the hospital, without naming her assailant, and left the Parisian police with a perplexing mystery on their hands. In the absence of any witnesses or physical evidence other than the knife, a standard ‘Laguiole’, it was a mystery they never officially solved. The Police Mobile section of the Sûreté Nationale immediately took French Cultural Studies, 14/1, 053–080 Copyright

Kinship, identity, and religion in sixteenth-century Toulouse: the case of Simon Lecomte.

This article explores the problems of identity, membership in the community, and religious violence which converge in one case study of Simon Lecomte, a merchant of Lyonnais origins, and a bourgeois of Paris, whose residence in Toulouse extended from the turbulent 1560s through the Catholic Leagues rise to power in the late 1580s. Arrested for heresy in 1586, Lecomte was a man of amphibious identity, neither wholly inside nor outside the community of Toulouse. By examining the course of Lecomtes trial from 1586 to 1589, this article also seeks to further our understanding of the roots of religious conflict in early modern France. Who became a victim of religious persecution and why? What role did long-standing grievances, personal and familial, urban rivalries, and economic competition play in shaping the ferocity and direction of religious persecution?

Lighting the Fuse: Terrorism as Violent Political Discourse in Interwar France

During 1936–1937 France experienced elevated levels of violence in the form of terrorism that historians have tended to overlook, opting to leave most discussion of terrorist activities to political scientists. This paper examines the use of terrorism in 1930s France by one of the most notorious and understudied groups of political radicals on the far right, the Comite Secret d’Action Revolutionnaire or Cagoule, whose members perpetrated terrorist acts in interwar France as part of their unsuccessful bid to overthrow the Popular Front government of Leon Blum. Former Cagoulards regrouped during the war to achieve their political goals in a reincarnation known as the Mouvement Social Revolutionnaire (Pour la Revolution Nationale) or MSR.1 The MSR reprised many of the same terrorist tactics they had employed in the interwar period, and against many of the same targets. The Cagoulard leadership (and, subsequently, that of the MSR) consisted of extremists expelled from the right-wing Action francaise in 1935 for advocating direct action in favour of the ‘National Revolution’. These extremists argued that mainstream leaders of the French right were all talk and no action, and criticised in particular the failure of the Action francaise to take advantage of the violent anti-parliamentary street riots of 6 February 1934 to overthrow the Republic.2

Images of Empire: Francis I and his Cartographers

In this chapter, the author talks about Francis I, and in doing so demonstrates that, immersed as he was in the visual and textual symbols the humanists around him marshalled in support of his reign, maps were at once an assertion of, and confirmation of, his rightful equality with, or even precedence over, his imperial rival, Charles V, and his imperial ally, the Turkish sultan. The chapter shows that Francis I, like other early modern rulers, competed for the service of cartographers, and treated cartographic knowledge as a potent source of royal propaganda and as a means to assert effective possession over territories. Although rulers, and especially the Portuguese and Spanish, often attempted to suppress maps that might aid foreign interlopers in reaching their new overseas trade routes and colonies, at other times maps were proudly displayed as tangible indicators of the extent of the power of the possessor. Keywords: cartographers; Charles V; Francis I; humanists; Spanish; Turkish sultan