Project: Completing research for a book on the Procès des Tailles, a 250-year long legal battle waged by the non-noble elites of Old Regime Provence against the fief-holding nobility's tax exemptions. Stretching from the 1540s to the French Revolution, this bitter court struggle reveals with unparalleled clarity the shifting interplay among royal fiscality, feudalism, provincial particularism, judicial culture, and social strife first in the construction of the absolutist state and then in its demise in 1789.  Both the long duration of the litigation and its principal object (the noble privilege of tax exemption) give this project the unique capacity to link two distinct bodies of historiography—early modern European statebuilding and revolutionary studies—and introduce to each fruitful new lines of enquiry.  To the first body of scholarship, the study provides a case study in the corrosive dynamics of early modern fiscality, revealing taxation to have been an important causal factor in the breakdown of provincial allegiances, the weakening of corporate identities, the atomization of society, and the advance of state power into the periphery.  To the second, it suggests the importance of Old Regime juridical conflicts and categories—particularly those related to taxation and exemption—to the configuration of social conflict in the age of democratic revolution.  The significance of the project can be summarized simply.  The central problems of taxation and social privilege raised by the Procès bring together the specific concerns of two major bodies of scholarly literature (early modern statebuilding and democratic revolution), thereby allowing the formulation of a new explanatory model capable of encompassing both the rise and fall of the absolutist state in Old Regime France.