La falsification d'identité en France, du règne personnel de Louis XIV à la veille de la Révolution.

Until now falsification of identity under the Old Regime has scarcely been addressed, and only through biographies of famous impostors or studies of the progress of identification, which has meant approaching the subject through individual cases or from the point of view of public authority. This article proposes, on the contrary, to offer as complete a panorama as possible of the falsification of identity, beginning with the reality of the phenomenon, namely, the motivations and methods of the falsifiers. This panorama, which makes it necessary to examine astonishingly varied aspects of social life, is accompanied by two indispensable parts: the first offers a rigorous definition of the falsification of identity; the second analyzes penal legislation in this field. This study shows that it would be an oversimplification to envision the falsification of identity exclusively as a category of crime, more or less nourished by the progress of identification. Through the diversity of its social manifestations, this fraud transcends at once the history of criminality and that of the construction of the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]