The historian Joe Shennan, who has died aged 82, wrote as JH Shennan on the politics of the French ancien régime, the Bourbon monarchy overthrown following the revolution of 1789, and on wider early modern European politics and political ideas. Over more than three decades, he was active in these areas and then increasingly in management at the University of Lancaster.
From The Parlement of Paris (1968) to The Bourbons: The History of a Dynasty (2007), he explored the French monarchy’s intricate and shifting relationships with ministers, counsellors, influential mistresses and institutions. The French parlements were constituted as law courts, where the registering of new measures gave an opportunity for examining them in principle and in practical terms, and for arguing their shortcomings with the monarch. In The Parlement of Paris, Joe challenged the view prevalent in France that, particularly after Louis XIV, they had been mere bastions of noble privilege and reaction. He presented the Paris parlement as a more resilient, less socially exclusive, altogether more complex body, defined by its judicial character and involved in a relationship with the crown that was supportive even when difficult. His revisionist argument, readily embraced by British and American historians of France, has also, since the 1990s, won acceptance in France itself.
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