The decline of interpersonal violence has long been seen as a critical hallmark of the narrative of civilisation and progress that has for so long shaped the historiography of western Europe. Open displays of aggression, it has been argued by Norbert Elias and others, were a distinctive feature of medieval feudal society which gradually gave way to more polite codes of conduct, against the backdrop of the cultural shifts precipitated by the Renaissance and the growth of early modern states intent upon creating obedient citizens and limiting the potential for political disorder within their midst. In this important monograph, Stuart Carroll offers a convincing and timely reassessment of this grand model of historical change, of which France is widely regarded as a precocious exemplar. Drawing on impressively deep and extensive research in local archives, he demonstrates how far patterns of vindicatory behaviour not merely continued to dominate social relations within the French nobility, but were arguably exacerbated and intensified by the spread of the Protestant Reformation, civil war, economic instability and the dynastic upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Played out in a rich repertoire of verbal insult, legal dispute, intimidation and physical encounter, feuds between individuals and families over issues of status, inheritance and property remained rife. If anything, traditional moral and chivalric values were eroded in this period, in the context of the emergence of a Calvinist rhetoric of providential vengeance and of the revival of the legends of the heroes of Greek revenge literature, including Aeneas and Achilles. One manifestation of these developments was the vogue for duelling from the 1520s onwards: far from a means of taming the violence of the nobility by channelling it into elaborate ritual, in France the duel served to reinvigorate and perpetuate the brutal blood feud. The final part of Carroll's book reflects on the political ramifications of these trends and considers how the French crown, particularly under Louis xiv, sought to contain noble violence in its effort to create a well-ordered state, not least through the establishment of a standing army, into which the martial instincts of the warrior class could be channelled and redeployed in the interests of absolutist rule. To this extent, he concludes, the foundations of the modern state rested not on the elimination of vengeance but on its redeployment as an instrument of militarisation.

In a work of such ambition, subtlety and range, it is inevitable that some readers will wish that particular threads of argument had been pursued further and find minor points with which to quibble. Carroll's suggestive comments in chapter xii about the relationship between elite and popular violence as a key motor of the Wars of Religion might, for example, have been extended and substantiated further. So too his brief remarks (pp. 290–6) about the extent to which the new office-holding class created by the burgeoning of royal bureaucracy, the noblesse de robe, participated in the culture of vindication which his book outlines: while accepting that cultural differences between robe and sword have been overstated in previous accounts, does Carroll swing too far in the other direction in seeking to emphasise the coherence of outlook and conduct of the old and new nobility? A third issue that might have repaid more attention is the role of religious confessionalisation and enmity in both stimulating and complicating the trends under examination: how far did mutual antagonism between Catholics and Protestants cut across the culture delineated here? Finally, the part played by Counter-Reformation moral rigorism in promoting a turn away from the tradition of the noble feud is perhaps inferred rather than proved: more needs to be known about the reception of the Reformation of Manners before we can assess how far this contributed to reshaping the conventions of aristocratic behaviour in this era. Blood and violence in early modern France deserves to be recognised as a major contribution to our understanding of social change and political transformation in early modern Europe as a whole. Its findings question conventional assumptions about the division between the medieval and early modern eras and undermine another of the settled but distorting polarities upon which twentieth-century historical interpretation has instinctively rested. Brutality and civility, Carroll shows, are not opposites but inseparable twins.