Stéphane Durand, Arlette Jouanna, and Élie Pélaquier. Des États dans l’État

Dazzled by the brilliance of Alexis de Tocqueville’s L’ancien régime et la Révolution, scholars have been reluctant to challenge the traditional political and administrative history of France, which has long been dominated by the thesis of centralization, with the monarchy gradually tightening its grip over the provinces. Central to that interpretation was the role of the intendants, who acted as modernizing agents confronting the parochial and frequently self-interested opposition of their provincial subjects. That model continues to find adherents, but it has always possessed an Achilles’ heel in the form of the pays d’états, those provinces that had preserved functioning provincial estates where the administration remained firmly in local hands. To be fair to Tocqueville, he was well aware of the flaw in his argument, and to avoid disrupting his compelling narrative, he had the good sense to write what was, in effect, a separate essay in the form of an appendix discussing the administration of the largest pays d’état, Languedoc. In their enthusiasm for the alluring paradigm of centralization, generations of subsequent historians tended to ignore the warning contained in that appendix and to gloss over the continued existence of provincial estates, which they treated as little more than medieval relics. Thanks to the works of, among others, James B. Collins, Marie-Laure Legay, and Jérôme Loiseau, that interpretation has been substantially revised. Far from appearing moribund, the provincial estates in Artois, Brittany, and Burgundy, in particular, remained vibrant, often innovative, and highly acquisitive of new powers and responsibilities, especially in the eighteenth century, when they began to look more like the administrative future in the eyes of would-be reformers than the increasingly unpopular intendants.

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