Unnaturally French

Peter Sahlins' latest book is impressive and meticulously researched. The study of foreigners and citizenship in France has been burgeoning over the past two decades and Sahlins makes a major contribution here. He argues that, in the later eighteenth century, the ideas and practices of French nationality law mutated from the absolutist conceptions developed in the seventeenth century into a recognisably modern, political notion of citizenship. French subjects had long been differentiated from foreigners by legal distinctions, the most important of which was the droit d’aubaine, by which foreigners could neither inherit nor bequeath legacies in France. There was also the notorious ‘naturalisation tax’, imposed by the cash-strapped Louis XIV on foreigners and their descendants in 1697. From the cultural groundswell of the mid-eighteenth century, however, there arose new ideas of citizenship, which emphasised the citizen as a participant in public life and in civil society. Consequently, the definition

Citizenship · Immigration · Nationality · Naturalisation · Political science · Politics · Sociology · European Political History Analysis · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Law