“Viles personnes”: the plebeian multitudes in Charles Loyseau’s Traité des ordres

Charles Loyseau’s <em>Traité des ordres et simples dignitez</em> (1610) is well known to historians for its apparent “anatomy” of France’s social hierarchy in the Ancien Régime. Whilst Loyseau was mostly preoccupied with the elites and their varying levels of dignity, his treatise noneth...