8 - Village Politics and Vendetta

Summary

Communal politics is an important and still largely unexplored aspect of social and political relations under the Ancien Régime. This chapter attempts to get at the village view by means of a vendetta which has left a rich trail of archival sources. We get an invaluable and rare insight into non-elite politics before 1789 that goes beyond the standard historical conventions of peasant resistance and rebellion, shedding light on villagers’ motives, deliberations and divisions, as well as their capacity to organise, use the law and exploit the protection offered by local lords and officials. The story that emerges is not simply one of resistance to the royal fisc, centre against the periphery, or the people versus the nobility. Rather, the demands of the state after 1635 divided local society among itself and led to faction and violence within the corps politique. While in the short term these internal divisions posed a challenge to traditional local order, they paradoxically offered an opportunity for the state and its agents to intervene as arbiters, an opportunity that was realised by Louis XIV’s redeployment of the intendants after 1661.