This book is the latest in a long succession of studies of the governance of individual French provinces during the Ancien Régime. Rafe Blaufarb approaches Provence from a legal perspective, analyzing the relationship between land ownership, taxes, and social relations. Except for the differently focused studies by Sharon Kettering, this is the first time Provence has had this kind of treatment. The book is deeply researched, cogently presented, and closely argued. Seeking the origins of the rise of revolutionary consciousness in the eighteenth century, Blaufarb proposes to analyze the impact of a provincial elite's centuries-long experience with litigation concerning taxes and seigneurial rights.

Blaufarb's focus is the procès des tailles, a series of disputes and appeals over taxes that extended from 1647 to the Revolution. The problem derived from two sacred principles in Provençal law: that royal taxes were granted and collected only by the provincial administration; and that under the régime of taille réelle noble estates were exempt from being assessed for taxes, whereas noble persons were not. Thus if a noble acquired roturier land, he was liable for its taxes. Collection of these royal and local taxes was administered by the provincial Estates, and after 1639 by the General Assembly of Towns. Once the sum demanded by the king had been established, it was up to the province to collect it. This system had conflict built in. The greater nobles of the province naturally wanted to expand their estates. Any such expansion would create new tax-free areas and increase the burden of taxes on the rest of the taxpayers. But if the newly acquired land was not exempted, the nobles would face the humiliating prospect of being subjected to collections and having to pay a degrading tax like a common peasant. The provincial administration wanted exactly the opposite. They fought to avoid further encroachments on taxable territory and the consequent increasing of the burden on taxpayers. In 1547–1553 after appeals to the king from all sides, a deal was worked out. A noble could elevate newly acquired lands to tax-free status, provided he demoted an equivalent acreage of his land to roturier taxable status.

This apparent compromise just caused more litigation. Could the exchange rule be applied retroactively? How far back did it apply? What if the village bought up seigneurial property, secularizing it, and then the lord got it back? The two sides mobilized their legal defenses, setting the corps de la noblesse against the procureur du pays, the chief agent of the Assembly of Communities, the former defending the nobles and the latter protecting the tax base. Over the years, a series of royal declarations and endless petitions sided with one side or another, and the Parlement of Paris got involved, along with other courts. Law suits proliferated on every level.

Blaufarb presents a blow-by-blow account of this 250-year succession of legal debates. He discusses treatises by legal experts and analyzes several communities in detail. During the eighteenth century, local disputes over particular feudal rights multiplied. By the 1770s discourses about liberty, equality, usurpation, and the relics of feudalism were creeping into court cases. The polemics began to resemble class-conscious attacks. The “pre-revolution” of 1787–1789, saw the same surge of revulsion against not only the nobility but also against the oligarchs who ran the province.

Once the Revolution had begun, local leaders applauded the events in Paris, but only after viewing them from their distinctive local perspective. They ratified the renunciations of the night of August 4, but with added provisos retaining the right of Provence to collect its own taxes and, if the Revolution failed, the right to secede and form an independent country. They dutifully inventoried the claims of the abolished lordships, but local people were reluctant to create lists of specific feudal claims, for fear that they might be creating written documents that might someday serve as evidence for a restoration of the lord. Many legal attitudes and judicial practices lived on during the Revolution and surfaced after the Restoration, in some cases as late as the 1830s.

This book succeeds in highlighting the importance of judicial practice as an influence on the revolutionary mood in 1789. The obvious caveat that Provence was a rather unusual province whose experiences may not apply elsewhere needs no comment. Happily, Blaufarb takes seriously the elements of continuity between Old Regime culture and the Revolution. He suggests that under the absolute monarchy “the political” took the form of endless litigation and competitive jockeying for position by judicial bodies because no one but the king had final authority. This “politics” served to maintain equilibrium within the system. It was submerged in the end by the very different participatory politics of the Revolution. I would add that the procès des tailles offers marvelous evidence for the distinctive character of Old Regime society. Political consciousness did not in fact “emerge from a legal fiction—the definition of certain kinds of property” (p. 264). On the contrary, the legal fiction had to exist to justify the superiority of the privileged nobility over the common herd. The land was noble because the owner had seigneurial jurisdiction—a superior power of command—over it. As Jacques Mourgues, a jurist, put it in 1658, “lands exchanged by seigneurs must be noble and feudal and not previously taxable because the stain of roture imprinted upon them has degraded them” (p. 124). The concept of estates being “pure” or “stained” mirrored the concept of superior and ordinary people upon which the whole society was based. In the north, the taille personnelle served the same purpose more directly by attaching the honor to the noble himself, as part of his being. This description of the procès des tailles also illustrates the way seigneurial and collective rights were becoming mere financial assets to be bartered and sold, even as the nobles of Provence were fighting to preserve the “magic” attached to their titles.