S tephen A. L azer . State Formation in Early Modern Alsace, 1648–1789

The study of state formation in early modern France has a long and distinguished history. Much of that research, and the often-heated debate it has provoked, has been focused upon the relationship between the central institutions of the monarchy, in Paris or Versailles, and the periphery. Traditionally, attention was focused on the role of the intendants and the pays d’élection with the assumption that they represented a more modern and unified administration, which, pace Alexis de Tocqueville, prefigured that of the nineteenth century. Elsewhere, the so-called pays d’états in, for example, Brittany, Burgundy, or Languedoc, where provincial representative bodies continued to meet, were presented as the vestiges of a medieval past and at best as an obstacle to a more efficient administration. Thanks to a generation of scholarship, that picture has been substantially modified, and the provincial estates are now seen as effective administrative institutions in their own right, working...

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