The State with Two Centers: The French Monarchy and the Dukes of Pfalz-Zweibrücken in Early Modern Alsace, 1648-1789

Following France’s annexation after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Alsace evolved a political culture in between that of the putatively “absolute” France and the decentralized Holy Roman Empire. This dissertation analyzes the interaction of French and German political cultures and practices in Alsace from the Peace of Westphalia to the French Revolution through a case study of the Alsatian territories ruled by the dukes of Pfalz-Zweibrücken-Birkenfeld, a rising dynasty that inherited the Duchy of Pfalz-Zweibrücken in 1733, and their administrations. It illustrates the contingent nature of political change and state building in early modern Europe, strips the state of the teleological trappings placed on it by later historians, and restores the early modern state to its proper historical context. The dissertation has two primary arguments. First, both newcomers, the French monarchy and the dukes of Pfalz-Zweibrücken shared power in a successful bid to develop and maintain political legitimacy. The relative authority of the two powers varied considerably depending on the specific territory; the final division of power therefore did too. In France, French monarchy served as the political center. The individual rulers of the Holy Roman Empire ruled a plethora of different principalities, free cities, and ecclesiastical states. In Alsace, the French monarchy and the dukes of Pfalz-Zweibrücken formed two separate political centers. Second, my dissertation takes advantage of recent historiography on the early modern state to argue for the critical role of seigneurial officials in building and embodying the state. As they executed their tasks in face-to-face encounters with subjects, they bound together the ducal government that appointed them, the French administration that approved them, and the local communities that accepted them into an indissoluble whole. In short, they were the crucial mediators of authority for both state centers. I call this process state building through the middle. This study therefore demonstrates the how and the why of early modern state building, the limitations of focusing on the view from above, and the critical position of subjects and officials in the middle

Practical persistence in ecological models via comparison methods

A basic question in mathematical ecology is that of deciding whether or not a model for the population dynamics of interacting species predicts their long-term coexistence. A sufficient condition for coexistence is the presence of a globally attracting positive equilibrium, but that condition may be too strong since it excludes other possibilities such as stable periodic solutions. Even if there is such an equilibrium, it may be difficult to establish its existence and stability, especially in the case of models with diffusion. In recent years, there has been considerable interest in the idea of uniform persistence or permanence, where coexistence is inferred from the existence of a globally attracting positive set. The advantage of that approach is that often uniform persistence can be shown much more easily than the existence of a globally attracting equilibrium. The disadvantage is that most techniques for establishing uniform persistence do not provide any information on the size or location of the attracting set. That is a serious drawback from the applied viewpoint, because if the positive attracting set contains points that represent less than one individual of some species, then the practical interpretation that uniform persistence predicts coexistence may not be valid. An alternative approach is to seek asymptotic lower bounds on the populations or densities in the model, via comparison with simpler equations whose dynamics are better known. If such bounds can be obtained and approximately computed, then the prediction ofpersistence can be made practical rather than merely theoretical. This paper describes how practical persistence can be established for some classes of reaction–diffusion models for interacting populations. Somewhat surprisingly, themodels need not be autonomous or have any specific monotonicity properties