Law and citizenship in early modern France

Scholars of French history have long maintained that the modern French notion of citizenship - including the concept that citizenship endows one with certain civil rights - is a product of the Enlightenment. But in Law and Citizenship in Early Modern France, historian Charlotte Wells argues that many of the ideas that found their way into Enlightenment tracts in fact had their roots in the French Renaissance.

Wells shows how an understanding of the droit d'aubainethe legal disabilities of foreign-born residents of the French kingdom - helps to identify the implied rights of native citizens. She then describes how such sixteenth-century jurists as Jean Bacquet, Rene Choppin, and Jean Bodin combined Roman law and feudal principles into an organized concept of citizenship.

Through an examination of key seventeenth-century trials, Wells demonstrates how French "citizens" were gradually transformed into "subjects" during the absolutist reign of Louis XIV. A century later, however, jurists and such writers as Diderot and Montaigne rehabilitated earlier notions of citizenship, thus providing the foundation for further developments in political and legal theory.