ABSTRACT
The comment appears to be flippant, but Bertin was serious. His 30-year long correspondence with a group of French Jesuit missionaries in Peking constitutes an important contribution to the European Enlightenment. Hilton Root has provided chapter and verse to describe the collective resistance of the peasantry in Burgundy, founded upon their shrewd exploitation of the law. The devot faction, short on enlightenment, but glad to be rid of the agnostic Choiseul who had struck up too cosy a deal with the parlements, threw in their vote, securing the active support of Louis XV by presenting him with a beautiful, new mistress, madame du Barry. Reasons of state dictated that more money would be spent on the navy in order to protect the colonies. The Seven Years War would not only change global balances of power, it would also place a question mark over the survival of the Bourbon state.
