Unnaturally French - by Peter Sahlins (Hardcover)

About the Book

In his rich and learned new book about the naturalization of foreigners, Peter Sahlins offers an unusual and unexpected contribution to the histories of immigration, nationality, and citizenship in France and Europe. Through a study of foreign...

Book Synopsis

In his rich and learned new book about the naturalization of foreigners, Peter Sahlins offers an unusual and unexpected contribution to the histories of immigration, nationality, and citizenship in France and Europe. Through a study of foreign citizens, Sahlins discovers and documents a premodern world of legal citizenship, its juridical and administrative fictions, and its social practices. Telling the story of naturalization from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, Unnaturally French offers an original interpretation of the continuities and ruptures of absolutist and modern citizenship, in the process challenging the historiographical centrality of the French Revolution.Unnaturally French is a brilliant synthesis of social, legal, and political history. At its core are the tens of thousands of foreign citizens whose exhaustively researched social identities and geographic origins are presented here for the first time. Sahlins makes a signal contribution to the legal history of nationality in his comprehensive account of the theory, procedure, and practice of naturalization. In his political history of the making and unmaking of the French absolute monarchy, Sahlins considers the shifting policies toward immigrants, foreign citizens, and state membership.Sahlins argues that the absolute citizen, exemplified in Louis XIV's attempt to tax all foreigners in 1697, gave way to new practices in the middle of the eighteenth century. This "citizenship revolution," long before 1789, produced changes in private and in political culture that led to the abolition of the distinction between foreigners and citizens. Sahlins shows how the Enlightenment and the political failure of the monarchy in France laid the foundations for the development of an exclusively political citizen, in opposition to the absolute citizen who had been above all a legal subject. The author completes his original book with a study of naturalization under Napoleon and the Bourbon Restoration. Tracing the twisted history of the foreign citizen from the Old Regime to the New, Sahlins sheds light on the continuities and ruptures of the revolutionary process, and also its consequences.

Review Quotes

Historians have, almost by definition, a fascination with transformations. Peter Sahlins is clearly no exception. Sahlin's superb new book on Old Regime France explores two related 'passages': one an alternation in personal identity regularly accomplished almost entirely through routine paperwork, the other a change in the relationship between subjects and the state that even the Revolution of 1789 could not fully secure. Together, he argues, these incommensurate transformations shaped what is meant to be French across the dividing line of the early modern and modern eras.... This book should become a standard work for students of French history and, indeed, for all historians concerned with how to write the history of immigration, foreignness, nationality, and citizenship before the age of passports, work permits, and border patrols.

There can be no doubt that this is a book of major significance.... Wide in scope, thoroughly researched, brilliantly argued, and lucidly written, this work tells the story better than it has ever been told before and constitutes the most substantial integral history of early modern French naturalization and citizenship to date.

This book, destined to be a classic, raises important questions on the nature of the absolute and revolutionary state and on the citizenship revolution that Sahlins dates to the 1750s. The contradictions inherent in the absolute state are illuminated in the jostling between fiscal imperatives and commercial interests and in the contest between international public law and private civil law.... Grounded in the archives, this magisterial work sits at the intersection of legal, social, and political history but does not neglect the international dimensions. This book will appeal to professional historians in a number of fields. Case studies from the archives enliven the book as clerics struggle for benefices, some of the Protestant diaspora seek inheritances, lawyers construct legal fictions, the desperate resort to lies, diplomats deal with the intended and unintended results of international agreements, kings assert their authority, and revolutionaries debate the meaning of citizenship.

This is a detailed, meticulous study that should shift the paradigms of the study of citizenship and nationality.

About the Author

Peter Sahlins is Professor of History at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of Boundaries: the Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees; and Forest Rites: the War of the Demoiselles in Nineteenth-Century France; and coauthor, with Jean-François Dubost, of Et si on faisait payer les étrangers? Louis XIV, les immigrés et quelques autres.