Between Crown and Community: Politics and Civic Culture in Sixteenth-Century Poitiers

The sixteenth century was an important period of transition in France, in which antagonistic religious beliefs led to prolonged civil wars and a growing state apparatus competed with medieval notions of political authority and the social order. Poitiers, a midsized provincial capital, actively experienced these tensions. Early known as a center of Reformed belief, it became a stronghold of ultra-Catholic sentiment by 1575. In examining sixteenth-century Poitiers, Hilary J. Bernstein argues that civic governments and the French monarchy enjoyed a mutually beneficial and reinforcing relationship rather than an antagonistic one; that disparate urban groups shared a political language for defining the identity and interests of the city that helped to balance the exclusive nature of urban government; and that French provincial cities did not suffer inevitable decline at the hands of the developing state but, instead, continued to help define the nature of early modern political culture. Though Poitiers continued to celebrate the traditions and institutions of local rule, it sought throughout the century to maintain a strong bond with the monarchy. Bernsteins meticulous research in the rich archives of Poitiers allows her to analyze early modern rhetorical culture and reveal the processes of daily decisionmaking. Using contemporary printed sources, she compares Poitiers to other cities and draws general conclusions about royal policies toward provincial cities. Between Crown and Community illustrates in precise and sometimes dramatic fashion the actual performance of politicsthe interaction of political identities, rhetorical strategies, and ritual practices with the civic traditions of the premodern urban world.