We live in violent times. The second half of the twentieth century has been marked by soaring crime statistics, by the troubles of urban ghettos and by bitter manifestations of social discontent in protest marches, student revolt, prison disturbances and terrorism. Not surprisingly, such an environment has produced a keen interest in crime and its repression among criminologists, penologists, sociologists, psychologists – and historians have not been left behind. Beggars, vagrants, debtors, thieves, bandits, prostitutes, smugglers, poachers, bread rioters, heretics, blasphemers and rebels of all kinds have become the dramatis personae of specialist studies. Discussion of the incidence of types of crime, moreover, could not have proceeded without further inquiry into the structure of the law itself – its prejudices and its relationship with an establishment concerned to use judicial procedures and punishments to preserve its control.

These have been particularly productive lines of development in the study of eighteenth-century France. Analysis of the intellectual framework of legal repression has combined with detailed local studies in Normandy, Flanders, Paris and Languedoc to produce some stimulating hypotheses – the argument, for example, that in the course of the eighteenth century the brutal ‘assassin’ was supplanted as the archetypal criminal by the conniving thief. This study seeks to contribute to these continuing debates with the crimes and disorders of two large and contrasting provinces – Guyenne, in south-west France, and the more backward Auvergne, in the mountainous centre.