If economic reality was grounded in the countryside in the seventeenth century, political reality was urban. The towns were, first, the home of the local institutions which provided the grassroots of provincial government – consulates, episcopal sees, assiettes, and sénéchaussée courts. In a society where authority was always passed down from above, these local jurisdictions were not as fundamental as they might have been in another setting, but there was still an interaction between the issues arising ‘from below’ and the policies of higher authorities. The towns were important, secondly, as an environment within which all authorities functioned. Matters such as the prices of necessities, the intensity of social unrest or religious strife, and the spread of epidemic disease affected all the major authorities for they all lived and worked in the same narrow streets. Thirdly, the proximity of the authorities generated major jurisdictional conflicts which influenced the very nature of political life. The towns were thus important institutionally as the bottom level of various hierarchies, socially as an environment affecting politics, and physically as the geographical battlefield for conflicts of authority. By looking at their situation we set the scene for all the rest of the analysis.

THE ENVIRONMENT

To a visitor from the north, the Languedocian landscape must have seemed to bristle with walled towns, for the high intensity of urban development was one of the features of the Midi.