Heller refutes Roland Mousnier's thesis that early modern France was a society of orders in which most people knew and accepted their status in society. This concept of order certainly had meaning for the sixteenth-century elite because of aristocratic domination over land and people, but it is not clear that this was also the view of the commoners. Heller maintains that for peasants, craftsmen, and merchants the decline of the French economy started at the beginning rather than the middle of the sixteenth century. This resulted in unrest which spread from town to countryside, culminating in...
Heller refutes Roland Mousnier's thesis that early modern France was a society of orders in which most people knew and accepted their status in societ...
