The Language of Citizenship in the French Religious Wars
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 16608102 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Charlotte C Wells (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1999 |
| Volume | 30 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 441-456 |
| Publication date | 1999-06-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Sixteenth Century Journal (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0361-0160 • E-ISSN: 2326-0726 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.2307/2544712 |
| OpenAlex | W2497778960 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
This article traces the evolution of ideas about citizenship in the ideological conflicts of late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century France. It documents the uses of the word citoyen itself in political literature intended to appeal to a wide audience, emphasizing the pamphlet literature of the religious wars. Results of the study show that the various parties involved in the civil strife employed citoyen in ways that reflected their beliefs about what membership in the French state really meant. Nonetheless, an evolution in the meaning of the word can be discerned: from being simply a synonym for bourgeois, citoyen came to also indicate membership in the national-as opposed to local-community. Finally, the article suggests how the employment and understanding of citoyen reflected the growth of absolutist ideology in the early seventeenth century. THE EVOLUTION OF MEANINGS ATTACHED TO THE WORD CITOYEN in the France of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, roughly 1560 to 1615, is worth examination. These years constituted a watershed in the development of French state and society. The French Renaissance in law and literature reached its height with an unprecedented interest in native history, language, and legal customs. The French intelligentsia began to seek the seeds of Gallic greatness in sources unique to France itself, moving beyond the Italian Renaissance's dependence on ancient Greece and Rome. The movement produced such works as Etienne Pasquier's Recherches de la France, Fran~ois Hotman's Antitribonian, an attack on Roman law as inappropriate for the unique culture of France, and the unrivaled French poetry of Pierre de Ronsard and the Pleiade.Nhat such thinkers drew from Classical sources, they adapted to reflect French values and understandings. A sort of intellectual and artistic nationalism constituted major thought trend of the time. The concept of national citizenship appeared as a manifestation of this type of thinking.Jurists working with the legal process of naturalization began to write about what it truly meant to be French, and how that status was to be achieved. They based their thinking upon the ancient Roman laws of citizenship and upon the regulations of the city-states of Renaissance Italy, adapting them by considering the entire realm of France to be one great city, and the citizen, a member of the national corporation, exactly analogous to the bourgeois on the local level.1 The result of their work, while an intellectual innovation, was not the all-inclu
Citizenship · Linguistics · Political science · Politics · Sociology · European Political History Analysis · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity
| Citations per year | 0.12 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2000 - 2004 (5) |
| Highly cited | No |