Law, Patronage and Municipal Authority in Seventeenth-Century France: The Aftermath of the Lanturelu Revolt in Dijon

摘要

Popular uprisings have attracted the interest of early modern historians but the efforts of local elites to manage their consequences remain largely unexplored. This article examines how Dijon’s municipality negotiated the aftermath of the 1630 Lanturelu revolt. Following the uprising, Louis XIII curtailed Dijon’s privileges, reorganized its municipality, and ordered it to indemnify the revolt’s victims. Over time, however, the avocats of Dijon’s municipal government successfully manipulated the Ancien Régime’s power networks—law, local institutions and clientage networks—to win a restoration of Dijon’s traditional city government, the reduction of damage claims, acknowledgement of the municipality’s innocence and reaffirmation of its contested authority. Lanturelu’s aftermath, often interpreted as an example of the early Bourbons’ growing control over French cities, thus reveals that the latter could remain dynamic political centres in the early seventeenth century and that the state’s expanding apparatus could be used to contest royal authority, as well as extend it.