Coercion, Conversion and Counterinsurgency in Louis XIV’s France

This is a study of the domestic application of armed coercion during the reign of Louis XIV. It examines the coercive aspects of tax collection, the royal response to tax revolts, and the use of force to convert the king’s Protestant subjects and to wage a devastating counterinsurgency campaign against Protestant rebels in the mountains and plains of Languedoc. Relying heavily on archival sources, the study demonstrates that both the coercive inclination of Louis XIV and the coercive capabilities of the French army have been overstated. This raises questions about some common assumptions regarding the role of the army in the projection of state power and its contribution to the process of state formation in Early Modern France.

“At one level, the book is an interesting read expounding aspects of day-to-day life several hundred years ago. But more important, it succeeds in its campaign to demonstrate that the armies of Louis XIV have been the subject of much exaggeration of both their abilities and their commitment to coercing the population of late seventeenth-century France into new ways. I imagine that _Coercion, Conversion and Counterinsurgency in Louis XIV's France_ will become a corrective reference for the period.” Tom Lewis (Department of Defense, Australia) in H-War (April, 2008). “...scholars already familiar with seventeenth-century France will gain the most from this work, but all readers will come away appreciating more fully the difficulties of using royal troops as tools of coercion in the age of absolutism.” Jamel Ostwald in Journal of Military History, Oct 2007, Vol. 71/4

Roy L. McCullough, Ph.D. (2005) in History, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, is a Project Manager with the Defense Policy Analysis division of Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) in Mclean, Virginia.