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The Eusebius-Jeromian tradition of universal chronicle, as transmitted in twelfth-century Normandy via Sigebert of Gembloux, embodied an understanding of time (chronographia) as framed by the succession of the political order (imperium). Whereas earlier scholars attributed the twelfth-century success of Sigebert's chronicle to its chronological precision rather than its political ideas, this thesis shows that the Eusebius-Jeromian tradition, as transmitted to twelfth-century Normandy, hinged on a political understanding framed by the ebb and flow of political order. By analysing the wider textual community of Sigebert's chronicle in Normandy, the thesis addresses Robert of Torigni's (1106-1186) Chronography, the Mortemer continuation, the Ourscamp continuation, and John of Salisbury's (1120-1180) Historia Pontificalis. Norman and Norman-linked chroniclers actively engaged with the political implications of Sigebert's chronicle, manipulating its conceptions of time, political order, and empire to match the political realities emerging in twelfth-century Normandy and Europe. Robert of Torigni, along with the Mortemer and Ourscamp chroniclers, elaborated a unitary narrative of the past to legitimize Henry II's hegemony after the civil war. The Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Norman, and the more dubious Galfridian British pasts were normalized within the succession of time since the Creation and elevated as crucial stages within the economy of Salvation. John of Salisbury, member of the Angevin court and, later, exiled by the outburst of the Becket dispute, recognized the political implications of Sigebert's chronicle and wrote his Historia Pontificalis as a hybrid continuation and, at the same time, as an opposed reaction to Sigebert's chronicle. Because of the politico-chronological dimension of the Eusebius-Jeromian tradition, its Norman and Norman-linked continuators elaborated sophisticated textual projects which provided a political reconstruction of the order of time and propagated a unitary vision of universal history matching the political realities emerging in twelfth-century Normandy and Europe.

This thesis uncovers and analyses Gregory, Bishop of Tours’ attitude towards the philosophical and theological concepts of the fear of God and demonically-inspired fear. It presents a new contribution to the history of Gregory of Tours and the Merovingian World, the intellectual and theological history of the wider late antique west, the history of emotions, and the history of fear. Chapters one and three use the Vulgate and a selection of theological literature from those late antique writers whose views drastically shaped the doctrine of the Church in Gaul and perspectives of Gregory of Tours, to establish what the wider intellectual attitudes towards the fear of God and those associated with demonic figures were, and to show how they developed from the fourth to the sixth centuries. Chapters two and four use Gregory’s textual references to the fear of God and those associated with demonic beings, in his Ten Books of Histories, books of Miracles, and The Life of the Fathers, to argue that he used these fears to participate in the long-standing tradition of debating Christian paideia and the formation of the virtuous self.

This thesis examines the French Company of the Indies ('Compagnie des Indes', 1664-1769) as a vehicle for state-making in India and France. The French Company was always much closer to its metropolitan state than its English or Dutch rivals. Existing scholarship has cast this state influence as a debilitating weakness for the Company’s finances and trade, yet this thesis shows how the entanglement of state, commercial and religious interests proved a dynamic factor in the Company’s political interventions in the Indian subcontinent. By writing sovereignty into our understanding of the Company, this thesis thus provides a new explanation for French territorial expansion in India, a history that has been largely ignored in recent years. It employs the tools of social and cultural history in novel contexts to examine the creation of Company sovereignty in a wide range of sources, including private and official correspondence, legal records, missionary accounts, journals, ships’ logs, newspapers, travel writing, maps, and material culture. In doing so, it demonstrates how the Company was permeated by a diverse array of interests that shaped its state-making processes in specific ways, from royal ministers in Versailles to Luso-Indian widows in Bengal. It argues that this porosity helped shape the emergence of a corporate political economy driven by the accumulation of land revenues, which led to the articulation of a new kind of imperial power and sovereignty. Using the neglected history of a French trading company, this thesis tells a story that is at once global and local. In doing so, it provides a fresh perspective for understanding both the Old Regime and early colonial India.

Lawyer and royalist, political prisoner and polemicist, Pierre de Belloy (c. 1550-1611) had the misfortune to live through interesting times. During the 1580s, he became the leading Catholic apologist of the Protestant heir-presumptive to the throne of France, Henri of Navarre. Belloy suffered imprisonment in the Conciergerie and the Bastille for his controversial political writings, the most famous of which was the Apologie catholique of 1585. After his escape in 1591, he became a royal representative, as avocat-général, to the Parlement of Toulouse. This thesis uses a combination of archival, manuscript, and printed primary sources to better understand this minor but not insignificant figure in the history of political thought. It reconstructs his formation in the society of royal office-holders in Toulouse as well as his later speeches as avocat-général to the Parlement. In so doing, it connects Belloy’s political thought, particularly his Gallican concern for royal jurisdiction, to his social background. This thesis also shows the importance of Belloy’s voice during the 1580s for his writings on the Salic Law and on the inexcommunicability of the King of France. Although Belloy is known to historians as a theorist of absolute kingship, his writing on obedience and resistance is more notable for its manipulation of Étienne de la Boétie’s La servitude volontaire than for any theory of sovereignty within it. With its dual concern for the intellectual content and social context of Belloy’s political writing, this thesis is a significant study of the place of ideas in the society of early modern France.

Warfare and violence in the post-Roman West have attracted much interest, and historians have used the insights of social anthropology and literary theory to interpret the evidence. To date, however, psychological and behavioural aspects of violence in late antiquity have been relatively neglected. As a result, the question of how ‘warrior cultures’ consistently produced individuals who were enthusiastic participants in ancient warfare, has not been properly explored. This thesis explores the warrior culture of the post-Roman Frankish kingdoms, through three sequential phases. First, by reviewing a range of modern literature on the causes and consequences of violence, the shortcomings of present assumptions about violence in this period – which tend to interpret it in strategic terms – are brought into relief. Violence is re-conceived as a uniquely powerful experience with lasting psychological effects on participants, victims and witnesses. And violent behaviour, including participation in warfare, is shown to be an outcome not just of culturally-bounded strategic thinking, but also of psychological and behavioural adaptation that comes about through experience. Second, the thesis puts the warrior culture of the Frankish kingdoms into historical perspective by looking at the the emergence of the Franks and other military groups of the late-Roman West. This section engages with the debates about the collapse of the Western Empire and the formation of the Frankish kingdoms, focusing on the evidence for violence and warrior subcultures in the fourth and fifth centuries. It is argued that the northern frontier was a hotbed of violent experiences and behavioural profiles, where militant subcultures, stimulated by Roman military activity and demands for manpower, were producing a surfeit of willing fighters prior to the Frankish takeover. Finally, the largest section of the thesis examines the evidence for the culture of violence in the post-Roman Frankish kingdoms through a detailed analysis of Lex Salica and the Histories of Gregory of Tours. It is argued that these are valuable sources of information for understanding the warrior classes and their violence. Through close attention to the language and evaluations of violence in these sources, some aspects of contemporary attitudes and experiences of violence are reconstructed. And the mechanisms by which warriors were psychologically and behaviourally conditioned to embrace the horrors of battle are brought into relief.

This thesis identifies the archaeological and non-archaeological signatures of rural Christianization in the French department of the Yvelines. It questions the roots of Christianization from the influence of villae and Gallo-Roman cult sites to settlement development, and Gallo-Roman and early medieval necropoleis; it also identifies patterns, ruptures, continuities, and discontinuities as well as historical sequences of Christianization after Antiquity. I have created maps for each step to analyze spatial patterns and determine blank spots in the distribution map; this exercise also allows the identification of potential early churches. The thesis further discusses the role of monasteries across the early medieval to medieval periods as well as their influence on settlement development, and questions parish growth and parish networks. Special attention is paid to less well-researched areas such as prieurés-cures, proprietary churches, and leprosaria. I also explore the main players of early and continued Christianization – lords, saints, and bishops, but without neglecting the ‘ordinary' people. Finally, this thesis identifies gaps in the current research on rural Christianization in Gaul/France, and debates the processes, character, and significance of late and slow Christianization. These research questions are examined with the help of an extensive Gazetteer of sites which includes published archaeological and historical data.

This thesis examines the extensive political pamphleteering campaigns engendered by the rebellions of the princes in France between February 1614 and April 1617. Situated between the periods of rule of two larger-than-life figures of French history - Henri IV and ArmandJean du Plessis, cardinal-duc de Richelieu - who continue to monopolise historical research, the pamphleteering campaigns and the rebellions which gave rise to them have received relatively little attention. Such scholarly neglect is unwarranted, for the printed pandemonium of 1614-1617 was comparable to that of the Wars of Religion and the Frondes in intensity, and the political characters and events in this period would set the stage for the dramatic factional struggles throughout Louis XIII's personal reign. The thesis begins with an investigation into the underlying causes of the princely rebellions which will serve as an important reference point with which to contextualise and analyse the pamphlets. Chapter two reappraises the characteristics of the pamphleteering campaigns and discusses the often-overlooked question of why political persuasion was even necessary during the rebellions, and how it was compatible with the unique political and social structures of seventeenth-century France. Chapter three explores another unacknowledged aspect of French political pamphleteering; it demonstrates how the contemporary obsession with the law of lèse-majesté and the loss of aristocratic honour shaped the production, distribution and contents of certain types of pamphlets. Chapter four examines the princes' recourse to the timeless and cynical propaganda tactics of demagoguery and mockery, and reconsiders if their pamphlets reflect the true nature of their ideology and political agendas. Chapter five explores how the government and the loyalists responded to the princes' literature. It illuminates how they circumvented potential diplomatic backlashes, gave lie to the princes' accusations and played on noble psychology. Chapter five will then reveal, for the first time, how the loyalist pamphleteers used disinformation to nudge the political nation into eschewing the princes' rebellions. In drawing together all these strands, the thesis will not only present a fresh and more nuanced understanding of the interdependence between politics, government and pamphleteering in 1614-1617, it will throw light on the ethos of the French great nobility and minister-favourites and the nature of princely rebellions. In the process, it elucidates the entangled relationship between power and the media as well as public and private interests in the politics of the era.

The Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris is an anonymous Middle French historical narrative relating events in and around Paris from 1405 to 1449. The Journal offers important insights into one of the most turbulent periods of Paris’ history, encapsulating the Armagnac-Burgundian civil conflict (1407-1435), the Lancastrian occupation of the capital (1420-1436) and the reassertion of Valois authority culminating in the expulsion of the English from Normandy in 1450. Through a concentrated analysis of the Journal supported by a new edition of the surviving manuscripts, this thesis examines how Parisians discussed these events, employing theoretical approaches to the public sphere, political communication and public opinion. While these ideas are typically reserved for early modern phenomena, this thesis contends that the Journal demonstrates the operation of medieval public spheres, framing widespread commentary upon political issues beyond the upper echelons of society that reinforced a nascent collective Parisian identity. The first part of the thesis situates the Journal and its author in their social, political and professional contexts, drawing upon codicological information and internal evidence. Rather than being an isolated reflection of Parisian conversation, the Journal captures an interrelation between the perspectives of the so-called ‘Bourgeois’ and his audience. This is demonstrated in the thesis’ second part, that examines the Journal’s descriptions of three key aspects of political communication in late medieval Paris, namely the official media employed by civic and royal institutions, civic ceremonies, and rumours circulating in the city. Each indicates the ways in which Parisians appropriated, contested or rejected political messages, but also how the Bourgeois himself arrogated authority by selectively reproducing instances of opinion that privileged Parisian perspectives. Finally, this thesis assesses the content of these discussions, analysing the Bourgeois’ reactions to warfare, taxation and government, determining how theoretical considerations of these issues influenced urban political discourse.

This thesis responds to the historiographical focus on the trope of the Albigensians and Waldensians within sixteenth-century confessional polemic. It supports a shift away from the consideration of medieval heresy in early modern historical writing merely as literary topoi of the French Wars of Religion. Instead, it argues for a more detailed examination of the medieval heretical and inquisitorial sources used within seventeenth-century French intellectual culture and religious polemic. It does this by examining the context of the Doat Commission (1663-1670), which transcribed a collection of inquisition registers from Languedoc, 1235-44. Jean de Doat (c.1600-1683), President of the Chambre des Comptes of the parlement of Pau from 1646, was charged by royal commission to the south of France to copy documents of interest to the Crown. This thesis aims to explore the Doat Commission within the wider context of ideas on medieval heresy in seventeenth-century France. The periodization “medieval” is extremely broad and incorporates many forms of heresy throughout Europe. As such, the scope of this thesis surveys how thirteenth-century heretics, namely the Albigensians and Waldensians, were portrayed in historical narrative in the 1600s. The field of study that this thesis hopes to contribute to includes the growth of historical interest in medieval heresy and its repression, and the search for original sources by seventeenth-century savants. By exploring the ideas of medieval heresy espoused by different intellectual networks it becomes clear that early modern European thought on medieval heresy informed antiquarianism, historical writing, and ideas of justice and persecution, as well as shaping confessional identity.

This dissertation is a study of the reception of the Jesuit-trained Italian author, Giovanni Botero (1544–1617) in early-seventeenth century England. It examines how Botero was translated for an English audience, and reconstructs the debates to which Botero was relevant and helped stimulate in late Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Part I examines the publication history of Botero’s books in England and finds that the translators and printers edited Botero significantly. Its primary focus is thus on who was translating Botero and for what purposes, and who was printing and selling the resulting books. It establishes that the most prominent of Botero’s books in England were the Della grandezza della città (1588), Della ragion di stato (1589), Relazioni Universali (1591–1595). Chapters I–III accordingly consider these works in turn. Chapter IV then briefly turns to consider Botero’s other works, including I prencipi (1600). Part II then turns to look at Botero’s readers. Four further chapters consider Botero’s reception in relation to four broad themes: geography and travel (Chapter I); climate and situation (Chapter II); colonies and commerce (Chapter III); and responses to Machiavelli (Chapter IV). Each of these chapters examine Botero’s contributions to these themes, other contemporary authors whom he was read alongside, and how and why people were reading him to speak to these debates. Ultimately, the backdrop to this story is English colonialism in the Americas and Ireland and a growing interest in understanding the political significance of trade. The dissertation therefore contributes to our understanding of the history of early modern political thought, translation and reception, and English-Italian intellectual exchange in the early modern period. Ultimately, the thesis tells two stories – one about the importance of this Italian author in seventeenth-century England, the other about the intellectual origins of certain key themes in British political thought of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The historians writing in the Carolingian Empire, with a few important exceptions, frequently ascribed events in recent history to God. Where they have been noticed at all, these statements of God’s agency have usually been explained as political propaganda, to demonstrate God’s favour towards the reigning dynasty. Alternatively, they have been explained by the legacy of late antique Christian historians, from which this language supposedly derived. This thesis aims to demonstrate that this language was a distinctive and innovative feature of the emerging tradition of Carolingian history writing and is best explained in religious terms. It argues that Carolingian historians reflected the emphasis on God’s agency found throughout contemporary culture and that they deliberately reshaped the Christian language bequeathed by their Roman, Anglo-Saxon, and Frankish predecessors. It offers a text-by-text analysis of how God’s agency functioned within each major Carolingian history, to further show the versatility of this language over the period. Taken together, these texts suggest that Carolingian historians wanted to teach their audiences about God’s agency and its implications for their own beliefs, identities, and behaviour. As a result, these histories and their depictions of God’s agency can be seen as a distinctive contribution to Carolingian religious renewal. This thesis thus aims to contribute to our understanding of the relationship between religion, history, and culture in early medieval Europe.

Despite decades of scholarly scrutiny, the politico-economic exploits of vikings in and around the Frankish realm (c. 750-940 CE) remain - to a considerable extent - obscured by the constraints of a fragmentary and biased corpus of (near-)contemporary evidence, conveying the impression that these movements were capricious, haphazard, and gratuitous in character. For this reason, rather than selectively assessing individual instances of regional Franco-Scandinavian interaction, the present study approaches the available interdisciplinary data on a cumulative and conceptual level, and combines this with the innovative use of GIS to detect and define overall spatiotemporal patterns of viking activity. Set against a backdrop of continuous commerce and knowledge exchange, this overarching survey demonstrates the existence of a relatively uniform, sequential framework of wealth extraction, encampment, and political engagement, within which Scandinavian fleets operated as adaptable, ambulant polities - or 'hydrarchies'. By delineating and visualising this framework, a four-phased conceptual development model of hydrarchic conduct and consequence is established, whose validity is substantiated by its application to three distinct regional case studies: the lower Rhine-Meuse-Scheldt Basin, the Seine Basin, and the Loire Basin. As well as facilitating the deductive analysis of viking activity for which primary evidence has thus far been ambiguous or altogether absent, the parameters of this abstract model affirm that Scandinavian movements across Francia were the result of prudent and expedient decision-making processes, contingent on exchanged intelligence, cumulative experience, and the ongoing individual and collective need for socioeconomic subsistence and enrichment.

Fashion merchants were acknowledged as the highest status trade and dynamic agents for change within the production and consumption of women’s clothing in the eighteenth century but their position in the nineteenth century has not previously been considered. This thesis examines how the trade evolved in Paris between 1795 and 1855 considering factors such as gender, finance and location in the context of political, economic and social change. The findings challenge the idea that significant change only occurred before 1789 or after 1860. Fashion merchants used novelty, luxury and taste to produce fashionable merchandise, particularly headgear, from a range of authentic and substitute materials that stimulated consumer demand across different social levels. Engaging with debates about gender and the public sphere, the investigation demonstrates that, although there were successful male merchants, women continued to dominate the sector. Married women did not retreat from business, instead their husbands could be helpmeets and the métier was often the focus of the family economy. Continuity was found in the use of credit in trade, the high status of the fashion merchant, the importance of reputation and the value of location and premises. Change was shown in production, sales and promotional strategies including advertising and the increasing importance of headwear to French industry was acknowledged by its inclusion in the industry exhibitions of 1851 and 1855.

This work provides the first ever transnational intellectual history of the globalized notion of esprit de corps, disputedly defined as a sometimes beneficial, sometimes detrimental mutual loyalty shared by the members of a group or larger social body. As a polemical argumentative signifier, ‘esprit de corps’ has played an underestimated role in defining moments of modern Western history, such as the French Revolution, the United States Declaration of Independence, French imperialism, British colonialism, the Dreyfus affair, the World Wars, the rise of administrative nation-states, or the deployment of individualism and corporate capitalism. The birth of the term is evidenced in eighteenth-century France, both in military and political discourse. ‘Esprit de corps’ is shown to be an important matter of political and philosophical debate for major historical agents (d’Alembert, Voltaire, Rousseau, Lord Chesterfield, Bentham, the Founding Fathers, Sieyès, Mirabeau, British MPs, Napoleon, Hegel, Durkheim, Waldeck- Rousseau, de Gaulle, Orwell, Bourdieu, Deleuze…), but also for less renowned authors, scientists, officers, militants, entrepreneurs, administrators, or politicians (e.g. the British Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union). A comparative methodology is proposed, based on the longue durée examination of large corpora of primary sources in French and English, via digitized archives and a focus on explicit mentions of ‘esprit de corps’ in their rhetorical, philosophical, and historical context. The approach is tentatively called ‘histosophy’: the long-term survey of a large issue within a small compass (Walker, 1985), the compass being the invariable observed signifier, and the large issue the multifarious relation between universalism and particularism in the context of globalization. An interpretation is eventually elaborated to account for the fact that ‘esprit de corps’ is today an incantation of widespread global use, especially in corporate discourse, with laudative essentializing denotations.

In this thesis, I ask whether catastrophe can be said to have a particular temporality, and how a society’s sense of its own temporal situation can be developed through representations of catastrophe as the beginning or end-point of a past, present, or even a future epoch. My argument rests on the claim that the act of naming one’s era and defining it against others is not just reactive, but is in itself productive. This is especially the case with narratives of catastrophe, which often have a prophetic or proleptic element, enabling new retrospective visions and revisions of the past. Critical work responding to fears around climate change is currently enjoying a period of vibrancy, and my thesis speaks to these contemporary concerns. It both draws on this field, and emphasises that catastrophe is historically constructed by focusing on the late eighteenth century, a time perceived by many contemporaries as being on the cusp of radical, catastrophic change. I ask how writers active in this period conceived of their epoch, expressed anxieties about its instability and conceptualised the possibility of era change – and how they imagined the role of their own texts across ruptured time. I focus on the interaction between different timelines: of universal progress, of ancient-medieval-modern, of the nation. Often, these are in tension. National time, notably, begins in the moyen âge figured as catastrophic to progress. I access these temporal concerns through writing or art which employs sombre elements. A sombre aesthetic, emerging in the eighteenth century, facilitates the exploration of catastrophic motifs or spaces, and is particularly suited to the depiction of the three major spaces which denote the passage from Ancient to Modern via a supposed Dark Age: ruins, gothic castles and state prisons. The sombre offers a powerful form for the exploration of a Dark Age as past, still partially ongoing and/or as threateningly located in the future.

This thesis examines the rhetorical and opportunistic strategies used by the Duchess of Châtillon, a seventeenth-century female aristocrat, to negotiate both the political and the diplomatic spheres of Louis XIV’s court. This work is based on her correspondence, most of which still remains unpublished. The analysis of these strategies reveals that it was possible for some women, through the use of informal means, to have influence in the male-dominated political arena.

Louis XIII's reign has long garnered historians' and popular interest. The king of Cardinal Richelieu and the three musketeers, Louis is traditionally viewed as having presided over the development of the French state and facilitated the rise of absolutism. Yet his court has received comparatively little attention. Traditionally understood as the reflection of its master, Louis XIII's court has been assumed to be backwards and inconsequential. On the contrary, this thesis contends that Louis's court experienced substantial institutional development and expansion over the course of his rule. Neither Louis nor Richelieu was the principal instigator of this growth. The main drivers were the courtiers themselves who sought to expand their prerogatives and to find new ways of profiting from their offices. The changes that were initiated from the top down were not determined by a broad, sweeping agenda held by Louis or his minister-favourites but rather by immediate needs and contingencies. Cardinal Richelieu, nonetheless, recognised that Louis's court really mattered for high politics in this period: the royal households produced key players for the governance of the realm, either gravitating from court office to broader governmental office, or holding both simultaneously. Furthermore, Louis's court helped to bind the realm together, not just because it acted as a hub attracting people from the provinces but also because of the time it spent in the provinces. Richelieu, however, struggled to control this court — so vital to the direction of the French monarchy in this period — because its members were so active and vibrant. They shaped the cultural and social environment surrounding and associated with the court because they were heavily invested in the court as an institution. Indeed, the court did not only serve the needs of the monarch: courts could only operate because a large group of people had a stake in ensuring that they functioned. By establishing the importance of Louis XIII's court for the direction of the French monarchy, and his courtiers' role in moulding it, this thesis seeks to throw light on humans' fundamental relationship with power.

This thesis examines the relationship between religion and politics in France by looking at the cult of Saint Louis under the bourbon kings of the ‘ancien regime', from the accession of Henri IV in 1589 to the abolition of the monarchy in 1792. As both a historical king whose reign was held to be the epitome of ideal Christian kingship and as a canonised saint of the church, Saint Louis was positioned at the very nexus of this relationship and his cult and memory had an important place in the political, religious and artistic culture of Bourbon France. Following a period of relative neglect since the Hundred Year's War, the cult was revived under Henri IV and Louis XIII as part of their ‘recatholicisation' of the French monarchy. Saint Louis began to emerge as a prominent theme in royal representation and as a symbol that could be used by flatterers throughout the bourbon period. Celebration of his feast was part of the texture of sacral monarchy that helped bind the monarchy to various elite groups - ecclesiastical, lay and military. His praise was generally harnessed to the glorification of his Bourbon descendants. However, there were limitations. His feast was never celebrated across the kingdom as comprehensively as the monarchy had hoped, and enough ambiguities remained in the relationship of sanctified ancestor to living descendant to allow opponents of the monarchy to use Saint Louis's idealised image to criticise the reigning king. Moreover, broader changes in culture and intellectual life rendered a cult that had been re-established in the era of Catholic reform increasingly out of tune with contemporary sensibilities by the middle of the eighteenth century. Ultimately, this study of the cult of Saint Louis is a contribution to debaters about the nature of royal sacralty and the extent of both ‘resacralisation' and ‘desacralisation' across the period. It shows the ambiguities and difficulties created for the French monarchy by the weight of its sacral identity.

The dissertation examines the role that landscape gardening and the ‘irregular’ English-inflected style played in the attempts by senior figures in the French monarchy to re-cast their identities in modern terms and re-negotiate their roles in political life. Analysing surviving vestiges, contemporary descriptions and iconography, it reconstitutes the form, evolution and reception of the gardens of the princes of Conti and Condé, the ducs of Orléans, Chartres, and Choiseul, and Marie- Antoinette as well as those built by the Royal Buildings Administration on behalf of Louis XVI. It questions to what degree in the initial phases of its development the ‘new mode’ was shaped by the new contestatory spirit of the ‘Republic of Letter’s and contemporaneous developments on the public sphere such as the arrival of Englishstyle commercial pleasure grounds, the increasing popularity and importance of manuscript newsletters, and shifts in the way in which the middling public viewed and interacted with hereditary élites. The thesis proposes that at a time when the high aristocracy and the crown were at odds over the constitutional structure of the kingdom, new practices in landscape gardening allowed dissident aristocrats to leverage their visibility for political ends. With the advent of Louis XVI and the campaign of reforms launched by his ministers, the dissertation tracks how the meanings of the new mode changed, particularly with its adoption by the queen and the crown in the second half of the 1770s. In the context of the crown’s attempts to adapt and modernise absolutism, the dissertation questions to what extent the adoption of English-inflected landscapes aesthetics eased the acceptance of English-style political practices and mentalities? Thus how did landscape gardening play an integral role in the articulation, negotiation and assimilation of change in the last decades of the absolutist regime?

Drawing on sociological conceptualisations of the formation of group identities, this study investigates the formation of a ‘French’ identity in the sixteenth, seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Whilst championing a symbiotic relationship between theoretical frameworks and the historical case study, I consider how a twin discourse of barbarity, both forged and recorded in the first French monolingual dictionaries, was invested in a social practice in order to form an elite and restricted intra-European ‘social identity’, which would later be rearticulated as a national identity at the end of the eighteenth century. My main thesis is that the methodisation of – what I typologise as – Gallocentric travel to distant extra-European lands and the accounts resulting from such travel was mirrored in the culture of travel to England and travel writing, itself a practice employed as a further vehicle in the assertion and consolidation of the language of ‘Frenchness’. To evidence this, I examine how the language of barbarism, first employed in the sixteenth century in relation to Eastern and Amerindian peoples, was reattributed to the lower English classes in the seventeenth century to construct a sense of superior ‘Frenchness’ within Europe and with it, a French ‘social identity’. In turn, I study how in the wake of the Glorious Revolution exponents of a counter-culture of anti-Gallocentric travel challenged this particularised narrative on ‘Englishness’ and looked to upturn the language of barbarity. Overall, my study drives towards putting forward a fresh analysis of Voltaire’s 1734 Lettres philosophiques. I argue for a new reading of this canonical text in light of my study of the language of ‘social identity’ and cultures of (anti-)Gallocentric travel and travel writing. In this, I suggest Voltaire’s ambivalence in the face of increasingly ‘enlightened’ thought.

From its inception, the French Wars of Religion was a European phenomenon. The internationality of the conflict is most clearly illustrated by the Protestant princes who engaged militarily in France between 1567 and 1569. Due to the historiographical convention of approaching the French Wars of Religion as a national event, studied almost entirely separate from the history of the German Reformation, its transnational dimension has largely been ignored or misinterpreted. Using ten German Protestant princes as a case study, this thesis investigates the variety of factors that shaped German understandings of the French Wars of Religion and by extension German involvement in France. The princes’ rich and international network of correspondence together with the many German-language pamphlets about the Wars in France provide an insight into the ways in which the conflict was explained, debated, and interpreted. Applying a transnational interpretive framework, this thesis unravels the complex interplay between the personal, local, national, and international influences that together formed an individual’s understanding of the Wars of Religion. These interpretations were rooted in the longstanding personal and cultural connections between France and the Rhineland and strongly influenced by French diplomacy and propaganda. Moreover, they were conditioned by one’s precise position in a number of key religious debates, most notably the question of Lutheran-Reformed relations. These understandings changed as a result of a number pivotal European events that took place in 1566 and 1567 and the conspiracy theories they inspired. This combination of influences created a spectrum of individual interpretations of the French Wars of Religion. The military campaigns of the years 1567-69, far from being motivated by political or financial opportunism, were the product of these individual interpretations.

Jeanne de Penthièvre (r. 1341–1365) inherited the duchy of Brittany, but was challenged by her collateral relatives in a lengthy civil war and ultimately defeated, though she remained politically active until her death. This thesis uses her career as a case study of the ways princely power was expressed and implemented in the fourteenth century, and includes a critical biography and an edition of the 1341 legal brief for her succession. It focuses especially on official records such as legal arguments, charters, orders, and seals, and incorporates the close reading of individual texts alongside broader linguistic and quantitative analyses. The high nobility of fourteenth-century France has been relatively underserved by this type of examination of the influences of rank, relationships, gender, and conflict within the focused context of an individual’s life, an approach which demonstrates the flexibility of non-royal political authority. Jeanne’s participation across different areas of government (such as finances, bureaucracy, warfare, and diplomacy) reveals a variable balance of power between Jeanne and her husband as spouses and as co-rulers. The terms used to establish her power in the official acta suggest further that simple descriptions of power often used in modern scholarship on noblewomen do not adequately characterize or explain late medieval views of these dynamics. The legal arguments advanced in defence of Jeanne’s claim to the duchy reveal disagreements about the technical relationship of the duke/duchess to the rest of Franco-Breton political society. Jeanne’s ability to assert her authority was particularly important in the contested circumstances of her rule, and her adherence to or deviation from contemporary expectations was important in establishing her legitimacy. Contemporary Breton and French chroniclers, particularly Froissart, complement this perspective with their reactions to her rule; Jeanne’s reputation was informed by the multilayered standards attached to her positions as heiress, wife, and duchess.

This thesis re-evaluates the chronology of Lower Normandy’s integration into the duchy growing around Rouen from the tenth century onwards. The introduction argues that modern accounts of Normandy’s development remain dependent on the works of Dudo of Saint-Quentin and Flodoard of Rheims. Difficulties with these authors and alternative approaches to Normandy’s early history are identified. It is argued that regional distinctions throughout the later duchy hindered efforts to bring about political cohesion. Chapters One and Two identify the ninth-century Breton occupation and early tenth-century Scandinavian settlement of Lower Normandy as the twin sources of ongoing regional divisions. The early dukes’ interest in and influence over the west are also called into question. Chapters Three and Four instead posit that ducal interest in Lower Normandy was a product of the late tenth century, with direct intervention following in the favourable circumstances of the early eleventh century. Ducal success in this period depended upon the co-operation of regional aristocrats and ecclesiastical institutions and continuing constraints on Rouen’s influence and authority are emphasised. Chapter Five argues that Robert the Magnificent was a more assertive ruler, who actively strengthened ducal authority in Lower Normandy in spite of renewed opposition. Chapter Six considers how rebellion against William the Conqueror in 1047 reveals growing local interest in the conduct of ducal government. Victory allowed William to consolidate ducal authority in Lower Normandy, encouraging further expansion beyond its borders. Local landholders, however, resultantly received little direct ducal patronage, including scant reward in the post-Conquest settlement of England. In conclusion, while Lower Normandy had been brought firmly under ducal control by 1087, it is argued that it was only under William’s son, Henry I, that the region’s aristocrats acquired any major influence over ducal policy and secured an equal position within the wider Anglo-Norman nobility.

This thesis explores the influence of French royal image-making on English monarchies at the turn of the eighteenth century. It investigates the relevance of Louis XIV (r. 1643-1715) to English royal iconography during the reigns of William III (r. 1689-1702) and Queen Anne (r. 1702-1714) across a wide range of source material - from panegyric and portraiture, to medals, sculpture, and architecture. In doing so, it foregrounds the intricate interplay between political communication and different forms of artistic imagination in the early modern period. The thesis conceptualises the relation between post-revolutionary English monarchical image-making and its French counterpart as one of contest with and emancipation from French influence. The specific political circumstances add a particular poignancy to the investigation of this narrative, as the almost continual crises which the English monarchy suffered at the time stand in sharp contrast with the (dynastic) stability of the French monarchy and its highly influential court culture. Despite these elements of rupture and contrast, however, the story of seventeenth-century English monarchical image-making is one of continuity in respect of its gradual disengagement from the French model. In contrast to his immediate predecessors, I contend, William's image-making presents him as Louis's competitor, rather than his imitator. In the course of William's reign, Louis's monarchical model thus turns from model to foil. This development evolves further in Queen Anne's reign, culminating in Louis's mort avant la lettre, as Anne's image-making dispenses with the Ludovican model both as model and as foil. English post-revolutionary image-making, I argue, not only mirrored, but actively contributed to the decline of the Ludovican model, whilst maintaining the figure of the monarch as central to public political discourse. Through the lens of monarchical image-making, therefore, this thesis offers a critical outlook onto late seventeenth-century Anglo-French political and artistic relations.

This study of the term politique during the French Wars of Religion (c. 1562-98) argues that it is a keyword in the sense that it is is active and actively used in French explorations of the political, in the forming and undermining of collective identities in a period of civil crisis, and in the self-fashioning gestures of a shifting political class. I sample and analyse a range of texts - from treatises that form part of the canon of early modern French political writing (such as Bodin's Six livres de la Republique [1576] and the Satyre ménippée [c. 1593]) to anonymous polemical pamphlets - all of which feature prominent uses of the term politique. Certain of these sources gave rise to a longstanding historiographical impression that politique referred, in the period, to a coherent third party in the religious wars as well as to a related kind of expertise and its practitioner. This thesis builds on and extends recent work showing that there was no such party and no one in the period who directly identified as politique. Rather than seeking to identify the 'real' politiques or to establish a corrected definition of the term as used in sixteenth-century French, I argue that the term is strikingly and increasingly mobile across the period, coming at times to refer to mobility itself in conceptions of politics and political action. Dialogue emerges in the thesis as a key conceptual arena and discursive mode for writers attempting to work out what they and others mean by the term politique. I use philological and word-historical methods to examine writers of the period who seek to determine what makes a good or bad politique, to present themselves as politique, or to condemn politiques as morally bankrupt, and - in some cases - to do all of the above in the same text. Almost every text I analyse in the thesis offers its own definition of politique, and attempts to be definitive, but I show that all these attempts to make the reader recognise the 'true' meaning of politique are extending the drama rather than concluding it.

Between 1659 and 1689, northern Italy was generally at peace, having endured almost three decades of continuous war from the 1620s. The Peace of the Pyrenees of November 1659, between the French and Spanish crowns, seemed to offer the young Louis XIV an opportunity to gradually subvert Spanish influence over the small princely families of the Po valley. The Houses of Farnese, Este, and Gonzaga-Nevers, respective rulers of Parma, Modena, and Mantua-Monferrato, had all been allies of France at various points in the Franco-Spanish War (1635-1659), but had gained scant reward for their willingness to jeopardise their own relationships with the king of Spain and the Holy Roman Emperor, despite the promises of material and diplomatic support which Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin had extended to them. As a consequence, they were reluctant to agree to again participate in alliances with France. This thesis examines how Louis XIV gradually came to lose the friendship of these three ruling families, through his arrogant disregard of their interests and their ambitions, and also by his contempt for their capabilities and usefulness. This disregard was frequently born out of the French monarch's unwillingness to jeopardise or to undermine his own interests in Italy – in particular, the permanent retention of the fortress of Pinerolo, in Piedmont, as a porte onto the Po plain. But although the principi padani comprehended the reasons for Louis's unwillingness to act as a benevolent patron, they resented his all-too-palpable distrust of them; his entrenched belief that they were unreliable; and his obvious love of war. The rulers and élites of the Italian states believed that Louis would undoubtedly seek, at some point in his reign, to attack Spain's possessions in Italy, and dwelt in perpetual dread of that day. This thesis provides the account of French policy towards the small Italian states after 1659 which is still absent from the historiography of Louis XIV's foreign policies.

Apart for a few episodes such as the battle of Cravant (1423), the defence of Paris (1429) and especially the capture of Joan of Arc at the siege of Com-piègne (1430), the military aspect of Anglo-Burgundian alliance in 1420-1435 war is little known to general audience. This stage of the Hundred Years War is presented largely as a series of English successes in the 1420s followed by the defeats and setbacks after 1429. The present study aims to uncover this large-ly ignored aspect of one of the most dramatic stages of the Hundred Years War, which at a certain point brought the English to the walls of Orléans – an undoubted peak of their centuries-long efforts to subdue the French kingdom. For the aims of research, the course of the Hundred Years War in the 1420s-early 1430s has to be considered not in the terms of the English fighting against the French but as a struggle of two alternative claims to the French throne, both of them relying on certain support among the French pop-ulation. One of these suggested that the French crown remained with the Va-lois dynasty represented by Charles VII, the other tried to introduce the Dual Monarchy of England and France under the governance of the House of Lancas-ter, as formalised by the Treaty of Troyes (21 May 1420). The role of Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy, the most high-ranking French partisan of the Dual monarchy, as the pillar of the Lancastrian power in France becomes the subject of study. This raises the question of the system of obligations between the duke and the Lancastrian government, the modes of its practical exploitation and the significance of the duke’s contribution to the Lancastrian war efforts. With this in mind, this study provides a chronological reconstruction of Anglo-Burgundian military cooperation in its development by placing it in a wider military and diplomatic context. Having assembled the evidence on the practice of military assistance it proceeds to discussing the most widely em-ployed models of cooperation and interaction between the allies eventually leading to a certain reconsideration of the whole nature of the Anglo-Burgundian alliance. What the research reveals is the scale and continuity of the alliance which retained its importance from December 1419 to September 1435, the significance of the allies’ efforts in supporting each other and variety of its models and, finally, the crucial influence of the military power or weak-ness factor on the diplomacy and politics in France.

The thesis takes the French revue Lignes (1987-present) as its object of study to provide a new account of French intellectual culture over the last twenty-five years. Whilst there are now many studies covering the role of such revues throughout the twentieth-century, the majority of such monographs extend no further than the mid-1980s: the major novelty of this thesis is extending these accounts up until the present moment. It is largely assumed that a reaction against the Marxist and structuralist theories of the 1960s and 1970s led to embrace of liberalism and an intellectual drift to the right in France from the 1980s onwards: whilst largely supporting this account, the thesis attempts to nuance this narrative of the fate of the intellectual left in the following years by showing the persistence of what can be called a politicised 'French theory' in Lignes, and a returning left-wing militancy in recent years. In doing so, it will both reveal under-studied aspects of well-known thinkers, such as Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou, as their thought develops through their participation in a collaborative, periodical publication, and introduce lesser known thinkers who have not received an extended readership in Anglophone spheres. Lignes also argues for the continued persistence and relevance of the thought of a previous generation of thinkers, notably Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot and Dionys Mascolo, and the thesis concludes by examining the potential role 'French Theory' could still have in France. Furthermore, as revues provide a unique nexus of intellectual, cultural, social and political concerns, the thesis also provides a unique history of France from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the 2007 financial crisis and the Arab Spring. Much of the thesis is concerned with contextualising intellectual debates within a period characterised by the moralisation of discourses, a return of religion, the global installation of neo-liberalism and the eruption of immigration as a controversial European issue. From a relatively theoretical and politically stable position to the left of the Parti socialiste, Lignes therefore provides a privileged vantage point for the mutations in French social and cultural life throughout the period.

The prevailing historical narrative of the collapse of Louis XIV's naval power has emphasised the importance of political decision-making, either in the strategic shifts between the guerre d'escadre and the guerre de course, or in the decision to reduce the naval budget in the midst of war in 1694 and 1707. As France faced massive financial overextension and an increasing need to fight for territorial survival in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714), it was inevitable that Louis XIV's government would fund its armies in preference to its naval capabilities. However, a shift in priorities at Versailles does not provide a full explanation for the navy's decline. Recent works emphasise the effectiveness of the state's revenue-raising capabilities and the importance of the fiscal intermediaries who financed royal expenditure. Yet, these connections between French naval power and Louis XIV's fiscal capabilities remain only partially explored and this thesis presents a fresh examination of the navy's financing arrangements. It is argued that the difficulties that Louis XIV faced in maintaining the fleet were rooted in a unique set of issues embedded in the navy's financing mechanism and the way it was managed. The problem was four-fold: the naval ministry consistently overspent its allocated funds; the navy's budget was increasingly underfunded as a result of the finance ministry's mismanagement and also of wider fiscal instability; the naval treasury was not fit-for-purpose since the navy's fiscal intermediaries, the trésoriers généraux de la Marine, lacked the capacity to sustain costly levels of borrowing; and the crown failed to meet the organisational challenges of war by not controlling spending and the activities of the trésoriers. These structural issues surfaced internally early in the war and would be progressively and disastrously exposed by the loss of liquidity and the mounting debts that affected France in the 1700s.

Despite the frequently world-class nature of French funerary monuments of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a period of prolonged social, cultural and military upheaval in France, no English-speaking scholar has studied them in any depth since Anthony Blunt in the 1950s and 1970s. This neglect is partly due to the impact of the iconoclasms, mutilation and destruction of monuments during the sixteenth-century Wars of Religion and the French Revolution in the eighteenth century. In consequence, most literature has focused on a limited selection of high-status sepulchres, mainly preserved in the Louvre and Saint-Denis. Although some of the best works of their kind, these monuments are not representative of sixteenth-century French funerary sculpture as a whole, as they were placed into artificial repositories in the process of revolutionary iconoclasm and post-revolutionary nationalism. In consequence, they have been alienated from their original locations, their architectural frameworks and historical contexts, which distorts their significance and meaning. Drawing upon a much wider database of monuments assembled during an extended research trip, this thesis challenges these preconceptions, demonstrating that France’s early modern sepulchral heritage is richer than previously assumed. By analysing a broader base of samples from a multitude of geographical locations against their historical circumstances and architectural settings, this thesis attempts to reconstruct some of the socio-political and religious contexts which led to noble patrons’ preference of a specific mode of tomb at a certain point in time. Using a chronological approach focusing on key critical events, it promises to provide a fuller understanding of the variety of sixteenth-century tomb sculpture and its significance in French history.

This thesis examines reworkings of the flâneur in France and Britain during the nineteenth century (1806-1869). It suggests that before it was made famous by Baudelaire, this urban observer emerged out of French and British print culture, and of crossings between them. It has endured because it is a protean, composite figure which weaves in and out of literature, journalism and essays. Its roots in print, the thesis argues, fostered a form of cross-cultural pollination which ensured the power and persistence of the figure. Given the metamorphosis of the flâneur from ‘type’ to literary character to ‘critical concept,’ the thesis looks at flânerie as a fluid concept which demands both rigour and a possibility of going astray. My corpus reflects this flexibility since it includes newspapers and physiologies, as well as works by De Quincey, Dickens, Brontë, Balzac and Baudelaire. The thesis is chronologically structured, and begins with a study of the flâneur’s origins, exploring how the early Parisian flâneur of the press and physiologies finds predecessors and descendants in the London press. Chapter 2 demonstrates how the flâneur is rooted in the British and French collective literary imagination and is thus inextricably linked to other gazing figures whose traits he adopts and discards as he moves seamlessly through time. Chapter 3 examines how ever-evolving optical technologies profoundly altered the flâneur’s ‘ways of seeing.’ Chapter 4 is a phenomenological exploration of walking, demonstrating that the flâneur’s gaze is also created through a living, moving body embedded in time and space. The final chapter introduces the concept of croisement, a heuristic device I develop to understand the role of the flâneur as passeur and go-between and re-read the literary history of flânerie as one of constant crossings and crossovers. It concludes that the flâneur’s permanent in-betweenness or ‘out-of-jointness’ makes him ‘contemporary’1 – more capable than others of grasping his own time.

This thesis explores the relationship between lordship and landholding in Anjou, from c.1000 to c.1150, focussing specifically on the effects of power upon that relationship. I consider questions central to lordship: how closely connected was lordship with control of land; to what extent was the exercise of seignorial power characterised by the use of force; what influence, if any, did legal norms have upon the exercise of power? I address these questions over four chapters. In chapter 1, I focus on the consent of lords to grants of land, emphasising the close relationship between lordship and landholding. Chapter 2 looks at claims for services lords brought on their tenants of ecclesiastical lands, and highlights the remedies contemporaries possessed against lordly heavy-handedness. In chapter 3, I explore lordship from the perspective of the tenant by outlining warranty of land, and suggest that warranty ensured the tenant considerable security of tenure. Chapter 4 rounds off the thesis through a detailed discussion of five cases, which I use to elucidate the workings of seignorial power, drawing attention to the interactions between lords and their lay followers. I situate these issues within a framework emphasising competition for control of land and resources, and stress the importance of legal norms in relation to such competition. The thrust of my argument is twofold. First, whilst I stress an environment of intense, sometimes violent, competition over resources, I suggest that the exercise of lordly power was not unlimited, nor was it arbitrary. Instead, ideals of good lordship, together with legal norms, served to act as important restraints upon power. Secondly, I emphasise the need to look at both the short-term and long-term consequences of competition over land, and stress that legal norms were influenced by the former, with an eye to the latter. I therefore stress the capacity for legal innovation and change in eleventh- and early twelfth-century society.

This thesis focuses on the Celestine monks of France, a largely neglected and distinctive reformed Benedictine congregation, at their apex of growth (c.1350-1450). Based largely within the kingdom of France, but also including key houses in the contiguous territories of Lorraine and the Comtat, they expanded significantly in this period, from four monasteries to seventeen within a hundred years. They also gained independence from the mother congregation in Italy with the coming of the Great Western Schism (1376-1418). The study aims view the French Celestines against the backdrop of a vibrant culture of 'reform' within both the monastic estate (the Observants) and the Church as a whole, as well as the political instability and war in France. It will reveal a congregation alive with the passions of their times and relevant within them. Following an introductory section, chapter 1 will discuss the previously unstudied Vita of the leading French Celestine Jean Bassand (d.1445) in depth and introduce the key themes of the subsequent chapters. Chapter 2 will examine their Constitutions, in the process providing perspective on their hyper-scrupulous understanding of sin and the relation of their statutes to the Christian idea of 'reform'. Chapter 3 will look to anecdotal evidence concerning the quality of their observance in practice, as well the spiritual and moral writings of Pierre Pocquet (d.1408), another important Celestine leader. Chapter 4 will begin to establish how and why the order grew, examining records of benefaction (contemporary martyrologies and charters) as well as taking view of the financial (and in the end, moral) difficulties brought by war through the documents concerning the reductions of founded masses at the Paris and Sens houses. Chapter 5 will look at monumental and anecdotal/literary evidence, as well as the works of Jean Gerson, a friend of the order, to further define the cultural impact of the monks.

Pierre de L'Estoile (1546-1611) kept an extraordinary diary and collection in Paris during the Wars of Religion, recording everything from high-political scandals to low-life criminality during this crucial turning point in early modern history. The first extensive study of L'Estoile in any language, this thesis demonstrates how he negotiated and commemorated the conflicts that divided France as he engaged creatively with the rumours, ephemeral prints, poems, pictures, and books that he assembled in his diary and cabinet. It argues that the story of his life and times is the history of the civil wars in the making. While historians and literary scholars depend on L’Estoile’s diaries as an essential source of information, citing him as a mere passive observer, this thesis instead explores his subjectivity and interprets a wide range of hitherto unseen or neglected manuscript evidence that situates him in the Parisian society of royal office-holders and demonstrates his significance in the republic of letters. It follows a microhistorical approach to L'Estoile and his world in order to challenge established interpretations of his sources as evidence of a widespread mentality of eschatological anxiety in sixteenth-century France, instead focusing on L’Estoile’s personal responses to pieces in his collection. In this way, it critiques a common trend in cultural history to roam freely among ‘collective representations’ and argues for the importance of a precise analysis of social context, materiality, and individual subjectivity in reception studies.

Antoine Vallot worked as premier médecin du roi (Chief Physician to the King) to Louis XIV of France from 1652 to 1671. In this position, he participated in some of the most important political and medical developments in early modern France. Yet without a single substantial biography to his name, he remains the least studied of the three successive premiers médecins who cared for Louis XIV during his personal reign. This thesis attempts to rectify this disparity, but not through the means of a traditional biography. Instead, it aims to shed greater light upon Vallot’s career as premier médecin, and his place in the world around him in this role, through an exploration of his interactions with contemporaries. The royal court of France, and the kingdom’s wider medical profession, provide the two main backdrops for this investigation. The relationships which Vallot sustained within these two environments are explored with the help of a broad range of source material, including personal correspondence, archival records from the king’s household and Vallot’s medical record for Louis XIV. Within the source material relating to the royal court, a picture emerges of an extremely prolific physician whose professional popularity contrasted with a distinct lack of social significance. Although this social shortcoming was exacerbated by a tumultuous relationship with the royal medical team, Vallot’s exchanges with some of the court’s most important ministers reveal the achievements he accomplished within another dynamic sphere of court life: patronage. In the kingdom’s medical profession, Vallot kept a measured distance from the heated discussions of his medical contemporaries working beyond the court. Behind this distance, however, lay ambitious plans to secure a uniquely authoritative voice within the medical world as premier médecin. Throughout this investigation attention is drawn to the emerging continuities that can be traced between Vallot’s experiences in the role of premier médecin, and those of his better-known professional successors.

At the end of the twentieth century, Pierre Bourdieu and Umberto Eco were two of the most prominent intellectuals in France and Italy. Yet, in spite of the fact that France and Italy are neighbouring countries and have been, historically, exercising an on-going cultural influence upon each other, there is no systematic comparative study of these two intellectuals. This study responds to this absence by offering, within the framework of an interdisciplinary project, a thorough analysis of some of the key themes of the thought of Bourdieu and Eco. By addressing how Bourdieu’s and Eco’s work contributes to a better understanding of the creative and the interdisciplinary nature of intellectuality, this study explores the following hypothesis: those scholars who become known to the general public as public intellectuals are often interested in exploring and in testing the limits of disciplinary fields. In so doing, they challenge the norms that define academic professionalism and the growing specialisation of knowledge in academia. By highlighting the differences, as well as the similarities in the approaches of Bourdieu and Eco, this study shows that critical engagement is defined by the very disciplinary boundaries and structures it attempts to challenge and question. This study demonstrates that interdisciplinarity does neither exclude nor render obsolete existing disciplines. On the contrary, solid grounding in one discipline facilitates the production of interdisciplinary knowledge. As the examples of Bourdieu and Eco show, disciplines can be transcended only once they are fully mastered. Once fully mastered they appear in their contingency, not as absolute statements but rather as vehicles towards knowledge.

Cardinal Richelieu is traditionally accredited with defeating the power of the grands, the upper echelon of the French nobility, as part of his supposedly successful project for monarchical absolutism. Modern historians have recast Richelieu as a nobleman of his time, who advanced himself within the social and political hierarchies through marriage alliances and patronage. He therefore worked hard to forge alliances with the grands rather than trying to destroy them. Yet his ministry was riven by persistent noble conspiracies and rebellions, which have gone largely without systematic investigation. This study examines the nature and causes of that unrest during Richelieu’s final six years, offering a radical re-assessment of the opposition and the politics of the period. Noble conspiracy was not just a by-product of government by a first minister, but reflected the factional nature of Richelieu’s approach. Factional rivalry was exacerbated by the emergence, after 1638, of a struggle for the anticipated regency. After this, Richelieu took a more hostile approach to his adversaries, forcing them to adopt strong countermeasures in order to preserve their positions. Richelieu’s opponents were surprisingly successful in asserting their independence. As well as enjoying widespread domestic support, they allied with the Habsburg powers to engineer military rebellion, posing a major threat to the Cardinal and undermining the war effort against Spain. The Spanish set their stall out for a long-term war, expecting that Richelieu’s opponents would eventually gain power and negotiate peace on more flexible terms. The ability of the grands to re-assert themselves was still a dominant characteristic of French politics. Richelieu’s legacy, on his death in 1642, was a highly volatile political situation in which success was still a long way off for France. These findings suggest the catalytic impact of Habsburg power on France’s internal divisions, which should consequently be seen as integral to the forging of the ancien régime.

This thesis analyses French policies towards and perceptions of the British colony of Rhodesia, from the immediate aftermath of the Second World War up until the territory’s independence as Zimbabwe in 1980. Its main objective is to challenge notions of exceptionality associated with Franco-African relations, by investigating French engagement with a region outside of its traditional sphere of African influence. The first two chapters explore the development of Franco-Rhodesian relations in the eighteen years following the establishment of a French Consulate in Salisbury in 1947. Chapter One examines the foreign policy mind-set that underpinned French engagement with Rhodesia at this time, whilst Chapter Two addresses how this mind-set operated in practice. The remaining three chapters explore the evolution of France’s presence in this British colony in the fourteen and a half years following the white settlers’ Unilateral Declaration of Independence. Chapter Three sets out the particularities of the post-1965 context, in terms of France’s foreign policy agenda and the situation on the ground in Central Southern Anglophone Africa. Chapter Four analyses how the policies of state and non-state French actors were implemented in Rhodesia after 1965, and Chapter Five assesses the impact of these policies for France’s relations with Africa, Britain and the United States, as well as for the end of European rule in Rhodesia. This thesis argues that France’s African vision began to expand to include Anglophone Africa, not in the post colonial or post-Cold War eras, but immediately following the Second World War, thus challenging the view that France was solely concerned with its own African Empire at this time. Throughout, Rhodesia was intertwined with France’s policies towards Francophone Africa in terms of motivations, methods and men. This, in turn, had far reaching consequences for France’s presence on the African continent, its relationship with “les Anglo-Saxons” and the course of Rhodesian decolonisation.

This study enquires into the construction of a cultural fantasy, the favorite (or royal mistress), in the reign of Louis XIV (1661-1715), and aims to explore the kinds of narrative, the 'scénario pour l’imaginaire', articulated around this figure. A process of crystallization in respect of the favorite, both as word and as literary figure, develops across the late seventeenth century. This process is on the one hand fuelled by the increasing prominence of female favouritism as a political practice during the period, and on the other facilitated by the emergence of new privileged media such as the novel and the 'nouvelle historique'. The favorite, as a new incarnation of the ‘femme forte’, becomes a trope by which anxieties can be expressed: about female power, but also about the monarchy in general. This thesis advances by way of close readings and studies of vast corpora of texts; it alternates – both within and between chapters – between analysis and synthesis. Following the introduction, the first chapter introduces a set of mental landmarks, both semantic and axiological, and explores the dictionaries, treatises and courtly manuals of the time in search of the favorite. The second chapter focuses on the fiction of the 1660s and 1670s, and questions the way in which these texts established elements of definition and recurrent issues related to the staging of the favorite in this period. The third chapter considers the representation of Louis XIV's mistresses, principally through a study of the ballets, poems, letters, memoirs, satires and pamphlets concerned with the Sun King's loves. Its object is to show how the favorite is inserted into the royal mythology. The fourth chapter is dedicated to the first text explicitly and exclusively devoted to the favorite: the Histoire des Favorites (1697) by Anne de La Roche-Guilhen. This chapter attempts to bring to light the tensions underlying the text, while interrogating the determining role of this collection in the process of crystallization explored throughout the thesis. The fifth chapter sketches out the afterlife of the favorite under Louis XV and Louis XVI, and describes the principal evolutions which ensured her survival in the collective imagination.

The story of the French Prophets has gone down as one of the greatest examples of religious enthusiasm in English religious history. It began in 1706 with the arrival in London of three inspired Camisards from Southern France and ended with the foundation of the Shakers in 1747. These Prophets claimed to be possessed by the Holy Spirit and announced the end of the world and Christ’s Second Coming to the local Huguenot community, but rapidly attracted a majority of English speaking followers. Their ecstatic trances and alleged supernatural powers caused a great controversy over the nature of enthusiasm in the ‘Age of Reason’. This thesis examines the significance of enthusiasm in the context of the Toleration Act of 1689 through the particular case of the French Prophets. It argues that enthusiasm meant much more than religious fanaticism in the eighteenth century and that it should be viewed in opposition to the Enlightenment. It takes an thematic approach to enthusiasm in order to reflect the multiple impacts the Prophets had on eighteenth-century England, with each chapter addressing the issue from a different perspective. Chapter one retraces their origins from Languedoc and covers the persecution and exodus of the Huguenots after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 and their arrival in England. The second chapter looks at the Camisards’ belief system and how they fitted in the English religious landscape. Chapter three analyses the social composition and organisation of the group, while the fourth chapter concentrates on their communication and the battle of pamphlets they created. The prosecution of radical dissenters in the post-Toleration era is then discussed in chapter five. Lastly, chapter six examines the medical debate on insanity and the growing perception of enthusiasm as an illness.

This thesis analyses the comtesse de Ségur (1799-1874), France's best-selling children's author, both as a cultural icon and as a historical subject. Although Ségur became the best-selling author for young children in the twentieth century, and a publishing phenomenon, her work has often been overlooked by Anglophone historians. This is because she is perceived to be a part of a school of didactic authors derided as “governesses”, and who are usually characterised as bigoted spinsters, in possession of little in the way of real literary talent. The recent tendency in French academic research has therefore been to play down the comtesse de Ségur's politico-religious agenda, in order to distance her work from that of her colleagues, and to explain her enduring popularity. However, such an approach is based upon a questionable reading of such “governess” authors, and is an indication that Ségur's politics recall a part of their history that many French people would prefer to forget. In contrast, it is the contention of this thesis that the comtesse's work must be understood in the context of the religious antagonisms of Second Empire France. Ségur was closely involved with one of the most influential religious propaganda networks of the Second Empire. The informal nature of their activities meant that Ségur's gender did not prevent her from engaging in the political fray. The thesis examines the immediate production of her work in the context of the Catholic drive to propagate „good books‟, and highlights the importance which the religious revival attached to the child and to children‟s literature; it looks at the myth-making process which generated the comtesse de Ségur as a symbol of ideal Christian womanhood, and the role that this played in the politics of identity in the second half of the nineteenth century; and finally it asks what her legacy has been for feminine culture in France. In restoring the comtesse de Ségur to the intransigent Catholic movement, this thesis brings to light a neglected aspect of the Franco-French culture wars, namely the important contribution made by women authors such as Ségur to the massive surge in religious print culture in the mid-century. It questions the old stereotypes that have long surrounded Catholic women, and shows just how engaged they were in the struggle for the nation's soul that raged in post-revolutionary France.

This thesis explores ceremonial entries in Renaissance France from the perspective of the townspeople who designed and produced them. Existing studies of French entries have tended to see them as expressions of monarchical power, with townspeople coming in submission before the majesty of the king. In contrast, this thesis demonstrates that ceremonial entries were nuanced civic ceremonies which demonstated urban pride and power. Chapter 1 details the weeks of preparations that went into staging a civic reception and the townspeople’s numerous efforts to ensure that the entry was a success. Chapter 2 examines the extramural greeting, where the civic council and other notables came out of the town in procession to greet the visitor and make the formal welcoming speech. The extramural greeting was an important part of the ceremony, as it was the first point of personal contact between the urban elite and the dignitary. The intramural procession is discussed in chapter three. During this part of the ceremony, the dignitary entered through the town gate and processed through the streets until they reached the town’s principal church, where a short service was held. The urban fabric was decorated with flowers, linens, triumphal arches and other decorative structures, while theatrical performances were staged along the length of the processional route. The streets were thronged with ordinary townspeople who had come to both watch and participate in the ceremony. Chapter 4 is concerned with the post-entry festivities, which included banquets, further processions and jousting. The exchange of gifts between the royal guest and the town council was an important element of the post-entry ceremonies, as it was the occasion when the civic councillors could win significant new economic grants for the crown in return for providing a valuable item of silverware.

The thesis outlines a systematic approach for the study of Narbonne. Chapter one presents a methodological analysis for an understanding of the city in Late Antiquity, formulating a tripartite distinction of territorial space on different planes of meaning: nature, containing references to geography and geology; custom, that incorporates meanings derived from archaeology, production and exchange; finally authority, that addresses educated texts of law, religion and power. This categorization is developed in chapters two to six. Chapter two examines the natural, geological evolution of Narbonne, together with the foundational descriptions of the city from Orosius, Hydatius, Olympiodorus and Philostorgius. Chapter three views the transformation of Narbonne from a city in a province of the Roman Empire to another context in a barbarian successor state. The chapter also sets out the part played by the port of Narbonne at the turn of the fourth century in the residence and travels of ascetics and Christian figures like Paulinus of Nola and Sulpicius Severus. Chapter four describes the topography of Narbonne in the fifth and sixth centuries, and the role of early Christianity, ending with a critical assessment of the archaeological research for the period. It also examines late antique archetypal narratives of the city. Chapters five and six assess the current historiography of Narbonne’s place in the development of the Visigothic kingdom, and argue for a new approach to the representation ofNarbonne in the sixth and seventh centuries. The thesis concludes that Narbonne was a regional centre for a territory that had its roots in the post-Roman settlement established in the Ostrogothic Interlude after 507, which eventually drew the city closer to the Merovingian kingdoms in the seventh century, away from any imagined unity with the Visigothic kingdom of Toledo.