The Bréquigny-Chapsal thesis made urban communities the historical engine of freedom

Evidence

The towns will of course be destroyed when the Frankish and Germanic invasions take place. But, being nomadic peasants or at least barbarians, the Franks and Germans neglect the towns and settle in the countryside. So the towns, which were neglected by the Franks, are rebuilt and enjoy a new prosperity at this point. When feudalism is established at the end of the reign of the Carolingians, the great secular-ecclesiastical lords will of course try to get their hands on the reconstituted wealth of the cities. But at this point, the towns, which had grown historically strong thanks to their wealth and their freedoms, but thanks also to the fact that they formed a community, are able to struggle, resist, and rebel. Hence all the great rebellious movements that develop in the free towns during the reign of the first Capetians. And they eventually forced both royal power and the aristocracy to respect their rights and, to a certain extent, their laws, their type of economy, their forms of life, their customs, and so on. This happened in the fifteenth and sixteenth So you see, this time we have a thesis which, much more than previous theses and even more than Mably’s thesis, will become the thesis of the Third Estate, because this is the first time that the history of the town, the history of urban institutions, and the history of wealth and its political effects could be articulated within a historical analysis. — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 5916

Categorization

• XREF: The mechanism by which towns consolidate power through wealth + community + freedom to force rights is a proto-model of how self-organized groups resist central authority — a structural parallel the reader may carry into discussions of marginal communities.