Law and Citizenship in Early Modern France.

This carefully crafted book traces the evolution of citizenship as a legal category in France from the late Middle Ages down to the Revolution. Far from being a modern invention or a mere memory from classical antiquity, citizenship according to Wells was in fact a longstanding, vital tradition that developed in Italian cities during the High Middle Ages, whence it spread to other areas of Europe. Wells examines this Italian background as well as the important role played by canon lawyers who; working out of Roman law, constructed a quite malleable understanding of what it meant to belong to a polity. Analogies between the family and city, when applied to the broader, more amorphous term patria, deepened the meaning of citizenship in France, particularly during the tumult of the Hundred Years War. So too did the respective importance of birthplace, heredity, and individual choice.

Wells then analyzes the practice of citizenship in France from the fourteenth through the mid-sixteenth centuries, highlighting the delicate balance between a citizen's rights and duties. She approaches this topic by considering the laws affecting foreigners, particularly the droit d'aubaine and naturalization procedures. Economic considerations bulked as large as political ones in shaping a foreigner's rights to hold property and/or office. Using court cases from the Parlement of Paris and legal treatises, she builds a richly nuanced discussion of the practice and theory of citizenship. In the writings of sixteenth-century legists such as Rene Choppin and Jean Baquet, becoming a citizen reflected, at its basis, a relationship between the individual and the broader community, whereas in the work of Jean Bodin and later seventeenth-century commentators, it came to signify a personal relationship with the king. Thus, in the "absolutist" seventeenth century, the Renaissance tradition of active citizenship became transformed into a more passive practice of royal service.

Equally interesting was the changing significance ascribed to religion. In the sixteenth century, in part because of the crown's longstanding reliance on Swiss mercenaries, being a Calvinist did not in itself invalidate an individual's claim to French citizenship, despite rising calls after 1560 to define the bon francais as necessarily Catholic. By the early seventeenth century, however, it became increasingly recognized in law that an individual's loyalty to the monarchy required, among other things, a shared faith. The revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 enshrined this confessional partisanship into a sweeping royal edict that effectively stripped resident Huguenots of their standing as citizens, with all the liabilities that entailed regarding marriage, property, and officeholding.

Finally, during the Enlightenment, the aubain laws fell into desuetude as discussions of citizenship tipped the balance decisively in favor of individual rights as opposed to duties, framing their elaboration - particularly during the Revolution - in constitutional terms best expressed in the Code Civile. As a result, the theory and practice of citizenship prevailing in the modern nation-states represent an amalgam of often contradictory elements inherited from the past, elements that help to explain the unstable nature of the boundaries that have long defined communities.

MICHAEL WOLFE Pennsylvania State University, Altoona