Unnaturally French : Foreign Citizens in the Old Regime and After / Peter Sahlins.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Sahlins, Peter, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Noncitizens--France--History.

Noncitizens.

Immigrants--Government policy--France--History.

Immigrants.

Naturalization--France--History.

Naturalization.

Citizenship--France--History.

Citizenship.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xiv, 454 p. :) ill., map ;

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press, [2018]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

In his rich and learned new book about the naturalization of foreigners, Peter Sahlins offers an unusual and unexpected contribution to the histories of immigration, nationality, and citizenship in France and Europe. Through a study of foreign citizens, Sahlins discovers and documents a premodern world of legal citizenship, its juridical and administrative fictions, and its social practices. Telling the story of naturalization from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, Unnaturally French offers an original interpretation of the continuities and ruptures of absolutist and modern citizenship, in the process challenging the historiographical centrality of the French Revolution.Unnaturally French is a brilliant synthesis of social, legal, and political history. At its core are the tens of thousands of foreign citizens whose exhaustively researched social identities and geographic origins are presented here for the first time. Sahlins makes a signal contribution to the legal history of nationality in his comprehensive account of the theory, procedure, and practice of naturalization. In his political history of the making and unmaking of the French absolute monarchy, Sahlins considers the shifting policies toward immigrants, foreign citizens, and state membership.Sahlins argues that the absolute citizen, exemplified in Louis XIV's attempt to tax all foreigners in 1697, gave way to new practices in the middle of the eighteenth century. This "citizenship revolution," long before 1789, produced changes in private and in political culture that led to the abolition of the distinction between foreigners and citizens. Sahlins shows how the Enlightenment and the political failure of the monarchy in France laid the foundations for the development of an exclusively political citizen, in opposition to the absolute citizen who had been above all a legal subject. The author completes his original book with a study of naturalization under Napoleon and the Bourbon Restoration. Tracing the twisted history of the foreign citizen from the Old Regime to the New, Sahlins sheds light on the continuities and ruptures of the revolutionary process, and also its consequences.

Contents:

Frontmatter

CONTENTS

TABLES

PREFACE

Introduction: Citizenship, Immigration, and Nationality Avant La Lettre

PART ONE. FOREIGNERS & CITIZENS IN EARLY MODERN FRANCE

CHAPTER ONE. THE MAKING OF THE ABSOLUTE CITIZEN

CHAPTER TWO. THE LETTER OF NATURALIZATION IN THE OLD REGIME

CHAPTER THREE. THE USE AND ABUSE OF NATURALIZATION

PART TWO. A SOCIAL HISTORY OF FOREIGN CITIZENS, I66o-1789

CHAPTER FOUR. STATUS AND SOCIOPROFESSIONAL IDENTITIES

CHAPTER FIVE. GEOGRAPHIC ORIGINS AND RESIDENCE

CHAPTER SIX. TEMPORAL PATTERNS OF NATURALIZATION

PART THREE. THE CITIZENSHIP REVOLUTION FROM THE OLD TO THE NEW REGIME

CHAPTER SEVEN. FROM LAW TO POLITICS BEFORE THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

CHAPTER EIGHT. NATURALIZATION AND THE DROIT D'AUBAINE FROM THE FRENCH REVOLUTION TO THE BOURBON RESTORATION

CONCLUSION. ENDING THE OLD REGIME IN 1819

APPENDIX 1. SOURCES OF THE STATISTICAL STUDY OF NATURALIZATIONS, r66o-r790

APPENDIX 2. TREATIES WITH FRANCE ABOLISHING OR EXEMPTING FOREIGNERS FROM THE DROIT D'AUBAINE, I753-I79I

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (p. 421-445) and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 26. Mrz 2019)

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9781501718489

1501718487

OCLC:

1080549345