In this book about Franche-Comté, conquered by Louis XIV in the 1770s and integrated into his realm by the time of his death in 1715, Darryl Dee tackles two fundamental questions: how did the sun king extend his absolute power over the province and how did the decades-long wars of the latter part of his reign affect the regime?

Dee shows that prior to the conquest, under Habsburg rule, the elite of Besançon and the military governors of Franche-Comté competed for influence and mobilized the popular masses to advance their goals. They failed to coordinate their activities, had problem governing, and actually asked Louis XIV's military commander Condé to accept terms for surrender in 1664 rather than organize resistance to his armies.

The Habsburgs regained the province in the subsequent peace treaty and proceeded to replace the Parlement of Dole with a nonpolitical tribunal under the presidency of the appointed governor. This Flemish nobleman ordered the executive committee of the provincial estates to replace their customary negotiable tax payment with a stream of new funding for fortifications and Habsburg armies, the first ones stationed in the province in a century. A venerable Franc-Comtois family drew on the indignation of the sword nobility to foment a revolt, mobilize inhabitants, and appeal for foreign aid. The Habsburgs defeated the revolt but failed to reestablish order. They lacked the capacity to overhaul the finances and administration of the province.

Dee argues that the definitive annexation of the province by Louis XIV in 1678 enhanced the standing of the local elites and gave them access to patronage. The monarchy's principal client in the province, Claude Boisot, wrote to Versailles in 1676 criticizing the historic constitution of Besançon as democratic and conducive to riot. The crown then replaced the municipality with a mayor, three aldermen, and fourteen councilors elected by the former town magistrates. The new officials went on to develop a close relationship to Versailles, gain additional responsibilities, and enjoy a firmer hold on the municipal finances and administration than had their predecessors. Louis XIV moved the Parlement to Besançon at the end of the 1770s and made it venal in 1693. Dee maintains that these policies rejuvenated the judiciary with dynasties responsible for settling disputes in the king's name. Overall, Louis XIV put an end to the internecine and debilitating conflicts of elites.

Other aspects of the conquest worsened the standing of the Franc-Comtois elites. Louis XIV did not reconvene the provincial estates. Associations of judges, ecclesiastics, and town authorities welcomed the suppression of a rival power center controlled by the sword nobility. But they could not have been happy to see the monarchy take advantage of the estates’ absence by forcing them to shoulder a greater share of royal taxation than did their counterparts in other provinces. The crown obliged all of the elites of Besançon, except for the first president of the Parlement, to pay the octrois. Over the two decades after 1690, Louis XIV obliged the municipal officials and parlementaires of Besançon to loan about 150,000 livres to the royal treasury by threatening their tenure and privileges. The municipal officials met their share by taking out loans backed by Besançon's octrois.

Louis XIV's largest sources of funds from Franche-Comté were the imposition ordinaire and capitation, the former producing 830,000 in 1701, the latter 749,000. Much of this revenue remained in the province to cover payments to the fiscal receivers, the governor, the intendant, judges, and other elites. This provincial share increased each time Louis XIV obliged elites to grant him new loans. It mounted to a third of the imposition ordinaire. In fact, the value of Parlement offices rose 33 percent over the last decade of Louis XIV's reign.

In 1704 the crown introduced a combination of direct and indirect taxes known as the abonnement général to replace the obligatory loans levied on the municipality and Parlement of Besançon. The abonnement général, Dee argues, shifted fiscal liability from the undertaxed officers and urban notables to rural inhabitants already bearing the highest burdens. A measure of the crown's confidence in this arrangement came in 1715, when royal ministers sought to establish district fiscal tribunals (élections) and sell the offices to local elites for 364,000 livres. The intendant objected that Franche-Comté had the fairest, most efficient tax system in the kingdom. The abonnement general, he stated, permitted him to control the fiscal officials, whereas venal judges would abuse their power for their own interests and increase the cost of administration.

Dee shows that after 1700, the authorities disregarded privileges, diverted revenue streams to the military, and even dipped into their own pockets to cover war-related expenses. They reverted to ad hoc expedients characteristic of the wars of the first half of the seventeenth century against the Habsburgs. Military emergencies, Dee contends, precluded experiments with institutional reform. His findings belie conventional liberal explanations, which accord the prime role to war for the development of the state.

My only criticism of this outstanding book concerns Dee's claim, in the concluding sentences, that the monarchy was neither feudal nor administrative, but distinctly early modern. Dee marshals much evidence to disqualify the monarchy as bureaucratic but none to disqualify it as feudal. The book contains no information about the seigneurial regime. Dee characterizes the mandatory loans extracted from the elites as “exploitation.” I wonder, however, whether one could more aptly characterize them as instruction in the ways of the new system. That is, it would be interesting to know if the Franc-Comtois nobles made use of the institutional stability provided by the French monarchy to arraign the peasants in the royal courts and update their feudal titles like their counterparts had done in other provinces in the centuries following the One Hundred Years’ War.