Putting down a revolt always risks seeing the legitimate use of force degenerate into an excessive and discredited repression, here called domestic state violence. Sergio Cotta's analytical model of the difference between force and violence helps to reveal the significance of various cycles of revolt and repression over three centuries of French history. Oscillations between measured coercive force and domestic state violence divide these three centuries into six stages: early absolutist (1594–1639), Louisquatorzian (1640–75), themistocratic (1675–1789), revolutionary (1792–5), late republican (1797–1802), and liberal authoritarian (1802–71). Continuities existed across all of these stages, such as the recourse to regular troops and summary justice; however, periods of rapid socio-political realignment caused the use of force to become domestic state violence. In order to overcome the alienation this produced, the state created new means of restricting its use of force while still protecting the new social order. The years 1797–1802 constituted the pivotal phase of this process because this was when so many methods of repression developed during the era between early absolutism and the Terror were revived, only now wrapped in the restraints of legal-rational authority. The resulting ‘liberal authoritarianism’ persisted until the 1880s without substantial changes other than growth in the sheer magnitude of repression.

The years immediately after the Glorious Revolution saw the Irish parliament establish itself as an active legislative body. Local government in the country then received something of a fillip, both through legislative action in Dublin, and by reason of the extended period of social and political stability that followed the end of Queen Anne's reign. This essay seeks to outline the responsibilities and functions of the grand jury in Ireland, and thus to establish its position as perhaps the most important component in the governance of provincial Ireland. Further to this it attempts to analyse the social composition of juries through a study of the methods of selection, and the attendant qualification criteria. The available evidence suggests that despite its extensive power and influence, membership of the grand jury was not completely monopolized by the land-owning Anglican elite. Rather, service on the grand jury reached some way down the social scale, and could be undertaken by men from outside the established church. Over time, however, jurors came to be selected from a diminishing pool of candidates : a practice which led to the creation of a largely homogeneous local administrative elite.

The two decades of French rule in the German-speaking Rhineland at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed the dramatic imposition of the sovereign state on a region previously noted for its absence. The successful integration of the new territories into the Republic and Empire depended upon the response of Rhenish elites to the transformation of local government from an accumulation of historical privileges into the lowest administrative tier of the state. Napoleon, more than his revolutionary predecessors, recognized the importance of ‘rallying’ the ‘notables’ in what was a politically inclusive and socially exclusive process. This policy was successful insofar as elites did, in general, rally. Their motivation varied, and the commitment was rarely unconditional. Rhenish notables, long adept at exploiting Old Regime institutions to preserve particular privileges, abused Napoleonic institutions, in order to protect clients and preserve their social position. This helped widen the gulf between the mainly urban notables and the rest of the predominantly rural population, which had fewer legal and institutionalized opportunities for asserting its interests directly. This system of rule proved suited to Rhenish conditions until the rise of party politics in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Contrary to the widespread assumption that in imperial Germany urban affairs were conducted by a homogeneous ‘unpolitical’ notable elite until around 1900, a review of recently published case studies suggests that politics had entered local government by the 1870s. Frequent causes for the politicization of local affairs included confessional divisions, territorial change, or simply the wish of local elites to buttress their own positions. The ways in which liberals in particular took advantage of this emergence of political discourse at the urban level is highlighted by the case of Frankfurt am Main. The city's three liberal parties developed in competition with each other. Each managed to address and articulate the citizens' peculiar grievances with differing degrees of success. By 1880, public life inside and outside the town hall was conducted according to political ground rules, and this was accepted by every party. Against the still prevailing view of a rigid liberalism which after 1874 was in evident terminal decline, the decade after 1866 needs to be recognized as the period in which liberals took charge of municipal government across most of Germany, through the politicization of often highly individual local concerns with astonishing sophistication and flexibility.

Most historians have assumed a fundamental antagonism between Marxism and theism. In practice, the relationship between the two world-views has been far more complex than simple hostility – a complexity admirably illustrated by the experience of the Marxist Parti Ouvrier Français (POF) between 1882 and 1905. While the Marxists of the POF developed a vicious socialist anti-clericalism that made its own original contribution to France's long tradition of anti-religious polemic, they none the less experimented with a rudimentary Christian socialism designed to attract the proletarian faithful, and also developed an agnostic programme of religious indifference which sought to insert the circuit-breaker of class conflict into the highly charged link between militant secularism and Catholic clericalism. This article examines the intricate and, in the end, incoherent, pattern of engagement between Marxist socialism and French religion during the fin de siècle, and suggests that this incoherence contributed to the eventual frustration of the Parti Ouvrier's revolutionary purpose.

This article reconstructs the constitutionalist nationalist critique of the Irish revolution. It employs the writings of Stephen Gwynn, John Dillon, Jasper Tully, and others to illustrate the views of those Irish parliamentarians who were marginalized by the emergence of Sinn Fein as the dominant force in Irish political life after 1918. Stephen Gwynn, in particular, claimed that republican violence could not militate against – indeed exacerbated – the damage done by the failure of the constitutionalist nationalists to grasp the need for compromise over Ulster. Indeed, Gwynn argued that the violence of the Collins era – which has been justified on counter intelligence and broader political grounds – played a major role in shaping the sectarian institutions of the Northern Irish state. Gwynn's reflections on the self-defeating aspects of the Collins strategy are linked to a wider consideration of the role of the British government. This article attempts to qualify a scholarly orthodoxy – that British policy in 1920–2, undoubtedly subject to fluctuations, was incoherent and essentially reactive; instead, it argues that from the spring of 1920, Britain evolved a strategy, dependent on a considerable degree of intelligence success, involving the application of a carrot and stick policy designed to lead precisely to the Treaty compromise of 1921, but available much earlier to any Sinn Fein leadership willing to take it.

This article is based on documents in the archives of the Soviet Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, many of which have not been previously published. This extra material allows one to see the development of Soviet policy at closer hand though there is still much that remains obscure. The correspondence between Litvinov, the Commissar for Foreign Affairs, and Stalin, despite the absence of the latter's answers, is particularly valuable as it further illuminates their working relationship and reveals some of the differences between them. The exchanges between Litvinov in Moscow and the Soviet polpred, Alexandrovsky, in Prague show clearly that the latter was repeatedly cautioned against encouraging the Czech leaders to think that they could rely on the unilateral assistance of the USSR. They reveal, too, the degree to which Litvinov and Potemkin, a deputy commissar, felt that Fierlinger, the Czech minister in Moscow, was misrepresenting the Soviet position in this respect. Additional evidence cited here confirms earlier views that the Soviet leadership was not prepared to act independently of France or outside the League of Nations even when the opportunities for assisting Czechoslovakia were available. The article ends on a cautionary note, pointing out the limitations of the foreign ministry archives as a guide to the inner dynamics of Soviet diplomacy.

There has recently been much debate about social policy in Britain during the Second World War. This article takes up Jose Harris's suggestion that historians should look not at large-scale forces, but at ‘those minuscule roots of idiosyncratic private culture’. As a way into the complex amalgam that comprised ideas on social policy in the 1940s, we look in particular at the report on the evacuation of schoolchildren entitled Our towns: a close up, published by the Women's Group on Public Welfare in March 1943. Of course it is undeniable that one report is unrepresentative of all the many surveys that were produced on the evacuation experience. However, the initial wave of evacuation in September 1939 was the most significant, and the Our towns survey, along with a famous leader article in The Economist, has already received some selective attention from historians. Here we subject the survey to a more intensive examination, looking at the backgrounds of its authors, its content, and its reception by various professional groups. The article argues that it was the apparently contradictory nature of the report that explains its powerful appeal – it echoed interwar debates about behaviour and citizenship, but also reflected the ideas that would shape the welfare state in the post-war years.

The article examines the 1966–70 Labour government's decision to withdraw the right of entry from Asians with British passports who were driven out of Kenya by its ‘Africanization’ policies. It examines the decision within the context of three issues: first, the existence and status of a pledge, allegedly made by Macmillan's last Conservative government, that the Asians' right to enter the UK would be respected; second, a decline in both major parties' commitment to the Commonwealth; and, third, competing ideological strains within the Labour party. The article concentrates on the first of these issues, focusing on an as-yet-unresolved debate between Duncan Sandys and Iain Macleod, both Conservative Colonial Secretaries. Macleod argued that a solemn pledge had been given to the Asians, while Sandys and the Conservative party adamantly denied the claim. In the light of new archival evidence, the article argues that the Asians' exemption from immigration controls, which had been applied to the whole of the Commonwealth, did not result from an explicit commitment by the British government; it was rather the unintended result of the mechanism chosen to restrict Commonwealth immigration in 1962. It was a consequence, however, that was recognized by civil servants at the time of the passage of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act in 1962, and accepted by key figures in the British cabinet, including Duncan Sandys himself. The position taken by Sandys and the majority of the Conservative party in 1968 was, behind the safety of the Official Secrets Act, a betrayal of commitments made and pledges given only a few years earlier. The article concludes by suggesting that the Kenyan Asians' crisis represented both a shift, in the two parties, away from previous commitments to the Commonwealth and, in the Labour party, the triumph of James Callaghan's strand of Labour ideology – nationalist, anti-intellectual, indifferent to arguments about international law and obligation, and firmly in touch with the social conservatism of middle- and working-class England.

The politics of the parish are increasingly attracting the attention of historians of early modern England. The exploration of the depth and extent of popular participation in the process of governance has disclosed sophisticated forms of political organization at relatively humble social levels. The locus classicus of innovation in parish governance is arguably the set of articles drawn up by the chief inhabitants of the Wiltshire community of Swallowfield in 1596. The articles are printed here for the first time. The introduction seeks to place them in their geographical, chronological, and historiographical contexts. In particular, the articles have profound implications for current debates over the nature and meaning of ‘community’, the dynamics of the growth of the state, and the scale and impulse of the reformation of manners.

Revisionist and post-revisionist historians alike still discuss politics in nineteenth-century terms, paying little attention to the politics of rhetoric and display that characterized Renaissance states. Literary critics and art historians, however, have focused attention on representations of authority and have developed critical methods to illuminate the performance and reception of texts in early modern culture. This essay reviews recent interdisciplinary work on theatre and poetry, painting and pageant, vital to historians of politics, and suggests a series of negotiations and exchanges over images of rule, and a dialogue about and for authority, between governments and subjects, in early modern England.

This article subjects a variety of works on nineteenth-century politics to critical analysis, focusing on recent work in biography, popular politics, and on those works that have shown an interest in post-structuralist approaches. Mostly it examines texts produced between 1993 and about 1997 with a view to sensing an historiographical mood. Although the argument urges an open-minded reception to the linguistic turn in historical work, it brings the work of some of its adherents – perhaps especially James Vernon – under critical scrutiny and concludes that a price has been paid for the attempt at constructing a ‘cultural politics’. In particular the article expresses alarm at the apparent incoherence and sub-literacy of some post-structural statements.

Life and religion at Louisbourg, 1713–1758. By A. J. B. Johnston. London: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1984, paperback edition, 1996. Pp. xxxii+227. ISBN 0-7735-1525-9. £12.95.

The New Orleans Cabildo: Colonial Louisiana's first city government, 1769–1803. By Gilbert C. Din and John E. Harkins. London: Louisiana State University Press, 1996. Pp. xvii+330. ISBN 0-8071-2042-1. £42.75.

Revolution, romanticism, and the Afro-Creole protest tradition in Louisiana, 1718–1868. By Caryn Cossé Bell. London: Louisiana State University Press, 1997. Pp. xv+325. ISBN 0-8071-2096-0. £32.95.

Hopeful journeys: German immigration, settlement and political culture in colonial America, 1717–1775. By Aaron Spencer Fogleman. Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996. Pp. xii+257. ISBN 0-8122-1548-6. £15.95.

Britannia lost the war of American independence but still reigns over the historiography of colonial North America. This is a problem now that historians of early America have embarked on an attempt to apply an Atlantic world perspective to colonial development. The complex web of human, cultural, economic, and political encounters and exchanges among Europe, Africa, and the Americas spreads well beyond the familiar terrain of Britain and its thirteen mainland colonies. While the histories of Indians and enslaved Africans are beginning to find their way into the historical narrative of early America to challenge the British hegemony, non-British Europeans remain virtually invisible, except as opponents in the imperial wars that punctuated the colonial era. These four books illustrate obstacles that must be overcome to remedy this gap and offer glimpses of the rewards to be gained by drawing the history of continental Europeans previously treated as peripheral into the centre of the major debates currently shaping early American history.