La sociabilité villageoise dans l'ancienne France: Solidarités et voisinages du XVI^e au XVIII^esiècle by Jean-Pierre GuttonReview by: John B. Cameron, Jr.The American Historical Review, Vol. 85, No. 4 (Oct., 1980), p. 895Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1868932 .

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Modem Europe 895

theless, within the limits he sets for himself, Buck- land's research is thorough, his analysis keen, and his judgment sound.

I)AVII) W. MILLER

Carnegie-Mellon University

JEAN-PIERRE GUT-rON. La sociabilite' villageoise dans I'ancienne France: Solidarites et voisinages du XVI' au XVIIO siecle. (Le Temps et les Hommes.) Paris: Hachette. 1979. Pp. 294. 65 fr.

For some years there has been a need for a good synthesis of recent important work on village life in Old Regime France. Jean-Pierre Gutton has pro- vided us with that synthesis. His modest-sized book will give the nonspecialist some excellent insights into the sociabilite of French peasants.

The book's coverage is more modest than its title at first indicates. It is in fact a summation of village soczabilite during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with occasional forays into the fifteenth and sixteenth and very rare references to the middle ages. But even that is a staggering undertaking, for what the French mean by sociabilite is nothing less than the entire anthropology of village life.

Gutton's book will not provide many new in- sights for the specialist in Old Regime social his- tory-nor is it so intended. His main thesis is that peasant life had for centuries been centered on vil- lage communities that provided a nearly complete universe for their members. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, most of these com- munities were weakened under the dual attack of statism and the Counter Reformation.

Gutton summarizes the social structure of peas- ant communities and discusses various forms of families to be found (a reality far more complex than the "extended-nuclear" dichotomy so beloved by sociologists), internal polity, and relations with state and church. I found the discussions of family structure, village government, tax collection, the na- ture of the seigneunie, and the changing role of the church especially well done. There is a great deal of noteworthy information given by means of well- chosen examples. Indeed, a good many lectures on European social history will be rewritten after read- ing this book. To take only one example, Gutton destroys that cherished belief that the typical parish priests were "of the people," in large part promising young peasants who made it up the social ladder. As it turns out, this was rarely the case. In the dio- ceses of Tarbes, La Rochelle, and Autun in the sev- enteenth century and that of Strasbourg in the eighteenth, the parish priesthood was mainly of bourgeois or noble origin. In lower Auvergne in the eighteenth century 10 percent were sons of rich la- boreurs and the remaining 90 percent sons of magis- trates, merchants, or well-to-do artisans. For those

not conversant with the research of the past decade, Gutton's book is filled with such revelations. Above all it conveys a sense of the enormous complexity of village sociabilite from region to region.

There are two modest criticisms to be made of the book. First, Gutton is uneven in his treatment of the regions of France. His own monographic re- search has been concentrated in the Lyonnais, and he naturally seizes upon that region for the greatest number of examples. Some regions rarely get men- tioned. Second, very little research by non-French- men is cited. Both of these criticisms are minor be- cause to push them would be to demand a different book rather than critique this one. La sociabilite vil- lageoise is not the final summation. It is a modest be- ginning, but one that deserves to be widely read. In- deed, I hope that some publisher sees fits to translate it, for the book would be even more valu- able for advanced undergraduates and others who are not comfortable reading in French.

JOHN B. CAMERON,JR.

University of Southwestern Louisiana

JACQUELINE-ILUCIENNE LAFON. Les Deputes du Commerce et l'Ordonnance de Mars 1673: Les juridictions consulaires, principe et competence. Preface by JEAN IMBERT. Paris: Editions Cujas. 1979. Pp. ix, 153.

The deputies of commerce represented the interests of trade and industry before the Council of Com- merce, created in 1700, and the Bureau of Com- merce that supplanted the council and lasted from 1722 until the Revolution. There were twelve depu- ties, and they were selected from the upper ranks of the merchant aristocracies in the leading com- mercial cities of eighteenth-century France. Their function was to advise royal commissaires in the council or bureau on a variety of economic, finan- cial, and administrative issues affecting French mer- chants.

Jacqueline-Lucienne Lafon, a student of com- mercial and public law, examines the role of the deputies in the interpretation and possible reform of Colbert's commercial ordinance of 1673. Her most important primary source is the F'2 series ("com- merce et industrie") at the Archives Nationales, which contains a subseries devoted to the Council and Bureau of Commerce. As a first step toward a general study, she has written a short monograph on the relations between the deputies and the "con- sular" law courts that, though initiated in 1563, looked back to the commercial ordinance as their main charter. The sixty-seven juridictions consulaires consisted of part-time judges called "consuls," who were in fact merchants drawn from the most pow- erful merchant corporations. They had competence over mercantile and business litigation, with the

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