Blood and Violence in Early Modern France, by Stuart Carroll. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 200e. xii, 3e9 pp. $110.00 US (cloth).
In offering a new chronological framework for aristocratic violence, Stuart Carroll's latest examination of royal letters of remission potentially shatters the civilizing process paradigm first articulated by Norbert Elias. Carroll argues that aristocratic "vindicatory violence," his term for the feud and the duel, dramatically increased in France between 1560 and 1660. After 1660, violence declined as the aristocratic warrior mentality gradually shifted to Louis XIV's large standing army and officer corps. Until now, historians following ...