The language of citizenship in early modern France: Implications of the droit d'aubaine

A study of the development of the concept of national citizenship in early modern France. A model of citizenship based in a combination of Roman law and the feudal droit d'aubaine appeared in France by the early sixteenth century. It grew out of the legal mechanism of naturalization operative under the royal aegis from the mid-fifteenth century. According to this model, all citizens, whether born or naturalized, enjoy civil rights not available to foreigners; chief among these was the right to own property and dispose of it by last will and testament. All citizens, having the same rights, were understood to be in some sense equal in spite of the hierarchical nature of French society.;This model of citizenship fell into abeyance during the seventeenth-century dominance of absolutist political theory. The state was identified with the person of the monarch, and the citizen was confounded with the subject, whose sole duty was to obey authority. Citizens lost freedoms they had previously enjoyed, and those who differed from authority in any way, as did the Huguenots in religion, were likely to lose the privileges of citizenship entirely.;The 1697 entrance of instruction in French law into university curriculum allowed the jurists of the Enlightenment to rediscover the citizenship schema of their Renaissance predecessors. The tradition of French citizenship influenced both Montesquieu and the Encyclopedie. The citizenship legislation of the Revolution embodied many of the ideas first enunciated two hundred years before.;Sources include published and unpublished juristic writings of the fourteenth through eighteenth centuries, unpublished naturalization records, and modern French doctoral dissertations.