Local conflict, local ties: Society and the state in seventeenth-century Auvergne

"Local Conflicts, Local Ties: Society and the State in Seventeenth-Century Auvergne" is a regional study of order and disorder. It argues that a cultural current privileging personal and private power, local social regulation, and personal connections of patronage and family affected the way institutions of the developing state were used by people in the province. Ordinary people, venal and municipal officials and nobles appropriated state functions for their own ends and assimilated them into their own habits of operating. By doing this, people negotiated conflicts between the official culture of royal authority and an unofficial culture.;Ordinary practices by which people appropriated control over their immediate affairs were rooted in a wider early modern culture where bargaining and negotiation helped order everyday life and manage conflict in social relations. The habits of bargaining and the practices that managed conflict were thus a form of collaboration in maintaining order, but were increasingly viewed by the monarchy as competing with it for both money and power. The more the monarchy viewed provincial practice as disorder, the more ordinary practices contested royal authority.;Many of the same practices that the King and his representatives targeted as disorderly contributed to larger-scale eruptions of revolt in the Auvergne. This is because the conflict between principles of the developing state and habits of the local culture that erupted during revolt was the same conflict that was routinely mediated and managed by bargaining practices in ordinary times.;During rebellions these ordinary practices and, with them, the conflict itself shifted from the ordinary to the extraordinary when focused collectively by more than one social group at a common opponent. Rooting practices of revolt in structures of ordinary life recognizes that eruptions of revolt are in fact extensions of the ordinary; this, in turn, permits us to locate the political opposition expressed in revolts in less extraordinary ways of negotiating royal authority and see the ways that people engaged in political struggle.