The contentious French

The book's twelve chapters function as six pairs. Complementing Chapter 1, Chapter 12 reviews the same problems in the light of the intervening historical analysis. The ten chapters in between pair off by period, one chapter dealing with a particular region, the other comparing the experiences of all five regions during the same period. Chapter 2 takes Burgundy from the beginning of the seventeenth century to near the end of the twentieth. Chapter 3 follows the five regions, and France as a whole, through the same four centuries. The two chapters provide an overview of the changes in social organization and in popular contention that later chapters discuss in detail. Chapter 4 concentrates on Anjou during the seventeenth-century experiences of Anjou, Burgundy, Flanders, the Ile-de-France, and Languedoc. And so on through three more chronologically matched pairs.