An Economy of Violence in Early Modern France: Crime and Justice in the Haute Auvergne, 1587-1664.

As its title announces, this book is about an economy of violence, an "endless, small-scale economy of provocation and riposte" (p. 231) that defined the world of private justice in the Haute Auvergne between 1587 and 1664. Like most historians of early modern crime these days, Greenshields knows that analyses of violence and "criminal" activity are not greatly aided by rigorous distinction between person and property. Instead, he invokes the very useful heuristic concept of "psychic property," or "all that a person possesses, mentally or physically, that can be violated: honor, dignity, space, possessions, and the physical person." (p. 2) It is the defense of this attribute, invariably, that Greenshields perceives behind all violent interaction.

To understand "the nature, causes, functions, and repression of violent criminality" (p. 9) during this period, Greenshields exhaustively mines his key sources: court records of various jurisdictions, and above all, the reports (proces verbaux) of the officers of the royal mounted constabulary, the marechaussee. Wisely avoiding quantifation of criminal activity, Greenshields instead interprets its meaning by employing the now familiar method of close analysis of multitudes of specific incidents. In teasing meaning from his sources, he brings a functional understanding of violence (which may give some historians pause) as a "release from painful circumstances," a "purgative." (p. 45) No doubt this is why he devotes his first chapter to a description of the harsh physical conditions of the 17th-century Haute Auvergne.

Greenshields explores the "varieties of crime" and a sociology of violence (who committed violent acts, and against whom). He concludes that almost always violence was directed toward social inferiors or against equals, but never upward, except when servants were vicariously violating enemies of their masters.

All of this is informative, if not terribly surprising to historians of early modern criminality; more novel is Greenshields's take on the position of "the state" in the economy of violence. For him, the state is just another interested party, if an enormously powerful one, wanting vengeance for an affront: "like others dishonored, it wanted to teach the offender a public lesson, and to restore the honor or the order that its self-regard demanded, to demonstrate to all that its extensive claims were justified and must be recognized." (p. 173) Indeed, for Greenshields, this desire for vengeance was immense because "the psychic property of French kings in our period was vast and growing." (p. 173) Such assertions are tantalizing, and cry out for elaboration, the more so when we consider that Greenshields tells us his book is about one stage in the "long slow evolution from private to public justice, or more properly, in the seizure and centralization by the state of the power of vengeance." (p. 1) It is thus all the more puzzling that he concludes by saying that there is no clear evidence of a "retreat" of private violence in the lives of ordinary folk. Are we to conclude that public justice and private violence were not really related? That the royal juggernaut of justice, the redoubtable "outsider," had effectively no impact upon the quarrelsome denizens of the Haute Auvergne? The state bulks large in Greenshields's story, as it does in most books on early modern crime, but here its intrusion ultimately is never clearly assessed.

Perhaps the nature of the records in the Auvergne instills Greenshields's caution, but a more expressly comparative approach might warrant a more venturesome conclusion. He suggests that "European research into the history of crime is not yet at the exhaustive stage where ... comparison can produce conclusive results," (p. 14) an assertion that many early modernists will find overly reticent and disappointing. Still, such an exhaustive archivally based study as this one merits, and will surely find, a prominent place in the historiography of violence.

James R. Farr Purdue University