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 | | Assimilation and Acculturation in Seventeenth-Century Europe: Roussillon and France, 1659-1715 (Contributions to the Study of World History) by David Stewart ISBN-10: 9780313300455 ISBN-10: 0-313-30045-3 ISBN-13: 9780313300455 ISBN-13: 978-0-313-30045-5 Hardcover 1997-01-30 Greenwood Press Find Lowest Price |
Editorials | ||
Product Description The province of Roussillon was acquired by France in 1659, just as Louis XIV reached his majority. The region was peopled by Catalans, a group with their own language, religious values, political traditions, and cultural patterns. Louis XIV and his ministers sought to accomplish two goals in the province. First they wanted to compel the Roussillonnais to accept French political supremacy as legitimate, and second they desired to eradicate the Catalan cultural identity in the province. This study examines the means by which the French chose to pursue their goals, and the methods of resistance employed by the inhabitants of Roussillon. It concludes with an examination of why the French ultimately failed to acculturate the province despite their success in asserting their political authority. | ||
Reviews | ||
Careful scholarship Dr. David Stewart has written a solid piece of scholarship, characterized by workmanlike though lively prose and convincing evidence and argumentation. This book should have been more widely recognized for the way it corrobates certain approaches to complex regional idenities in the early modern period (c.f. Linda Colley and Peter Sahlins) as well as for the way it complicates many of our assumptions about the reign of Louis XIV. While we have known for quite some time that Louis XIV was not without failures in his foreign policy, historians have generally characterized his "domestic situation" as stable, peaceful, etc. with little resistance to his centralization of the interior. Stewart makes it quite clear that these views are in need of revision (though he probably could have pointed out more forecefully the significance of his conclusions). The Catalans would tolerate little attenuation of their cultural autonomy. In order for Louis to exercise any political authority in trans-Pyrenean Catalunya, the monarchy was forced into negotiations. So much for absolutism! | ||