Driven by a desire for glory and renown, Louis XIV presided over France's last great burst of territorial expansion in Europe. During the first three decades of his rule, his armies conquered numerous territories along France's borders. After 1688, however, the tide of conquest turned as the kingdom was plunged into crisis. For the remainder of his reign, the king and his people endured wars against grand alliances of European powers, ecological disasters, economic depression, state bankruptcy, and demographic stagnation. Expansion and Crisis in Louis XIV's France examines these central yet understudied aspects of the age of the Sun King through the experience of Franche-Comté, a possession of the Spanish empire with a long history of autonomy, conquered by Louis XIV in 1674. Dee's detailed research reconstructs the ensuing dialogue -- sometimes harmonious, sometimes discordant -- between the king and the elites who ruled this province. The integration of Franche-Comté into France proved to be a protracted process involving confrontation, negotiation, and compromise. The resulting regime was then severely tested by the challenges of Louis XIV's late reign; its survival demonstrated how the king had brought a distinctly early modern state to the height of its development. This study offers significant new insights on the growth of the territorial state in early modern Europe, the nature of the French absolute monarchy, and the political legacy of the Sun King. Darryl Dee is Assistant Professor of History, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada.

In this first comprehensive history of immigrant inequality in France, Mary D. Lewis chronicles the conflicts arising from mass immigration between the First and Second World Wars, the uneven rights arrangements that emerged during this time, and their legacy for contemporary France.

Sara Chapman focuses on the Phélypeaux de Pontchartrain family to provide a broad study of institutions & political authority in the early modern French state from 1670 to 1715.

The personal rule of Louis XIV, following on from a long period of royal minority and apprenticeship, lasted 54 years from 1661 to 1715. But the second half of this personal rule has, until recently, received significantly less scholarly attention than the 1660s and 1670s. This has obscured some of the very real changes and developments that occurred between the early 1680s and the mid-1690s, by which time a new generation of younger royals had come to prominence, France was engulfed in international war on a greater scale than ever before, and the king was visibly no longer as vigorous or healthy as he had once been. The essays in this volume take a close look at the way a new set of political, social, cultural and economic dispensations emerged from the mid-1680s to create a different France in the final decades of Louis XIV’s reign, even though the basic ideological, social and economic underpinnings of the country remained very largely the same. The contributions examine such varied matters as the structure and practices of government, naval power, the financial operations of the state, trade and commerce, social pressures, overseas expansion, religious dissent, music, literature and the fine arts.

Historians and social scientists have long identified bureaucracy as the modern state's foundation and the reign of France's Louis XIV as a model for its development. A World of Paper offers a fresh interpretation of bureaucracy through a close examination of the department of the Sun King's last foreign secretary, Jean-Baptiste Colbert de Torcy. Torcy, who served as foreign secretary from 1696-1715, is widely regarded as one of the most brilliant foreign ministers of the ancien regime. Building on the work of his predecessors, he fashioned a skilled team of collaborators as he managed the complex issues of war and peace during the turbulent final decades of Louis XIV's reign. John Rule and Ben Trotter examine Torcy's department to depict administrative structures as they emerged through the circulating stream of paper that connected his office with provincial administrators and diplomats abroad. They explore the collection and centralization of information during Torcy's tenure through the creation of a modern state archive, discreet intelligence gathering, and the surveillance and management of the French mails. They also study the postal carriers, couriers, household officers of the royal court, genealogists hired for research, and an informal "brain trust" of experts, and advisors who carried vital information in and out of the department every day. A remarkable reconstruction of the department of Jean-Baptiste Colbert de Torcy, A World of Paper demystifies bureaucracy and explores the ways in which the modern information state developed from his labours.

An exploration of current scholarly thinking about the wide and surprisingly complex range of historical problems associated with the study of Ancien Régime Europe

Were the countries of Europe the only ones that were "early modern"? Was Asia's early modernity cut short by colonialism? Scholars examining early modern Eurasia have not yet fully explored the relationships between absolute rule and political modernization in the highly contested early modern world. Using a comparative perspective that places Chŏngjo, king of Korea from 1776 to 1800, in context with other Korean kings and with contemporary Chinese and European rulers, Christopher Lovins examines the shifting balance of power in Korea in favor of the crown at the expense of the aristocracy during the early modern period. This book is the first to analyze in English the recently discovered collection of 297 private letters written by Chŏngjo himself. These letters were a vital channel of communication outside of official court historians' scrutiny, since private meetings between the king and his ministers were forbidden by custom. Royal politics played out in an arena of subtle communication, with court officials trying to read the king's unstated, elliptically hinted at intentions and the king trying to suggest what he wanted done while maintaining plausible deniability. Through close analysis of both official records and private letters, including Chŏngjo's "secret letters," Lovins shows that, in contrast to previous assumptions, the late eighteenth-century Korean monarchs were not weak and ineffective but instead were in the process of building an absolutist polity.

This accessible Companion provides a wide-ranging and comprehensive introduction to French music from the early middle ages to the present.

French territorial ambitions and consequent military activity during the reign of Louis XIV ensured that a number of territories bordering on France were subject to military occupation for strategic reasons from the 1660s onwards. Drawing on extensive archival research, this study presents the occupation of two of these territories, Lorraine and Savoy, from a comparative perspective. It investigates the aims and intentions of the French monarchy in occupying these regions, the problems of administering them, and French relations with key local elite groups. Absolute monarchy on the frontiers makes a significant contribution to understanding this crucial era in the development of civil-military relations. It also places the occupations of Lorraine and Savoy within the framework of recent scholarship on early modern border societies and frontiers, and on the practice of ‘absolutism’ at the frontiers of the French kingdom. The book will appeal particularly to scholars and students of early modern France and Europe.