Legal uncertainty,resistance to royal taxation and rural revolts in late medieval France: the case of Beauvoir-sur-Mer and Bois-de-Céné (1480)

In 1480, the inhabitants of Beauvoir-sur-Mer and Bois-de Céné, two small towns on the Atlantic coast of Poitou, in France, rebelled against the officials in charge of collecting the salt tax and arrested some of them. Despite the fact that the resulting civil disturbance had few long-lasting consequences, the case is an effective illustration of the dynamics of rural revolts at the end of the fifteenth century. This article demonstrates how violence was only the last stage of protest against royal taxation; the riots had been preceded by legal resistance and negotiations. The article also shows how the events were permeated and fuelled by judicial complexity and a climate of legal uncertainty surrounding the rights of French officials to collect the tax. These revolts must then be understood not simply as a reaction to excessive taxation, but more as self-defence against royal officials who refused to acknowledge the rights of the inhabitants of these towns.     

La ségrégation économique comme un phénomène complexe : une analyse spatio-temporelle du cas montréalais

Economic segregation, or residential inequalities based on income, is a complex spatial process. It is associated with structures which arise at certain scales and which evolve in time. In this paper, we analyse the evolution of economic segregation in Montréal from 1980 to 2000. This analysis is based on household's income and on their distribution within the residential space from four scales: households, census tracts, municipalities and some radio-concentric zones. Results confirm that the spatial organisation of economic segregation is scale dependent. More precisely, local inequalities are growing more rapidly but this trend does not prevent the consolidation of metropolitan-sized clusters. Moreover, results confirm that Montréal's economic segregation follows North American trends like the growth of economic disparities (spatial or not) or the fact that the enrichment of central and ex-urban neighbourhoods is compensated by the impoverishment of inner-ring suburbs.