TY - JOUR
AU - FORREST, ALAN
AB - 372 REVIEWS OF BOOKS written about the lives of the urban poor. She takes a number of themes including popular belief, crime and deviance and then ambitiously seeks to assess the extent to which the government of Louis XIV succeeded in controlling this potentially subversive world. Perry draws attention to the often draconian measures employed to break the power of the cours des miracles and to regulate begging and prostitu- tion. However, her work suffers because of an attempt to establish an artificial cor- relation between government policing of the capital and attitudes to witchcraft and the supernatural. To state that witch-hunts ended under Louis XIV because 'his police system demonstrated that deviant women really had no power at all' (p. 55) is simplistic and unsupported by the evidence. Overall, therefore, the quality of these essays is mixed and together they do not form a wholly reliable textbook. Yet, many of the individual contributions will be of great value to students, combining an introduction to a growing historiography with scholarly assessments of the effects of Louis XIV's rule upon French society. Birkbeck College, University of London JULIAN SWANN Dix mille marins face a I'ocean: les populations maritimes de Dunker- 
TI - Reviews of Books
JF - French History
DO - 10.1093/fh/6.3.372
DA - 1992-09-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/reviews-of-books-4AR03fQUyF
SP - 372
EP - 374
VL - 6
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -