In Old Regime France, foreigners could not inherit or devolve property, and the king could seize it after their deaths unless they had been naturalized or had native French heirs. This royal right, called droit d'aubaine, constituted the legal basis for discrimination between foreigners and French subjects. The present article examines the effects that this law actually had upon foreigners in its implementation---in particular, the process of its application and the influence exercised by the rules, norms, intentions and interests of those involved---in order to describe the “spirit” of the law behind the normative texts.
The author first views how droit d'aubaine originated and was integrated into the legal and financial systems of the Old Regime, then analyzes the procedure of its implementation focusing on property seizure after death, in order to clarify how foreigners were chosen as targets of the law. Finally, she examines the characteristics of foreigners who were actually subjected to the law in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés quarter of eighteenth-century Paris, by investigating their geographical origins, social status, status of residency（temporary or permanent）and legal status（naturalized or not）, in an attempt to highlight various factors that restrained or promoted the application of droit d'aubaine.
The analysis leads to the following conclusions. To begin with, because of the limits of governance and the institutional framework at the time, it was difficult to implement droitd'aubaine according to the letter of the law. Moreover, privileges exempting specific foreign nationals from the law, a series of reciprocal conventions abolishing it, and special treatment given to certain nobles restricted effective implementation. However, such circumstances did not mean that the law had fallen into desuetude, while its application even showed an “absolutist” tendency to classify foreigners into one single legal category, regardless of social attributes and status of residence in France. Behind this tendency lay a growing fiscal interest in droit d'aubaine and conflicts between royal rights and seigneurial prerogatives, which had come to the surface once again during mid-eighteenth century. Thus the practice of droit d'aubaine reflects the contradiction into which the French monarchy fell during the eighteenth century, between its aspirations for “absolute” power, historically formed legal, institutional and social structures, and the development of international law regulating relations between sovereign states.

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This article is an attempt to further clarify the actual conditions surrounding the second-hand clothing trade and merchant active in castletowns of late premodern Japan, by tracing the activities of the second-hand clothing trade association（kabu nakama 株仲間）in the town of Utsunomiya（present day Tochigi Prefecture）during the Kansei 寛政 and Bunsei 文政 Eras（1789‐1830）.
Due to both the great diversity of the items of clothing available and varying extents of their wear and tear, selling required both insight into market conditions and pricing, as well as the ability to quickly cover losses. It was for this reason that the members of Trade Associations needed to balance profit and loss by consolidating multiple transactions, while at the same time determining prices for each individual transaction. Trade Association transactions involved both direct buying and selling and auctioning/bidding on pawned items, each Association member determining his prices on the basis of “eyeball” estimates（mekan 目勘）, which when deemed appropriate by other members would be implicitly adopted by the Association as a whole.
The Association was comprised of not only the shopkeepers residing in the neighborhoods of Teramachi and Miyashima-Cho, but also members of other trades who would borrow “vacated” memberships in the hope of making a quick profit in second-hand clothing. These latter speculators began to increase in number during the Bunka 文化 Era（1804‐1818）, and this changing composition was not opposed by the Association as a whole.
Utsunomiya was also the scene of “petty retailing” of second-hand clothing by hawkers, including women, not directly affiliated with the Trade Association, but who set up formal relations of subordination by attaching themselves to individual members as “quasi-patrons” （karioya 仮親）. They would peddle small amounts of goods in the guise of sales clerks working out of the second-hand clothing shops. However, servants working in the shops were specifically forbidden by the Association from such “petty retailing” on their time off, thus alienating them completely from the trade, indicating a clear division of labor between business within the Association and outside “hawkers”.
Two of the appealing aspects of the second-hand clothing trade were the high prospects for earning a profit and the small amount of capital required for entering the trade, which account for the diversity of business practices. While the Association continued to maintain and protect its enterprises on the basis of “eyeball” estimating, many other kinds of transaction were invented both within and without the Association membership. In this sense, the second-hand clothing trade of the castletown of Utsunomiya exemplified the kind of balance and compromise which trade associations in late premodern Japan tried to establish in general.

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