This book uses the Breton experience to address two fundamental historiographical issues: the meaning of absolutism and the nature of early modern French society. Drawing on economic, social, and institutional approaches, Professor Collins develops an integrated analysis of state-building in France.

The classes and their interests are analyzed first, in an examination of the Breton economy, and then the social system and the political superstructure that preserved it. Finally, Professor Collins addresses the question of order itself. How did the elites preserve order? What order did they wish to preserve?

His analysis suggests that early modern France was a much more unstable, mobile society than previously thought; that absolutism existed more in theory than in practice; and that local elites and the Crown compromised in mutually beneficial ways to maintain their combined control over society.

They imposed a new order, one neither feudal nor absolutist, on a society reexamining the meaning of basic structures such as the relationship of the family and the individual, the role of women in society, and property.