A woman who killed three men in a sword fight; drunken musketeers assaulting passers-by; a wife whose husband brought his mistress home and beat her when she objected.... These are just some of the colorful figures from eighteenth century France in this third volume in the Old Regime Police Blotter series, a collection of source books on crime and police matters in the period. From the organized, consensual violence of dueling to the random mistreatment of the vulnerable in public and in private, this collection looks at violence in its most personal form, at court, in the street, in theaters, in private homes, in the process giving vignettes of daily life in France before the Revolution. Much of this material - from the Bastille archives, from periodicals, from letters and memoirs - has never been previously translated. A treasure trove for historians, writers of period fiction and the simply curious.
